Seriously, less of this dippy shit.

Several years of recommendations to see Zeitgeist (2007) gnawed away at my tootsie-pop coated resistance to peer-pressure, and I finally succumbed to the two hours of mid-level propaganda that everyone has been talking about. My rational hatred for the film might have been less severe had the film been about thirty minutes shorter by doing away with all the trippy, hallucinogenic abstract patterns. But when you gaze into the conspiratorial abyss on acid I guess it’s bound to gaze back.

Others have already taken up the good fight in combating nonsense by examining the film’s factual flaws and erroneous research. As an amateur scholar on Ancient Near Eastern culture and their religious systems, I’ve often found it extremely illuminating to study texts in a comparative manner to elucidate the social, political, ethical and existential truths as well as the literary goals of the authors and redactors. Even a basic comparison of legal texts supplies fruitful insights into the ideological make-up of these civilizations. For these reasons, and aside from the fact that 9/11 conspiracy theories are about as thought-provoking as a bag of onions, I’m going to focus on the rhetorical strategy that PART I of Zeitgeist deploys.

PART I’s primary objective is to prove that the story of Jesus Christ is a myth created by the Roman Empire, because the Christ story contains many elements that are identical to the Egyptian god Horus. Peter Joseph goes so far as to say that the Horus mythology, along with other Ancient Near Eastern mythologies, have been plagiarized by those who constructed the Jesus myth as a form of social control. According to Zeitgesit, so long as Christianity is proven to have been ripped off from older religions, this conclusively demonstrates that

“Christianity, along with all other theistic belief systems [...] empowers those who know the truth, but use the myth to manipulate and control societies. [...] It reduces human responsibility to the effect that “God” controls everything, and in turn awful crimes can be justified in the name of Divine Pursuit. [...] The religious myth is the most powerful device ever created, and serves as the psychological soil upon which other myths can flourish.”

Aside from the fact that Joseph’s comparative claims have been dis-proven by several serious contemporary religious scholars, I also fail to see how such comparisons, even if they were accurate, prove that all theistic belief systems at their core, justify crime because of divine power.  PART I continues to assert this claim by flippantly reminding people that Ancient Near Eastern stories like the Flood myth pop up in various places and locations in the Ancient Near East, which somehow is meant to mean that all religions are the same everywhere. The modern-day analogue would suggest that since Before Sunrise (1995), It Happened One Night (1934), and Twilight: New Moon (2009) involve boy-meets-girl, they are ideologically identical.

To demonstrate more fully what I mean by this, let’s looks at the example of the Flood myth. The earliest story of a great Deluge is the Sumerian creation myth, which dates back to the 18th century BCE. The hero, Ziusudra, is chosen by the deities to be saved from an oncoming flood that the gods refuse to stop. Ziusudra is told to build an ark to save himself, and then Ziusudra is then granted immortality by the sky-god after the flood ceases. This story contains important parallels with the story of Noah in the Hebrew Bible. The next earliest example we have is the epic of Atra-Hasis, an Akkadian deluge story also dating back to the 18th century BCE. In this story, the cause of the flood is actually from a god, not an event the gods refuse to stop like in the Ziusudra story, and the reason given for the god Enlil to wipe out humanity is simply because humans are causing too much of a racket while the gods try and sleep: “The god was disturbed by their uproar. Enlil heard the clamor and said to the gods, “Oppressive has become the clamor of [hu]mankind. By their uproar they prevent sleep.” When the storm is summoned and Atra-Hasis is instructed to build his ark, the storm proves to be more than the gods anticipated, and they cower in fear from the tempest they stirred up.

The third and most well-known deluge myth after the Noah story, is contained in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh goes on a quest for immortality and seeks out Utnapishtim, the one human who had been granted immortality. Gilgamesh begs him for the secret to his immortality, and Utnapishtim tells him the story of the flood and learns that its only because of a twist in circumstances that he survived the flood (no ark) that as a reward, he was given immortality. Unlike the epic of Ata-Hasis, no motive is given by Utnapishtim for the destruction that comes with the flood. Indeed, an earth-god, Ea, asks Enlil, the god who caused the flood why he caused such destruction, only for him to respond, “lay upon the sinner the sin; Lay upon the transgressor his transgression,” indicating a high degree of capriciousness in this worldview.

The story of Noah’s ark should come as no surprise to readers without a summary, although it does contain subtle twists and changes from the previous versions of the story, which I’ll go more into detail soon. So we have the following consistencies in these stories: there’s a flood, there are gods or a god, and one person or people is/are saved in an ark that was built. To recap:

However, as noticed from the above table, the Israelite account of the story rejects the idea of a capricious worldview, where floods occur randomly, or according to the whims of gods, and that people are saved randomly or because they are favored. In the story of Noah, a moral rationale is provided for the destruction, as well as Yahweh’s decision to save Noah and his family; they are righteous and they have not committed injustice and crime. The biblical writer also rejects the popular Ancient Near Eastern notion that the gods were not totally in control of their powers. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, when the flood begins, the gods The text says they “cowered like dogs crouched against the outer wall.” The goddess Ishtar “cried out like a woman in labor.”And when the flood ends, the gods are famished and eat most of the sacrifice Utpushtim lays out for them. In the Biblical account, Yahweh is not threatened by the forces unleased and he is in complete control. He punishes those who corrupted the world through bloodshed and violence, and selects Noah because of his righteousness, to build an ark. With this kind of account of the flood story, morality becomes an absolute value that will result in punishment in the biblical writer’s view. This idea of a universal moral code would have been revolutionary for the civilizations of the Ancient Near East, and which ultimately contributed towards the separation of Israelite monotheism from Canaanite polytheism. The Israelite religion also centralized the ability for human beings to choose (think Eden) and be culpable for their actions, rather than exist in an amoral world where the decisions of the gods were random and feckless.

This small comparative exercise provides ample evidence of the mistake of broadly comparing religious stories with each other to indicate a shared corrupting effect. The Zeitgeist comparisons take an element of truth and exploit it for ideological purposes, ironically becoming a branch of the campaign of misinformation they seek to unravel and expose. The suggestion that religions provide fertile ground for the distortion of, and contribution to, a great array of crimes misjudges the capacity of human beings to use ideologies in general for their own sick purposes. I can think no better examples of non-religious criminality than the havoc and destruction wrought by the 20th century perversion of Enlightenment ideals and science.

Zeitgeist fails to draw any meaningful comparisons in its work, especially undervaluing the significance and meaning of Christianity and religion in general by failing to understand the relevance of how such Biblical stories responded to and reflected the particular history and circumstances in which they were created. Part of this response as a storytelling format requires the re-working and reinterpretation of older stories to suit more contemporary purposes.