Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Lou Reed Bleeps

I stopped by Lou Reed's website and saw this:

Lou Recommends:
What the Bleep Do We Know
Brother Ray by Ray Charles and David Ritz
Chronicles, Vol.1 by Bob Dylan
Jimmy Scott: If You Only Knew

I haven't heard anything about this Bleep business, so I did a little research. Here's what Roger Ebert had to say about the movie:

Among the experts on the screen, I wrote, "only one seemed to make perfect sense to me. This was a pretty, plumpish blond woman with clear blue eyes, who looked the camera straight in the eye, seemed wise and sane, and said that although the questions might be physical, the answers were likely to be metaphysical. Since we can't by definition understand life and the world, we might as well choose a useful way of pretending to."

This woman, I later learned, was the psychic JZ Knight, who channels a 35,000-year-old mystical sage from the lost continent of Atlantis. Still later, a letter to the Answer Man from an actual physicist, Rubin Safaya, informed me: "The individuals who are quoted are pretty far from qualified experts on the field of quantum mechanics."

The film is what it is, a group of people trying to explain the nature of reality. The confusion comes if you think they are discussing physics, when in fact they are discussing metaphysics. There is nothing wrong with having a belief system and using it to fashion your worldview; the error comes in ascribing scientific truth to what is by definition a matter of faith.

The argument between Darwinians and Creationists is similar: Darwinians use science, Creationists use faith. "Creationist science" is laughed at by reputable scientists because it tries to use its easily refuted "science" to explain a belief that grows from and depends entirely on faith. By the same token, although the Ramtha School may indeed have valuable insights into the nature of reality, it is misleading to present them as science.

So that's what Mr. Ebert had to say.

Go here for more bleep stuff. While you're there, you can find out how to "spend a day with the Seattle IONS Community and Dr. Fred Alan Wolf! Using the basic principles of physics as outlined in his new book, "The Yoga of Time Travel," you will see how your experiences in time are created from a sub-space time realm."

None of this makes any sense to me, but one has to defer to the judgment of the Advanced.

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