I walked by this van and…I could not stop thinking.

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A little bit ago, I located Star Wars as the true source of my atheism (or Spinozism, to be more accurate):

[In 1977,] I went into Star Wars a Christian and walked out of it an atheist. Before seeing the movie, I understood the war of Good against Evil to be an entirely Christian one: God vs. Satan. The war happened on the ground, in the sky above, and the immense dark space beyond the moon. The universe was ordered by heaven and hell. So imagine the shock of seeing on the screen a whole different order, a whole different war between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil; a war, furthermore, that made no mention of Jesus, or Lucifer, or the star of Bethlehem, the Romans, the beasts in “The Book of Revelations,” the Last Supper. Yet, in the absolute absence of Christian codes of goodness, I still sided with these other codes and acts of goodness taking place in a faraway galaxy.

In the bright afternoon light of that day, I realized that God was limited, and what was infinite was the Good itself, and that the Good could take on different shapes (Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi, John, Luke Skywalker, Jesus, Princess Leia, Mary).

Similarly, I can attribute my (brand of) Marxism directly to the way James Cameron’s Aliens opened my eyes one afternoon in a cineplex in downtown Harare:

While watching this film, I discovered the meaning or evils of the colonial process, corporate greed, and American militarism. I walked into that theater a capitalist, and I walked out a socialist.

For reasons that need no explanation, this film, Blade Runner, is the source of my cosmopolitanism/urbanism:

As for the space left empty by the death of God, it was filled by the TV show Cosmos. Where once there was Jesus Christ, there was now Carl Sagan:

What are we? We are the stuff of stars, the stuff generated by stars in main sequence and exploded into interstellar space by their violent deaths. Stars are the factory of all that matters.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

25 replies on “Foundations”

  3. I think Mr. Mudede reads to much into movies, and perhaps changes his views too quickly. It took me over a year to go from liberal to libertarian, and it didn’t happen by watching a couple movies.

  5. The fact that you ever identified as a Christian proves just exactly how stupid you are. The fact that you now identify as a Marxist proves that you just converted from one retarded religion to another.

  6. Clearly he is only telling a story and none of this is autobiographical, but Mudede is the kind of arrogant douche who would have his views defined by a fucking sci-fi movie. It’s very much, “Ooh, I want to be perceived as thoughtful and intelligent. Look what I can spin!”

  7. Look out, Joyce DeWitt! And evil wizard is coming for your oversized popsicle! And he’s got a laser-shooting trashcan and an overtanned twink with him!

  12. You’re a very impressionable young man, and you’re lucky to be able to point at 2-hour moments that up-heaved your whole moral universe. Be careful.

  13. I enjoy your interpretations of objects and events Mr Mudede. Without ‘reading too much into’ things the universe is merely a collection of meaningless interactions, even if it probably is in all reality. I find deciphering meaning where there may be none to be a considerably more entertaining way to travel through life than demanding meaninglessness. The assumption that some people will look for significance provides a means for artists to communicate ideas that cannot be easily described with words, without this assumption great art could not exist.
    Your writing is an oasis of consideration in a desert of facts.
    I also find the anger of your critics to be hilarious.

  19. Nice post. It sounds a lot like my own worldview evolution, and I assume that just like mine Charles’ journey didn’t happen overnight. I have a lot of distinct memories of struggling with faith and being worried by the fact that The Force seemed more real to me than god, even though I knew it was made up. And not long ago when I watched the Cosmos DVDs after not seeing the show for 20 years, I was moved to tears and reverence by that opening music, that tender hymn to reality that captivated me as a child.

    Here’s another influence: the image of divinity found in the Lord of the Rings is vastly more appealing than the one we get in the Bible. (Abstracted and watered-down Christianity is nearly always better than historical or “real” Christianity.)

    As for the Zoroastrianism bit: because Christianity is such a mish-mash of pagan and Jewish ideas (Judaism itself being a mish-mash of earlier pagan ideas, so we’ve got recursive mish-mashism going on, and hell, Zoroastrianism itself is probably also a similar mish-mash) there’s nothing odd about finding the themes of Z echoed in the themes of C. Thank Alexander the Great and every preacher who ever felt the need to threaten his followers with hell.

  23. Speaking of science here is an update about our evolution as humans:
    http://www.physorg.com/news171286860.htm…

    “They also got more recent dates for other crucial events such as the age of our African ancestral mother, known as mitochondrial Eve, from who all recent humans (Homo sapiens) descended. She was found to have lived around 110-130,000 years ago, rather than previous estimates of 150,000-200,000 years ago.”

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