The Postbiological Universe, The Peters ETI Religious Crisis Survey, The Girlfriend Experience Release Party & Film Review, CineVegas Marquee and Vanguard Actor Awards, The Mind Possessed, and more…

The Peters ETI Religious Crisis Survey.

I got an email from my friend Albert A. Harrison, Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis. Al (pictured) is the author of several books including Spacefaring: The Human Dimension. His most recent book, Starstruck: Cosmic Visions in Science Religion and Folklore describes how current scientific findings about our place in the universe are encouraging people to find new answers to old existential questions.

Al has been an avid supporter of my 2003 survey, The Alexander UFO Religious Crisis Survey, and kindly emailed me that Ted Peters, a well-funded and well- respected theologian, has long been a fan of my study and has himself recently released the results of one of his own studies, and they confirm and expand my findings.

One of Dr. Peters interesting findings is that Christian fundamentalists didn't think ET would be a big problem for them. It was other people who thought fundamentalists would respond badly. Al wrote that implications of ET for religion and theology is a hot topic right now and is the primary topic in the latest issue of Science and Theology, the scholarly journal of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. Dr. Ted Peters, Professor of Systematic Theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA, is the co-editor of Science and Theology.

The Peters ETI Religious Crisis Survey was constructed to test the following hypothesis: upon confirmation of contact between earth and an extraterrestrial civilization of intelligent beings, the long established religious traditions of earth would confront a crisis of belief and perhaps even collapse. Responses from individuals self-identifying with seven religious traditions - Roman Catholicism, mainline Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism, Orthodox Christianity, Mormonism, Judaism, and Buddhism - indicate widespread acceptance of the existence of ETI and incorporation of ETI into their existing belief systems. Religious persons, for the most part, do not fear contact. Forecasts regarding imminent collapse of earth’s religious belief systems were found to be more prevalent among non-religious respondents than among religious respondents. This survey provides evidence that tends to disconfirm the hypothesis.

According to the 1,325 respondents of Dr. Peters ETI Survey, a belief commonly expressed by some scientists that the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would undermine traditional religious belief is without supporting evidence.

The Peters ETI Religious Crisis Survey polled believers and the nonreligious around the world, testing the hypothesis: “Upon confirmation of contact between earth and an extraterrestrial civilization of intelligent beings, the long established religious traditions of earth would confront a crisis of belief and perhaps even collapse.”

I’m thrilled that Dr. Peters has continued my work. I often hoped that others would conduct a similar survey, using mine as a model, targeting doctors, lawyers, nurses, police, commercial pilots, and other specific groups to see how they would respond to definitive proof of ETI.

The theory that Americans would freak out and riot if contact was made is ridiculous. It is also ludicrous to think organized religion would collapse. As I found out from my survey, our organized religions would look forward to the missionary opportunities.

Movies This Week

The Brothers Bloom (NO)

Drag Me to Hell (YES)

Rudo y Cursi (YES)

The Girlfriend Experience Release Party. On Friday, May 29 I went to the release party for the film The Girlfriend Experience at LAVO Nightclub at the Palazzo. The party kicked off at 10 PM, and was hosted by the film's star Sasha Grey.

The Girlfriend Experience. No script, no acting, no sex, and no talent. Disney animation has more sex. Grey is shot hidden in the dark and behind sofas. She’s an emotional bore. She spends 77 minutes putting her hair in a bun.

I saw “The Girlfriend Experience” thanks to the CineVegas International Film Festival program “CineVegas Presents at the Brenden” held at the Palms Casino Resort.

I don’t blame Sasha Grey. I put all the blame on director Steven Soderbergh, the master of the dirt cheap production.

The May 14, 2009 Rolling Stone magazine issue has Bob Dylan on its cover (but passed up getting the explosive details on Dylan‘s sex life, secret marriage and daughter) and a story titled “The Dirtiest Girl in Porn” about 21 year old mega-porn star Sasha Grey. The author rapturously wrote about Grey as if she were the Jean Genet of the sex industry, an enlightened but perverted Jean-Paul Sartre, and an entrepreneur that Donald Trump or Sir Richard Branson would fear. Thank God Sasha Grey is not ready to build casinos or take paying passengers into suborbital space.

Of course, Sasha, like all porn stars, has the sexual appetite of Empress Catherine of Russia. Sasha is “the adult industry’s reigning princess of porn”. Unlike past porn stars like Linda Lovelace or Marilyn Chambers, Sasha controls her image. There are no mob men pulling the strings.

More important, Grey is a businesswoman of extraordinary intellectual prowess who is conducting her career with the skill of a high-powered, Hollywood insider with 30 years cut-throat experience.

Of course, Sasha Grey does not do drugs or drink.

Don’t be fooled by the pabulum dished to you by Soderbergh. “The Girlfriend Experience” is not the expose of the exploits of a high-end escort (played by a real life porn star).

What is “The Girlfriend Experience” (TGE) exactly? Some men want women to want them even if it is all pretend. They don’t want the contractual hour. I watch HBO’s “Cathouse”. The ladies LOVE what they do. They are always laughing! They want to party HARD! But then, once in the bedroom, it’s all business as the client peruses the sex menu. Then the “stiff” negotiation process begins.

In South American and Thailand TGE’s, men pay for a “love package” where they can have women at their beck-and-call, 24-hours a day. Let’s face it, men love the idea that the prostitute hopes, if they show off their girlfriend potential (go to a movie, get jealous of other women, have a little spat, make love all day long, cuddle at night, cry at the airport), they will be rescued by a foreigner who will fall in love, want to get married, and bring them and their family to America.

Soderbergh’s “The Girlfriend Experience” has no script so we are punished with scenes of men discussing the economy and 2008 presidential election with a $2,000 an hour call girl, Chelsea (Sasha Grey). Chelsea is the best at what she does, but we only see her listening to her sad and lonely clients.

I don’t want to be mean, but this mainstream movie could kill Grey’s porn career.

Chelsea works alone and is a free agent. Her escort website brings her clients. Chelsea has a gorgeous Manhattan apartment, a gorgeous and an understanding boyfriend (Chris Santos). Chelsea shops and has lunch for 77 minutes.

Soderbergh has put together two things meant to seduce audiences: A tease of a subject and a real life porn star without any tattoos or plastic surgery! What you get is aimless improvised dialogue about nothing and lousy camera work.

This movie is so cheaply made that there is only one camera angle. People talk in profile. Sasha Grey and Santos are photographed in red lights or in total darkness.

The Girlfriend Experience” makes “Dance Flick” look like a masterpiece.

What I’m Reading.

The Mind Possessed by Emma Cohen is the exploration of spirit possession practices she collected during eighteen months of fieldwork in Belem, Brazil. Cohen studied the mediumistic activities in an Afro-Brazilian cult house with a scientific explanation for the emergence and spread of ideas about spirits, possession and healing.

But Dr. Cohen never threw herself into getting possessed herself! Or, if she did, she kept it to herself. Dr. Cohen does a great deal of research and presents every possible explanation, except that the phenomenon might be real. I found this one interesting from a personal perspective since I never take vitamins and have a high magnesium deficiency!

The Calcium Deficiency Hypothesis. This theory was presented in American Anthropologist in 1981 and soundly dismissed and mocked, but I find it highly interesting (since I have lived my entire life subsisting on a vitamin-free “Third World diet”).

Alice B. Kehoe and Dody H. Giletti write: “Our suggested explanation for women’s preponderance in spirit-possession groups derives from demonstrable relationships between diet and behavior. There is a strong correlation between populations subsisting upon diets poor in calcium, magnesium, niacin, trypotophan, thiamins, and vitamin D, and those practicing spirit possession.”

CineVegas International Film Festival Marquee Award and Vanguard Actor Award.

Jon Voight will be given the Marquee Award, recognizing his artistic excellence, professional accomplishment and dedication to cinema. Willem Dafoe will be honored with the Vanguard Actor Award, which honors the distinctive mark he has made in film through his brave performances.

The awards will be given out on Sunday, June 14 at the CineVegas Awards Reception, to be held at Rain Nightclub at the Palms Casino Resort.

Jon Voight has had a long and distinguished career as both a leading man and, in recent years, a character actor, with an extensive and compelling range in both film and television. We all know Voight’s performance as a would-be hustler in 1969's Best Picture winner, Midnight Cowboy, for which he earned his first Academy Award® nomination. For me, Voight’s other best performance was in Deliverance, which I always watch when it is on TV.

As part of Voight’s tribute, CineVegas is proud to present the rare, newly re-mastered director’s cut of Lookin’ To Get Out (1982), directed by Hal Ashby, starring and co-written by Voight and filmed in Las Vegas. The screening will be followed by a special Q&A with Voight and guests.

Who doesn’t love Willem Dafoe? My favorite Dafoe performances are in To Live and Die in L.A., Platoon, and of course, Shadow of the Vampire. Dafoe has appeared in over 70 films. He is also one of the founding members of The Wooster Group, the New York based experimental theatre collective. Some upcoming film releases include Lars Von Trier’s highly controversial Antichrist, Werner Herzog’s My Son My Son and Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. Dafoe will also be seen in Day Breakers and Cirque du Freak. Does Dafoe ever stop working? A conversation with Dafoe will be held on Sunday, June 14 at 3pm, followed by a screening of his 1982 film The Loveless.

The Postbiological Universe.

Steven Dick, NASA's chief historian and an astrobiologist, writes in Popular Science:

"The existence of a race of sentient alien robots might be not just possible, but inevitable. In fact, we might be living in a 'postbiological universe' right now, in which intelligent extraterrestrials somewhere have exchanged organic brains for artificial ones."

Extraterrestrial civilizations may have “melded mind with machine” millions of years ago. The probable good news for us: Postbiological beings may have no interest in us at all.