a introdução de douglas rushkoff para sua excelente ‘testament‘ recupera todo o filme da bíblia, queimado por religiosos ao longo dos milênios, com uma visão diferente, muito interessante e atual sobre esse valioso manuscrito da humanidade

quem me emprestou e recomendou pra ler foi o legendário v de almeida cunha

também recomendo!

(grifo nosso)

Douglas Rushkoff’s “TESTAMENT” INTRODUCTION

The bible may have actually been better off as a comic book.

I’m saying this in my day-job persona as a halfway respectable media theorist – a guy who has written books and novels, taught university classes and made documentaries about the impact of new technology on the way we relate to stories. And particularly to those stories we happen to really believe in.

If anything, working in this field has taught me that our relationship to mythical narratives is stuck in a dangerous place. No, there’s no great harm in watching TV or a movie and imagining ourselves as the characters on the screen. But we have lost access to the gaps in these stories. We’re either afraid or forbidden to inhabit the places where temporality, interpretation and sequence are up for grabs. We just get lost in the seamless reality and get taken along for a ride. It’s fun, even comforting on some level to be gently and unthreateningly entertained. We get a good night’s sleep, and so do our stories’ sponsors. As a general rule, that’s how stories work – and how population are kept control.

Any time a new medium comes along, however, it challenges this little arrangement. The invention of text broke the monopoly that priests had on the collective story. Armed with a 22-letter alphabet, a ragtag bunch of Hebrew slaves went out into the desert and rewrote their reality from the beginning – along with a new set of laws based on living ethics instead of falsely promised rewards in the afterlife. It was an open source proposition – an ongoing conversation called Torah that eventually grew into what we now call the Bible.

Likewise, the invention of the printing press turned that sacred document into a mass-produced book. No longer dependent on a crentralized priesthood for the holy word, people read the Bible for themselves, developed their own opinions and reinvented Christianity as Protestantism. And today, the emergence of interactive technologies like the computer has revived the open source tradition, providing the opportunity to again challenge unquestioned laws and beliefs and engage with our foundation myths as participatory narratives, as stories still in the making.

I’ve found some less than receptive audiences for these observations. When I wrote a book presenting the bible as an “open source” collaboration, I was blacklisted by fundamentalists of more than one religion. They just didn’t want their story messed with–even though I was able to prove it was written with that very intent!

Yet these so-called men of God and the phony politicians they support are the very forces the Bible was written to warn us about! These scripture-thumping mind controllers are the last ones who want us to connect with the real power in these myths. I’m not bashing the Bible at all. I’m actually attempting to restore its integrity as perhaps the most transcendent narrative ever developed. If just a few people would truly read these stories, we wouldn’t be led around like zombies anymore. We couldn’t. It’d be like returning to normal after an intense psychedelic trip; it’s just too late to go back.

Business people, religious people, educators and publishers are all equally threatened and confounded by the idea that human existen itself – the births, deaths, joys and sorrows, the repression and exaltation of real people – is actually occuring in the gaps between the moments that pass for history. We all could use the kind of wake-up call that a good dose of Bible could provide.

Now don’t get the wrong idea. The Bible has been intenionally framed as a dry and sanctimonious tome just to keep thinking people from getting near it. In reality, it’s powerfully dangerous stuff: the ultimate handbook for psychic revolt. It’s filled with sex, temple prostitutes, incantations, incest, travel to other dimensions, conversations with aliens, wars with giants and, on more than one occasion, ritualized anal rape (if you don’t believe one, take a look at Genesis 19:5). Think you’re an accomplished magician? Check out the source code on reality hacking, and see if you can handle it.

That’s why the perfect place to tell what I’ve come to believe is the “real” story of the Bible may not be that leather-bound tome the Gideons put in hotel dresser drawers, but comics.

A comic is camouflage for me to expose the essential mythic battle underlying Werstern Civilization, and sequential narrative is a perfect way to tell a story that takes place in multiple universes at the same time – including our own.

For by insisting we “believe” that the Bible happened at some moment in distant history, the keepers of religion prevent us from realizing that the Bible is happening right now, in every moment. That’s right: We still engage in child sacrifice – every time we send our youngest citizens off to another war. We still practive idolatry through our worship of the almighty dollar (in God we trust). And we’re still victims of mental slavery courtesy of Madison Avenue’s latest techniques of behavioral control. Technology and media are our magicks and mysteries, making hackers today’s equivalent of Hebrews.

That’s why “Testament” follows a band of cyber-alchemist revolutionaries, wrestling against the pretty immense challenges of a future just a day after tomorrow – when the draft is reinstated and global currency takes the form of an insidiously promoted mind virus. It also takes place in Bible time – exposing how these sagas and their underlying themes have been recurring for centuries. And both story arcs are played out by the same set of characters who – for the time being anyway – are unaware of each other’s existence.

Overseeing all this action – from beyond the confines of either narrative line – are the gods. They live outside sequential time and, accordingly, are always depicted beyond the panels. If they try to interfere in the linear action by reaching into a panel, their arm or breath transforms into an element like water or fire. Try to pull that one off in a book, a movie or on TV. Like I said, this kind of story was “born” to be a comic.

So please do me the honor of taking a look at a version of the Bible that I’ll venture provides an experience a bit closer to what its original writers may have had in mind. The Bible’s narrative and its power transcend time. All we need is access and will. Here’s the access part. The rest is up to you.

For if we choose to take up the Bible’s challenge together, reality itself will be at our disposal, and then we’ll be the superheroes.