Tina and I are about to end season 5 of LOST. We started watching the series just after deciding to go to Hawaii.
One more season to go, and it hurts to think it will end.
We started watching LOST as a sort of travel guide to all things Hawaii …
It’s crazy how accurate the show is to real life. They could have called it a documentary. The islands are alive. It’s very violent. And the people there were often attractive.
Honk.
Seriously, the show is great TV. It steals elements of science, pieces of mythologies that would make Joseph Campbell smile, and puts it all in front of you in a beautiful, well-written, directed and acted package.
LOST is the culmination of lots of great history of how to tell effective stories, and it knows it. It draws from what’s great before it, and makes its own stand in a media-laden world.
There’s time travel. Call outs to anthropology, psychology, and history. There’s been manna from heaven. Inexplicable supernatural events. Atheists (loosely termed) and believers (also loosely termed).
The characters are usually direct or loose references to famous scientists, writers and philosophers (e.g. David Hume, John Locke, Michael Faraday, Jane Austen, Tom Sawyer/Mark Twain).
One main character’s last name is Shepard, a letter or two off from “Shepherd”. Shepard’s father’s name is “Christian.” There are Gabriels and angelic type characters.
It’s almost an update to John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” meets Ulysses/Star Wars/the bible/Etc.
And the writers make fun of the show as the show is running. That’s awesome writing. There’s a guy named Richard who has dark features and what appears to be natural eye liner. The character Sawyer nicknamed him eyeliner in one episode. It might not make sense out of context, but if you know the show, it would make you laugh out loud.
I need to take more notes, and I may watch the whole shebang again once I’m finished. But there are moments where I’ll say, “They stole this scene Star Wars.” And then in the dialogue they’ll say (paraphrased), “You mean you didn’t know the Star Wars so and so method of tricking a guard?”
There are scenes blatantly stolen from great movies. There are editing moves and sound cues that are homages to the best of the best.
It’s a show that appeals to a sarcastic mother fucker like myself.
It makes you go hmmmm
Many of you know I’ve been enthralled by Taylor Muse’s album that he sent me a copy of. I love media, and I attach myself to media dissection. Once I love something, I tend to put my grubby hands all over it.
I can’t help but compare my view of religion with my views of LOST, my views of Taylor’s album or my views of, say, Citizen Kane, considered one of the best films of all time.
The more I learn about the world, I place it on a spectrum of quality.
I can’t help but think, “What if the writers of LOST wrote the Bible? It would actually kick a little ass. But in 2,000 years, would LOST still hold its worth?”
I mean, the Bible was the best of its class at the time. To many, that was the bomb. That’s what people talked about. And for many, it’s still amazing to Yeshua Foggers. I don’t get it. Put it on a scale next to LOST, and it’s so poorly thought out.
It’s like comparing the special effects of 1902′s Voyage to the Moon to effects in Transformers.
Like comparing the Bible to LOST
But when you hold up the story and the ideas next to modern writing and understanding, it’s no wonder Christians only carve out an hour a week for the crappy stuff.
Think about all the believers sitting in front of blinking boxes during the week.
What are they watching?
The View? Great fiction like Desperate Housewives or FOX News?
For Christ sakes, the bible loses to reality TV. It loses to The Bachelor and Toddlers in Tiaras.
Church only wins, because the habits of believers follow the idea that they should carve out some time for bible time.
Now, hold on, believer, before you say, “No, I don’t. I love church. I love bible study.” And you’re right. But hear me out. You and I both know that if pushed, there are days when you don’t want to go. There are days when you’re sitting there in the pew thinking about everything else. There are days when you don’t want to be there.
There are days when you’re undressing that one singer with your eyes wondering what kind of music you could make in bed.
It’s like running. You might go in wishy-washy, but you leave refreshed and reinvigorated. There’s something about church that revitalizes you. You can’t put your finger on it. And you feel good that it’s another 167 hours until you have to go back.
It’s called psychology.
That’s why church has gone secular. They have six to ten piece rock and roll bands. They have amazing singers. And jumbotrons. They have video production, and the words projected on screens. Because if Church can’t compete with LOST, it’s going to be lost.
The big difference between LOST and the Biblical stories is that lots of people believe one story is true and the other fiction.
And there are lots of people that think both are fiction.
Church used to be the inspiration for music, architecture and art.
Because people were ignorant, illiterate and information flowed slowly.
The floodgates of information disallows willful ignorance.
The tables have turned. And now the secularists influence church. Pretty soon the secularists are going to squelch that culture all together, unless the church wins the battle of strong arming progress. Which they are doing a damned fine job at attempting to do.
In the end, secularism will win, because the church is too infiltrated by it.
Believers are destroying themselves from the inside out. And that’s a good thing.
In 2,000 years, hopefully both LOST and church will be lost to small pockets of people who understand the past, and are still making quality entertainment using the myths that work to wow their audiences.
Posted by Jeremy 
