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| Illustration by Miguel Ángel |
posted on 12/16/2018 by the Salt City Sinner
The Religious Education Series is has proved to be an
interesting and welcome addition to life in Salt Lake City. Since 2017,
Executive Director Megan Kennedy has presented a series of free public lectures
on topics including religion, anthropology, and archaeology. On Saturday, RES (in
conjunction with the Godless Rebelution Podcast, which sounds like a lot of fun
based on the name) presented the seventh lecture in the series, “Delusions of
the Gods: The Colonial Racism of Ancie1nt Aliens, Mormon Anthropology, &
Other Pseudohistory.” Recordings of all of the RES lectures can be found here for
free, which is mighty generous of them.
Now, I was not in need of a debunking on this subject. I
absolutely did not subscribe to the “ancient aliens” theory going in, and have
long considered it to be both nonsense and not a particularly rich vein of
nonsense at that (although I have a lingering affection for horror pioneer and
hideous racist H.P. Lovecraft). But considering that my sister’s boyfriend is
an “ancient aliens” enthusiast, further considering that “Jupiter Ascending”
made $184 million USD and "Prometheus" $403 million, and even further considering that I had a big plate of
nothing in front of me for Saturday afternoon, off to the downtown public
library I went. It turned out to be well worth it.
“Delusions of the Gods” may have been lecture number seven
for the RES, but it was only number two for me – earlier in 2018, I attended “GodHates Us All: The Religiosity of Heavy Metal Culture,” which I cannot recommend
highly enough (that particular lecture was sponsored in part by the Satanic
Temple, of which, full disclosure, I am a member). As with “God Hates,” this
was a top notch lecture, both accessible and as in-depth as time would allow,
well researched and backed up with slides and a great deal of
research and preparation.
The nut of Director Kennedy’s presentation is that there’s a
long line of racist, colonialist ideas about history and conquest going back to
Europeans’ first contact with indigenous peoples, and that the “ancient aliens”
conspiracy theory is simply the latest version of the Atlantean or Aryan or
Nephite/Lamanite stories. That is to say: that native peoples “couldn’t possibly
have built” the pyramids or other structures “on their own,” and thus “needed
help” from aliens / long dead white people / lizard men.
This fits into a larger pattern of historical erasure and
literal whitewashing that helps prop up colonialism and white supremacy: since
indigenous peoples have been established to be lesser and in need of assistance
from aliens to build those impressive structures surely the natives won’t mind
a little “help” from white people now, right? (It’s worth noting as an aside
that the author of Chariots of the Gods, the guy widely considered the father
of the “ancient aliens” theory, Erich von Däniken, is a racist who has said some things that will make your goddamned jaw drop.)
I find Kennedy’s argument compelling. She also had some very
depressing things to say about the financial rewards for bullshit archaeology
and anthropology offered by shows like “Ancient Aliens” versus the funding
available for real archaeologists. Speaking of real archaeologists, if you or
someone you know have questions about the pyramids or the Mayans and supposed
contact with aliens, Kennedy provided a list of Twitter handles for people you
can ask:
Anyway! The lecture was extremely well-attended, by which
I mean 80 people, maybe more. Lots of college kids (by the sound of it), but a
fairly diverse mix of people overall. The Religious Education Series appears to
be gathering steam, which dovetails interestingly with Salt Lake County’s new
status as a minority-Mormon area. After all, the Nephites and “reformed
Egyptian?” Joseph Smith would have been a die-hard ancient aliens fan.
I look forward to dropping in on more of these lectures, and
I’d encourage anyone to do so who is interested in atheism, religion, or any of
the related topics being discussed.
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