Skip to main content

Sexy Apocalypse

Some of Rael's female followers
Image from here


Religion can be quite funny and occasionally weird if you are a sceptic or non-believer watching it from the periphery.  Believers pour hundreds of litres of milk on a mass of granite while thousands of children go hungry in the vicinity. Buxom ladies sweep littered floors of temples with much hardship while they won’t even dust the furniture at home. I can understand the ritualistic fulfilment that the believer derives from such practices because I was a similar believer myself once. There was a period in my life when I flagellated myself with my belt believing that would rein in my carnal addictions. Today such practices bring a wry smile to my lips.

That’s why, perhaps, the very title of the book Intelligent Design: Message from the Designers by Rael caught my fancy. The author-publisher advertised it as a kind of Bible inspired by the “intelligent designers” of life on earth. Curiosity egged me on and I read the entire stuff – a collection of three books, in fact, running to over 400 pages – in two days. I would have given it up as sheer balderdash had I not been amused thoroughly.

The first of the 3 books, The Book which Tells the Truth, describes the author’s encounter with an extra-terrestrial (ET) man (yes, man – one who looks just like you and me) who gives him a startling revelation: that life on earth was created by him and others like him on his planet which is about a light year away from the earth. Quite many of the biblical events from the Genesis to the Revelation are given entirely new and plausibly scientific interpretations. For example, the tree of life in biblical Eden becomes the advanced scientific knowledge possessed by the intelligent designers and the original sin becomes the betrayal of some of those alien designers who refused to obey the order to keep a distance from their terrestrial creatures. When the prophets of the Old Testament went up mountains or into the skies to speak to Yahweh they were actually taken up by the aliens in a UFO to be given certain instructions. Yahweh is, in fact, the person who spoke to Rael whose original name was Claude Vorilhorn. He assumed the name Rael which means Messenger. Eventually he becomes the last prophet – the one who succeeded Muhammad – who had a virgin birth! Yup, Claude was born of artificial insemination given to his mother by Yahweh. Claude grew up without knowing his father as he was born out of wedlock, in reality. You don’t question the reality in religion, however.

The second book, Extra-Terrestrials Took me to their Planet, is a kind of Bible for Rael’s followers. Some of the instructions in that Bible are based on scientific and humanitarian principles and hence are good. Some are quite outlandish like interpreting self-fulfilment as doing whatever you wish to do so long as you don’t harm others. You can mate with any person if you like provided the other person also likes it irrespective of the gender. Rael himself was a man with a strong libido and had quite a few women in his life. I was reminded of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in which Aisha, the most beloved wife of the Prophet, teases the man of god saying that he was shrewd enough to have invented a god who danced to his tunes. Rael has no god, however. Yahweh is just another man albeit belonging to an advanced planet where life is eternal for chosen people.  In that eternity live Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, the Old Testament prophets, and so on having been brought alive to eternity using scientific cloning from their cells collected from the earth at relevant times. Well, the ETs were monitoring everything right from the first couple on the earth. They are monitoring us too with the help of a super computer which records all our deeds. Our final retribution is awaiting us there on that planet of our creators.

In that extra-terrestrial paradise, there are beautiful women too awaiting the men to pleasure them in whatever way they choose. Those women are robots, however, though beautiful and lifelike and also belonging to different races of your choice. There seem to be no women, however, among the eternal heroes in Rael’s extra-terrestrial Paradise: no women of the stature of Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, and of course Rael who will join them eventually.

The final book in the trilogy, Let’s Welcome the Extra-Terrestrials, Rael clarifies certain doubts raised by his followers as well as critics. This book also contains the testimonials of some of his prominent followers. The book is an attempt to get more followers who will contribute to the construction of a gigantic “embassy” on the earth for the ETs. You have to contribute one per cent of your income towards the cause.  So it is just like any other religion: a massive swindle! With a salacious paradise on a planet that’s not so far away. And its time is at hand too: the Apocalypse is imminent.
 
Rael
I suppressed my laughter many times as I read the book. I found it funny, very funny, much more funny than all the religions I am familiar with so far. I imagine Rael laughing all the way to the bank though he was born to an impecunious woman in a remote town in France and couldn’t complete even basic schooling. He knows the tricks of his trade, however.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more