"Art Merril Show" excerpts, WIOD radio with guest Jacque Fresco, 1973.
We are told in all good books
that the body is the shell,
that the soul dwells in the body.
And when the shell comes to an end
the soul leaves and takes on a higher form of life for some people.
And then we take this shell
and we put it in a $3,000 mahogany box.
Soft foam lining there that you've never had when you were alive.
And then you get a motorcycle escort when you don’t need it at all
on the last journey.
Look at the people standing around and watering your tombstones and all that sort of thing.
Look at the fuss made over the shell.
Why the weeping and the sadness?
Listen carefully.
You’re afraid.
You really don’t believe; you’re hypocrites, most of you.
We are told that Jesus had come into town
and he was a radical, and he threatened their institutions
and they crucified him, because he was a threat to an existing system.
He tried to say that there were lots of people out there
that tended to go along with things as they were.
They were part of the establishment
who Jesus said were the hypocrites.
They were in high places
and a lot of them wear white collars and they wear robes
and they speak in a very profound way, and yet they are hypocrites.
They are proud of their temples and their churches and their synagogues
and they have forgotten completely about the brotherhood of man.
And your society is not that different.
A breakdown of intellect
and a breakdown of inquiry
and magic-substituting.
And Eastern philosophy, men are searching
and they're getting off the real world.
(- Are they searching or are they running away?)
- They’re running away - and hiding
- hiding in - to get away from reality.
They can't take it; it’s rough.
When you live with someone who you believe you love
and then the divorce comes into the picture and people get sick in your family,
you can’t count on material things, they seem to fall away.
That’s because you're looking for justice; you're given a false package. You’re told
“If you give all the world all the best that you have the best will come back to you.”
And it doesn’t work that way. It didn’t work for Jesus, it didn’t work for Gandhi.
[In] the real world, anything can happen.
Your major newspapers talk of the marvels
of the technical and scientific achievements
and yet they have a page on astrology,
which really belongs in the Middle Ages,
which we are at the tail end of.
And there are people that take to that
and they really think that there's such a thing as astrology.
They think that the stars govern their lives.
And so you see flying saucers and magic.
Magic means: violation of natural law.
Do you think God would have gravity and then change his mind?
Do you think that in God’s infinite or divine wisdom
he designs a system of an interrelationship and correlation of the space time continuum
and then varies that natural law?
Of course not.
And the story of temptation is a senseless story.
Consider this:
that Jesus goes up to a mountain top, and Satan says to him
“How would you like kingdom over the earth?"
And he says "Get thee behind me!"
Imagine if you’ve known God, there is no temptation.
It is only the hypocrite that is tempted.
It is only the phony that is tempted,
that no real Christian or Mohammedan
or what have you, will be ever tempted
if they really believe in God.
If Christ existed and if he said these things,
I tend to go along with this concept.
He said during the ascension
"Ye shall do even greater things than I."
He walked on water. Man walks in space and he walked on the moon.
Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead, books say that he did this.
Men like Pasteur and Madame Curie
made it possible for millions of people to be alive, not one.
By the way if they understand Christianity, nothing would anger them.
If a man broke into your home
you would feed him and cloth him
and feel "there but for the grace of God go I."
I’m not pushing Christianity.
All I’m saying is if you want a better world, you have to get out and make it.
thevenusproject.com
video edit + photograhpy Joel Holt
2018 The Venus Project