(2010) In the midst of a personal crisis after 9/11, rethinking his place and purpose in the universe, director Roger Nygard (who also co-produced and edited this 94-minute documentary of the great celestial puzzle) takes us on his odyssey to find meaning in the chaos. Beginning by asking his friends and acquaintances in California, what's the point of existence, eventually contacting and discussing the topic with scores of people across the globe, he gets a variety of responses.

Joe Keyes, an actor, says suffering is funny, like a cosmic joke. After seeing real destitution first hand, Bobby Gaylor, a musician, realized he had tons of choices and hope compared with those who don't. Tv writer Stevie Ray Fromstein doubts God's representatives, not God. Neighbor Chloe Revery, a precocious 7th grader, lets him in on a secret: "There is no afterlife." If there were eternal happiness, she says, then it would be "a world with no point."

An obese spiritual guru Aha informs his audience that the realization of "you're gonna be forgotten" requires great courage. At UC Santa Cruz, astrophysicist Stanford Woosley offers that we are evolved from stardust.

Our purpose on Earth is to know God, salvation, personal survival, achieving an appreciation for one's own life, love, chasing women. Sampling from a smorgasbord of faiths and food for thought, Nygard often can't resist interjecting moments of tongue-in-cheek humor. Others argue that there's no need to worship energy or that God is an expanding definition or that a deity is wishful thinking.

God gets in the way of attempts to understand the universe, complains evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. God is part of the brain, insists author Matthew Alper, the result of our self-awareness and anxiety over our mortality: a delusion that we will live forever. "God as a challenge," remarks cosmologist Joel Primack, "not an answer." It's not just a universe, suggests string-theory proponent and physicist Leonard Susskind, making an analogy with DNA and the tree of creation, we exist in a tiny pocket of a multiverse.

How did we get here? We are here by accident. God created God, says a believer; but the button pusher needed a button pusher, objects an agnostic. "Know you are divine," serves up a waitress: "We are all God." Or perhaps the cosmos is simply beyond human comprehension.

In Nevada a member of the Paiute tribe says that a spiritual leader was recognized for being two-spirited (both male and female), a homosexual. How do people interpret an afterlife, if there is one? "Should I live life for now or later?" Roger inquires. It's something hoped for, a place where one will have perfect abs, a stage of reincarnation. "If you are happy," says an interviewee, "you are already in heaven."

In Texas Roger visits with the lesbian minister of the Cathedral of Hope, a church for gays and lesbians. At the University of Florida he rediscovers Brother Jed Smock, an evangelist (a quarter of a century after having heard him at the University of Minnesota airing his ludicrous yet entertaining God talk, and here he is still at it) who proselytizes from the Gospels for young women on campus to get a husband and then get pregnant.

What is sin? A con game (punishment is enjoyment, says a hedonist), a test of God, an act against nature, disobedience to God. Inside a wrestling arena, Roger witnesses the ministry of ultimate Christian wrestling ("God's into unique methods") to save souls.

What is truth, and is it absolute or relative? "Truth is God." It's like pornography, observes Susskind: "You know it when you see it." Truth is "what people don't want to hear," supplies another. It's based on the strength of the evidence from science. Art comes closest to revealing truth, proposes Irvin Kershner. A woman raises the question of free will.

What is prayer? Miracles are merely coincidences, for "if no unlikely things happened," says Susskind, that would be miraculous. Only actions have meaning, says Julia Sweeney. If a hurricane, genocide, or other catastrophe befalls those who prayed for deliverance, comments man of faith: "Pray harder next time." Our simple stories attempt to compete with the complexities of nature, opines Carl Sagan's widow Ann Druyan.

Why is there religion, and why are there multitudes of faiths rather than one? The basis of religion is "fear of death." Superstition. Organization of society. To be human. To follow Scripture. Hearing voices and receiving divine revelations. Dangerous, a form of insanity. Religion is, according to a psychologist, according to Freud, the desire to recover the innocence of infancy when we were cared for by a parent.

Since everyone in the US who practices a religion, except for Native Americans, has an imported religion, Roger flies first to Jerusalem in Israel (where a rabbi explains that God's completely beyond infinity and reality, solving the ontological question of God's origins), then to Italy and Rome (denied an audience with the pope unless he could contribute $20,000), followed by England with a trip to Oxford where Dr Steve Biller, yet another physicist, explains: "At some level [where identical electrons are "bumps in a field"] we don't exist." Visiting Stonehenge, Roger encounters a senior druid, King Arthur Pendragon, who rides a motorcycle.

How about sex (and chocolate)? It's part of the human condition, like eating. Be ashamed. The more children church members reproduce, the larger becomes the congregation.

In China Roger explores Confucianism and Taoism (the Tao being the Way). What is morality? Following the right path, shame and laws, attending to personal pleasure, not necessarily guided by religion, reciprocal altruism, Darwinian adaptation, pointing your finger at others.

What leads to happiness? Hard work, luck, being true to one's nature, closeness to others, marijuana, brain chemistry, contentment with one's lot in life. Studies indicate that couples who raise children are slightly less happy than childless couples, though those who are parents may serve a greater purpose. It's "the by product of having purpose and meaning," says Sweeney. There is no state of happiness, avers Susskind, only fleeting moments of joy. "Nice to be important," a female turns a phrase, "but far more important to be nice."

On to India, Roger briefly investigates Hindu history and its traditions, the Ganges River, Jainism (with its karma and meditation of self-awareness), Agra, Sikhs (students of the universe), Sadhus (legally dead elders), Mahatma Gandhi (all religions are the same), Buddhism (to end desire is to end suffering) in Gaya, the worship of the deceased avatar Meher Baba, the wisdom of the living guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, reflecting that while in the West people look outward for God, in the East they focus inward (attention to the third eye).

What is the soul? "Property of Allah," pronounces a Muslim. Something that's "particular to human beings," the essence, the needle that draws the thread through past-life regressions, consciousness, wishful thinking. According to the Tao, everything has soul.

What is spirituality? A seeking after the divine, "warm feelings," religion without the violence, God without religion, seeing nature with a sense of wonder, something more than the mundane, the ultimate objective of science.

Feeling less judgmental, Roger, sitting down to a stack of pancakes, sums up that while we're making progress: "Nobody has the answer."

Had Nygard made his film a little later, this year, he might have quoted from Herman Wouk's new book, The Language God Talks: "Sooner or later comes the leap to the big, inexorable Why, which occurs to only one animal on earth: 'Why am I here?' … With all the stunning modern discoveries in cosmology and the biosciences, you really don't know the answer. Nobody does. Not the unbeliever, not the believer. Faith is hope, not fact."

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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