izmeina | Strange Creatures

Izzie likes nothing better than a cocktail of religion and politics and this is a particularly delicious version.

John Safran vs God
Izzie just thought she would share some bitter and twisted snippets from one very wicked wacky guy. Now this is one time that the Izzie really wishes she had a television. (At the very end of the story there is a link to the website where you can watch bits from the TV show)

So here are some of Izzie's favorite snippets
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Rachael Kohn: Having watched all eight episodes of John Safran vs God, I was mesmerised. It’s full of pranks, which is what you’d expect of the Devil, but it’s also revealing, and in the end you do learn a few things. John Safran goes where angels fear to tread, including a Voodoo Day of the Dead ritual sacrifice in Port au Prince, Haiti, the Ku Klux Klan headquarters in an undisclosed location, a radical Muslim cleric in London and a Rinzai Zendo in Nagoya, Japan.

But all this multiculturalism has a price, which he discovers when he meets Bob Larson, the exorcist. It seems all those demons have stuck to John Safran, and, well, they have to be removed.

Bob Larson: You’re walking fly-paper for demons.

John Safran: I was involved in a Day of the Dead celebration for the Viking religion, the Norse Odinism, is that a problem?

Bob Larson: It’s a big problem. Odin is a very powerful demon.

John Safran: And when I was in India, I worshipped a goddess.

Bob Larson: Kali?

John Safran: Definitely Kali, but was it a Mah goddess, Goddess Mah? That’s an issue?

Bob Larson: It’s a big issue. It’s all false gods. John, I’m not even a third of a way through this thing. You could have every demon on this planet inside you.

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Rachael Kohn: It also can be pretty dangerous if you’re an atheist missionary in Salt Lake City.

John Safran: Oh yes, we went talking in Salt Lake City as atheists to try to convert Mormons to atheism as some sort of revenge.

But overall, the Mormons were just so not like a cult, at least in Salt Lake City. And their main critics are just Christians who don’t like their theology or whatever, but there’s not really too many non-Christians who seem to really have a problem with them. And they all had like great senses of humour, but for the sake of my comedy I often have to cut out the bits where you prove these people have senses of humour.

Like say for example that thing where we went door to door and were asking Mormons, Hey we’re atheists would you like to be converted to atheism? Like we had to get their permission afterwards to use the footage and most of them, like 90% of them got it and thought it was funny, and just and like it wasn’t like you know not in this condescending way where they didn’t quite get what we were getting at, they’re 100% got what we were getting at, and Oh, isn’t that ironic and funny, because you’re coming to Mormons and trying to convert them to atheism, like we go to you and stuff. And yes, they were fine, but you know, I always have to cut out those bits from the show, because who wants to see me blackslapping Mormons?

Rachael Kohn: Well any chance they’ll produce your film, Extreme Mormons?

John Safran: Ah yes, well we pitched that, because like the Mormon population in America is as big as just the entire population of Australia, so you can have things like a Mormon film industry, although I have seen many of their films in my research and after watching about ten Mormon films, and these films the kind of interesting thing about them is they always kind of look just like regular Hollywood films, like romantic comedies or like slight action bits, or like epics, and they kind of mimic the genre, but then they’re kind of like crowbarring in all these Mormon messages, like a disproportionate amount of time, the heroes in these stories are always Mormon missionaries and stuff like that.

So I pitched my own movie, but definitely after watching all those Mormon movies I was going ‘I’m pretty happy that the Jews are controlling Hollywood and not the Mormons’.