I started my talk yesterday at the Mormon Transhumanist Association Conference with this:

“It’s getting late in the day. Maybe this will help us wake up a bit. It’s Groundhog Day!”

“I think that’s how we often feel: ‘It’s not possible!’ Today I’d like to begin to show how it is possible.” See my paper for more on that topic.

Groundhog Day is one of my favorite movies of all time, with perfect casting of Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell (just a few years ago she publicly shared some concerning anti-evolution views, but more about that another day). The critics seem to agree, with 96% at Rotten Tomatoes, and 8.0 out of 10 at IMDB (it’s ranked #233 in the list of “Top Rated Movies” of all time).

I wrote a paper about the deeper meaning in this classic 1993 film for a theater and media arts (TMA) course I took at BYU some fifteen years ago. The director and co-writer, Harold Ramis (of Ghostbusters fame), was a Humanist, although he was also heavily influenced by the Buddhist beliefs of his wife, Erica Mann. He even, apparently, became friends with the Dalai Lama!

I’ll have to see if I can try to find that paper that I wrote in college to share.