So the Conservative Republican Christian Fanatic Religious Hate Film Gods Not Dead and all Atheists are evil pieces of shit is coming to DVD this week. Lets continue to look at how very lolol the entire enterprise is. But it’s what happens simultaneously with the Newsboys concert that is the film’s real climax. And it reveals the filmmakers’ most earnest wishes for how the world would be and how Christians would spontaneously respond to it. And it is more chilling and frightening a picture of Christianity than any of the depictions of atheists or Muslims. Ironically, the people who come off looking the worst in this film are the Christians who most fully internalize their beliefs and see everything through them. The atheists are bad, but at least Radisson and Amy have some anguish you can empathize with, and Radisson even gets in a couple sincere, passionate speeches from the heart about the problem of evil and the dangers of religion. Amy gets sympathy as devastated in the face of death. It’s the Christians who wind up frighteningly, inhumanly, indifferent, even joyful, in the face of evil. To get what I’m saying, we need to ruin the ending. To set the scene Professor Radisson has, by this point, predictably had his big defeat in the classroom. (I’ll write another post all about that.) His student, Josh, who refused to write down that God was dead and so had to prove God was not dead to the class or receive an F for 30% of his grade, has pulled a Tom Cruise from A Few Good Men and gotten Professor Radisson to emotionally confess he hates God and thereby betray that he actually believes in God. He’s been rendered speechless. The whole class has stood up and declared that God is not dead. Presumably, he’s on the verge of at least softening his stance on Christianity if not repenting and becoming a Christian outright. He has been left speechless by Wheaton in the classroom and gone back to his office. Night has fallen and he has reread a letter his dying mother had written to him about how she knows God is in control and hopes that he “will remain in the joy of the Lord” all his life. He calls Mina but gets her voicemail. He sees the Newsboys are in town and presumably knows she’ll be at the concert so he starts hurrying there. On his way, it suddenly starts to rain, drenching him. Radisson sarcastically says, “that’s perfect” and we’ll find out in a moment the ironic reason that it is unexpectedly perfect indeed! The reason it is surprisingly perfect is because the rain makes it so hard to see that Radisson is struck by a car and suffers fatal injuries that do not kill him instantly! He has just minutes to live! Just enough time to get saved! Hallelujah! And by dying he will go straight to glory and be blissful for eternity! Praise Jesus! I’m sorry, I know this sounds like I’m mocking Christian beliefs. Because it is ludicrous to present Christians as saying such ghoulishly callous things. Sure, they believe in an afterlife and that it’s better to be saved on your deathbed than burn for eternity, and that heaven is wonderful and those who die are theoretically luckier to be there than here. But Christians are human. They emotionally appreciate the graveness of death. They don’t literally shout “Hallelujah” at people’s deaths. They don’t smile and sing songs and envy the lucky guy who died because he’s with Jesus. They are somber. With every bit of optimism they can muster they affirm that the lost is “in a better place” or “free from pain at last”. But they mourn. They compartmentalize their supernatural hopes so that they don’t crowd out all room for emotional appreciation of the seriousness of earthly loss. But, like I said at the start, some Christians can’t handle any compartmentalization of God. They want to live and emotionally respond precisely as their beliefs logically would have it. And the filmmakers, and their representative Christian role models, Pastor Jude and Pastor Dave, are going to make them paradigmatic men of faith. Men who so live in the truth and reality of the Gospel that they don’t feel about a dying man what worldly, earthly, compartmentalizing, realistic, practical humans do. They don’t care about saving his body. They rush to the body like those ludicrous emergency response paramedical evangelists I hypothesized earlier. They act with all the life-saving seriousness of actual life-saving EMTs. But, like something out of anti-Christian gallows humor, they treat his soul instead. To my non-believer’s eyes watching, this was a sickening game of pretend. People impotent to save what is real, his earthly life, acting with dead seriousness to preserve what is purely pretend, his eternal soul. They are in emergency mode trying to get him to say the silly Lord’s Prayer as though it is the magic incantation that his entire salvation hinges upon. This is the kind of God these filmmakers believe in? One who, if the pastors cannot do emergency evangelism quickly enough in your dying moments will send you to hell? But if they can use their ace Gospel spreading techniques in time you can go to heaven? God needs this verbal assent to this arbitrary modern day little formula for salvation in order to save you? He can’t project out and figure, “Well this Radisson guy was mad I killed his mom with cancer when he was 12 (which, I gotta admit was a dick move on my part, so I can’t really blame him). And he means well and he seems to have been coming along at the end, going to a Newsboys concert where he may have decided to worship me and let the whole killing his mom thing go…” No, God sees the car hit Radisson (we’re assuming of course, to be theologically correct, that God didn’t make the car hit the guy, these things just happen) and God rubs his hands together thinking, “oh boy, this oughta be good, let’s see if he accepts my salvation before he loses consciousness or if I get to send him to hell!” The image of Christians being people who descend on the weak, the sick, the dying, to spiritually manipulate them on their deathbeds is extremely offensive to many non-Christians. The Christians who routinely spread lies about deathbed conversions because they don’t care about the consciences of non-believers. They care about whatever propaganda tool they can get. They care about claiming souls. They care about dominating you however you can. All the pretenses about concern for your free will aside, they want to capture your soul. The idea that someone in their dying moments needs to be harangued by people to change their religion is sick. It’s this sort of comprehensive Christian mindset that makes them so invasive, which makes them prowl hospitals trying to convert vulnerable people. It’s this exploitation of weakness–this exploitation of anything they can figure out to wring a conversion out of someone that is so fanatical and disgusting. I get it, they really think eternal souls are at stake. That’s why spreading the false beliefs of Christianity is harmful. Because people can act ghoulishly, manipulatively, and disrespectfully from a sincere concern for others’ souls. And the scene is really the kind of portrayal of Christians that had atheists written it in an attack on Christians I would have complained was way over the line. When real life Christians see someone bleeding to death in the street, they are as concerned as anyone to save his actual life. They don’t act like spiritual EMTs and then literally celebrate a job well done when the man’s life is gone before the real EMTs can do anything. I’m serious, in the film, they literally celebrate when he dies. The role model Christians in this film also literally tell the man struck by a car that he just received an act of mercy because it gave him a chance to repent. You want to talk about bullying? Take a God who “lets” you (*wink* *wink*) be hit by a car and then “mercifully” doesn’t heal you but lets you lay in agony on the ground while his followers swoop in and ask you, “Now do you want to give in?” No, no, nothing bullying about that at all. It’s those mean antitheists who want people to accept only what is rationally demonstrable to believe in. Those guys are the real authoritarians… When Radisson dies, these Christians act as though they are so certain that he is now in heaven, having accepted Jesus into his heart just before dying, that they literally treat the dead man as enviable for now being able to know more about God than they do, for getting to meet Him. While he is dying, they manipulatively exploit his expression of fear at dying by using it as an evangelistic tool in order to talk about how Jesus was scared when he died too. They trivialize the tragedy of his stolen life by rationalizing that he only had to endure a few moments of pain and now is getting to have an eternity in paradise. These responses to death are inhumanly cold and detached from reality. They are not ideal. Fortunately real life Christians are rarely so heartlessly consistent in their baseless beliefs. Their visceral emotions are too bodily and too real to let them feel the platitudes they mouth either as euphorically or sanguinely as the monstrous true believers in this film do. Real life believers can look at the horror of death and not be in total denial about it emotionally. Their consolations about heaven are desperate hopes that they try to muster as much confidence as they can in. This movie’s characters shows how sick it would look if everyday Christians all over the place really did internalize a belief that death is just an exciting chance to go be with Jesus. It’s macabre how dangerously shut off to appropriate feelings about evil they would become. When you can be reconciled emotionally to any evil inflicted on humanity out of your full immersion in the pie in the sky fantasy that God redeems all evil for good, then when you learn of a Christian murdered you can say, “Oh praise Jesus! Lucky old Sam gets to be with God now!” When you learn of a genocide of Christians you can chuckle without hesitation thinking, “Oh, those lucky lucky martyrs! They must be God’s favorites, the way he accelerates their return home!” This is a kind of twisting of human feelings that only cultishness creates. The most dangerous person in the world is the one who passionately loves you with a dangerous conception of what love or reality is, such that they eagerly subject you to evil thinking it’s good. This death scene presents the limit point of the dangers of trying to work yourself up into truly believing what is completely contrary to all the senses and reason. It’s a warning to non-believers and reasonable believers everywhere–don’t become like these people. But possibly the most disgusting and galling thing about all of this is is the hypocritical way this scene glosses over and betrays the very claim that Josh Wheaton made that was meant to be such a powerful counter-push to Radisson’s authoritarian antitheism. Where Radisson acted like he knew everything, Josh took the humble road. He claimed that the debate over God’s existence was really a push. Sure he couldn’t prove God’s existence, but neither could Radisson disprove it.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 17:21:34 +0000
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