They don’t care about saving his body. 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. 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 not that they say, “Well, we don’t know, maybe there’s hope he’s in heaven. I really hope that.” They are not the humble people Josh claimed Christians were when he talked about not knowing. But rather they they experience jubilant elation as though they are certain the dead man is really alive in heaven and convinced nothing bad really happened. They selfishly choose to ignore the very real possibility this man died prematurely, senselessly, and all in vain, is incredibly callous. They are certain not because they have rational reason to be but because they want to be, even if they’re wrong. They have willfully cut themselves off from even the possibility, that the film supposedly admitted to earlier, that they are wrong and that this man has been robbed of decades of happy life senselessly. They want to disconnect from feeling empathetic sufferings of their fellow human beings. They want to so much believe God is good all the time and all the time God is good that they refuse to acknowledge the truth of real, unredeemable, agony and feel it with others. The audience is to be encouraged to be unambivalently happy for the rest of the main characters as they party down at a rock concert in scenes intercut with those portraying Professor Radisson’s death and our pastors’ serenely joyful responses to it. Because all is well with the world. Let’s party. This is the irrationality and reality-warping character of faith epitomized and idealized. This is the repulsive extreme of Christianity’s demand to place commitment to God over solidarity even with one’s fellow human beings if necessary. It is anti-human. It is profoundly intellectually irresponsible. It is deeply morally repulsive and evil. And thankfully most Christians are much too human to ever have quite so much true faith. I find their lack of faith reassuring. I find their support of this film troubling.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Aug 2014 04:23:41 +0000
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