Film 301 Final Project Post 3: That Old Time Religion vs. The New Age of Reason

Our Nation's Leaders (or Don’t Forget to Open with a Joke)
"No, I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God." George H. W. Bush, while running for president as a Republican, August 1987


"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." – First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America (Which is still on the books, by the way, Mr. Bush)

I've been lucky enough that I haven't really been discriminated against for my atheist views, but I fear I might be in the future. My mom gave gifts to my sisters for easter, but I didn't get anything, and this got me thinking. What if I ever want to get a job in the southern U.S.? I know I don't have the willpower to keep my atheism a secret, and it is widely acknowledged that atheists are routinely discriminated against in the bible belt.

The Compassion of Christians (or God's Righteousness)

An AIDS patient, being punished, according to Pat Buchanan

"AIDS is nature's retribution for violating the laws of nature." "The poor homosexuals -- they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution."
- Pat Buchanan, during his 1992 presidential campaign, and on AIDS in 1983, respectively.

Never happened, according to many fundamentalist Evangelicals

“Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody.”
-- Pat Buchanan, explaining "group fantasies of martyrdom," part of his view as a Holocaust denier, in The New Republic, October 22, 1990

Replace education with religion, great idea!

"If we have to give up either religion or education, we should give up education."
-- William Jennings Bryan, contribution to The Commoner (January, 1923)

The easy answers that religion claims to possess cause people to think they don't need education. At least, that's the only way I can explain the ignorant, hateful things that are said by fundamentalist leaders.

Evil Begets Evil (or Who Wants to Be a Martyr?)













"Every Muslim, from the moment they realize the distinction in their hearts, hates American, hates Jews, and hates Christians. This is a part of our belief and our religion." Osama bin Laden, December 1998








"God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did . . ." George W. Bush, June 2003

"Everybody hates death, fears death, but only those, the believers who know the life after death and the reward after death, would be the ones who will be seeking death."
-- Mohamed Atta, 9/11 hijacker

“Yes, testosterone-sodden young men too unattractive to get a woman in this world might be desperate enough to go for 72 private virgins in the next.” “Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.”
-- Richard Dawkins, "Religion's Misguided Missiles" (September 15, 2001)

Atheism, and the related conviction that we have just one life to live, is the only sure way to regard all our fellow creatures as brothers and sisters.... Even the compromise of agnosticism is better than faith. It minimizes the totalitarian temptation, the witless worship of the absolute and the surrender of reason.
— Christopher Hitchens, “The Lord and the Intellectuals,” Harper’s July 1982, p 60, from James A Haught, ed, 2000 Years of Disbelief

Even if I had concrete, absolutely unshakable proof that God was real, I wouldn't worship him. How can anyone respect a being who instructs people to kill each other over their nationality or race? More importantly, this life in the physical universe is all we have, and convincing people otherwise invites them to treat life as disposable.

I’m too scared to think of a heading for this one.

You may have noticed that about halfway through, I lost my sense of humor and turned really sarcastic. That's because in the course of making this post, I found a certain video on YouTube. It is a fairly long clip, and one that I had no hand in creating or editing, so I debated using it. When I showed it to some friends, we laughed, and they said, “There’s no way that’s real!” But, of course, it is real, and it makes me afraid. I was compelled to include it here because it’s the most effective way of expressing the dread that is in my mind, the crippling fear that is unique to knowing that everything you value and everything you think gives hope to the world are already under attack. The attack is coming from people who have been lied to and misled by those hungry for power, and they don’t care if you are an atheist or a Christian or a Jew or a Minnesota Vikings fan; they just want you dead. They want you dead, and they teach their children to want you dead, because they think God wants you dead. The title is Muslim Kindergarten Graduation Ceremony. The scary bit starts about 45 seconds in.



Analysis
I didn't expect to find so much humor in this topic, but when I started, I kept having funny thoughts about what was in the heads of the people I quoted. I think the humor and sarcasm might be useful in disarming people who would otherwise dismiss this work, so that I can present the most powerful arguments in the last two sections of the post.

The most significant challenge of this post was to make something unique, despite the fact that I was building it with the words and images of others. I don't know if I was successful. Once I have spent this much time working on something, I have a hard time stepping back and looking at it from a different perspective.

I think I was successful in emulating the poetic mode of documentary because the focus was more on the tone of the people quoted and the shift in mood from humor to seriousness. I also intentionally ignored restraints of time and space, albeit in crude fashion, by having images paired with quotes that are not related in time or space, and by having the Constitutional Convention conversing with GHWB. Hopefully the affect is to allow people to see things in a way they usually don't, my version of the alternative knowledge.

The clip from YouTube probably doesn't belong here, but I don't have anything else to make a strong closing. I know that I have a weakness in wanting to include things that will get a rise out of people, even at the expense of the overall quality of the piece.

Sources
The images of George H. W. Bush and the Constitutional Convention are from the National Archives, and are in the public domain. All other images are in the public domain, either by the choice of the creator or by virtue of being produced by government agencies, and were found through Wikimedia Commons. Most images were edited (obviously) or at least cropped. Most of the quotes were found using Positive Atheism's quote list.