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.

Film 301 Final Project Post 1: Proposal

The topic of my final project is atheism. I chose this because I am an atheist, and this aspect of my identity has become increasingly important to me in the past few years. I was raised Catholic and my family is still dedicated to that religion. But as I became an adult, I began to look for the truth on my own, and everywhere I looked, it became evident that God was not needed to explain the world around me. Eventually I reached the point where I realized I was a hardcore atheist. Since then I have done my best to educate myself about what it means to call myself atheist and this project will hopefully be an extension of that goal.

Below are two videos that might give you an idea of what's going on in this lumpy melon I call a head. The first is The Blasphemy Challenge, posted by The Rational Response Squad. I'm a fairly stoic person, but this video makes the hair on my neck stand up when the child at the end says, "I deny the holy spirit, and I am not afraid." The second video is my response to the video (OK, I wanted a free DVD, so sue me) and my only regret is that I did not say that I am not afraid of being sent to hell.






Atheism is obviously a very broad topic, so I will focus on a specific aspect of my experience for each post. Each of these will attempt to replicate a mode of documentary film making, so let's see what these modes are about.

Expository Documentary
If the expository mode of documentary had to be given a three-word definition it would probably be "Discovery Channel Special." This is the mode in which the documentarian is putting forth an argument about the historical world by presenting images and rhetoric that cause the viewer to come to the conclusion that this is the one true view of the films subject. This is done by addressing the viewer directly, through "evidential" images of the subject and by actually speaking to him/her through a voice-over.

Poetic Documentary
The poetic documentary mode acknowledges that there may be alternative forms of knowledge that can be learned when the focus of a documentary is put more on the associations or patterns available in its study. This includes emphasizing mood and tone, as well as rejecting continuity in space and time in favor of breaking the subject into fragments and rearranging it for the viewer in a way that highlights the possibility of alternative knowledge.

Performative Documentary
Documentaries made in the performative mode emphasize personal experience and the emotional responses they elicit. They are concerned with helping us share in a perspective to which we are not native. This helps connect the personal and subjective content to a larger context that we are already familiar with.

In my next post for this project, I will focus on the Intelligent Design movement (oh, how I am loath to capitalize those words). I will do this in the expository mode, and while I would never deny that I am extremely biased on the issue, I will try to be as neutral as I can. To achieve something that could be considered expository, I will use a combination of images from factual sources. I will substitute text for the usual voice-over, but still aim to make something that conveys factual authority by being organized and accurate. I will likely not use sound for this portion, since the topic lends itself so well to a presentation based on images and text.

The following post will use the poetic mode to focus on a contrast between the tendency of religion to justify and inspire violence and the tendency of atheism engender more peaceful and compassionate responses to the world. I will not attempt to mask my bias here. I plan to pair images of religion with related images of atheism and use text to paint the contrast. For example, an image of Osama bin Laden on one of his tapes and a quote of his calls to kill "infidels" paired with an image of a television appearance of Richard Dawkins and a quote from one of his books, like "Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end." I would emphasize contrasts of tone and mood between the two sides rather than an organized debate. Some of the images might not even need quotes associated with them, such as ones of terrorist attacks. Others would show an image from one side of the argument with a quote from the other. Overall, the post would convey a visceral knowledge rather than a factual one. Whether sound is included would depend on if I can find useful video clips for the message.

The final post will be a performative treatment of my relationship with my family. I plan to record interviews with one or both of my parents using either the built-in camera and microphone in my laptop or the video mode of a digital still camera. I would ask questions related to my experience and record their responses without intervening once I have finished asking. I would follow these videos with text meant to relate this experience to a larger context of atheism in religious countries.