God's Not Dead

Well, christians always put much more emphasis on the importance of where you'll spend the afterlife rather than your carnal life anyway... In other words, I suppose it's what happens when you believe in an afterlife, carnal life stops being as important as it was.

edited 28th May '14 6:30:25 PM by PersistentMan

Right,but it still kind of comes off , well, lemme put it this way. If the next life is so good that you should celebrate when someone dies after repenting their sins, then why not celebrate the second anyone comes down with a fatal illness?

Hmm, I didn't think about it when I saw the movie, but considering how cheerful that scene was, the pastor and his Magical Negro are a couple of sociopaths given that they don't mourn the guy's death at all.

Extra unchristian points for how certain they are of his salvation, despite who goes up and who goes down is supposed to be something only God knows.

Because we're still supposed to cherish the time we have on this earthly plane and use it to improve the lives of others. Death is accepted as an inevitability, but not something that is actively sought out. When your time has come, your time has come. And Christians are still human (shocking, I know), and most humans don't actually embrace death (again, a complete shock, I know). Death is something people need to come to terms with at their own pace. Even if they do believe in an afterlife, most people still want to complete all the tasks they set out to complete in life before they leave their mortal body, and if they don't accomplish what they wish by then, they'll probably find themselves very unsatisfied while looking down the hallway toward death's door.

(Side note: I wish Carciofus was still here. He'd be able to explain this stuff pretty well.)

I thought you did a nice job explaining yourself. I wanted to reply, but my proposed answer fell short so I refrained from trying to worsen things rather than fix them. :p

I'm super late to the party but, the peripheral parts of the movie bothered me much more than the main plot. I've seen and heard all that kind of Christian nonsense before; but the parts with the stereotypical Muslim family where the backwards father subjugates his obliging daughter and the (Godless Communist) Chinese guy with the All-Business father who have apparently never heard of Christianity before were truly awful. They felt like they would fit better in a well-meaning unintentionally horribly racist movie made in the 1950s. They ought to fucking know better by now. And what kind of Persian woman is called A'isha anyway? And what kind of a hijab covers your face like a but nothing else? Ugh.

So the movie's out on DVD now. Anybody going to waste money at the Red Box? I'd put it in my Netflix queue, but I really don't want to mess up my recommendations.

Concerning the professor getting hit by a car and the helpful students converting him:

That's the notorious Happy Ending to a Chick Tract called "Somebody Loves Me". A small poor child of vague gender is mortally beaten by the alcoholic father and lays dying in an alley. He/she/it is "saved" by a Chick Tract that blows by and the girl passing them out helpfully informs the battered gutter child that Jesus loves him/her/it and then leaves. Kid dies, goes to Heaven, Good End.

Chick had add a word balloon when the Christian girl leaves the kid to die, promising to find help, because people called him out on somebody just leaving a kid to die in an alley.

edited 8th Sep '14 3:26:31 PM by Rotpar

In my first week of college, this one (admittedly, older) woman sat next to me in my Anthro class and mentioned this during a debate and... she was actually enthralled with what I meant and my criticisms and I actually felt proud. It was a great day...

And then some other girl I met claimed it was her favorite movie of all time and, when I asked her if there were any other movies she liked, she said nothing could top such a -insert various overly generous words of praise here-. I was so done and wanted to walk away.

I'm so sorry, but if anyone comes up to me and tells me if they like this movie, I have lost all respect of you and its impossible to win back.

I hope I get invited to see this movie with someone some time. Then I can keep harping on how funny it is that Hercules keeps insisting God is dead. Well duh, you and Xena killed them all.

I liked the movie.

Okay, this is from a while ago, but...

I suppose it's no coincidence that people like Jack Chick view the Catholic Church as a tool of SATAN!

Well, I'm pretty sure that we could find plenty of Christians who believe otherwise...

(Note: speaking as someone who was Raised Catholic)

As for the movie, from what I've heard of it, this seems like an appropriate visual metaphor.

edited 8th Sep '14 5:49:44 PM by KarkatTheDalek

Frankly, being slandered by Chick Tracts equals praise to the Catholic Church.

Having recently read the The Oresteia, I'll think others may find it interesting to note that apparently using "because God" as a basis for your entire argument has been around since Ancient Greece.

to be fair. a lot of stupid arguments have existed forever.

I mean, "kids today are disrespectful , lazy, and entitled" has been a complaint since ancient rome.

Since before that, I think. The Greeks got there first in our culture, and goodness knows the Chinese and other oriental nations had the theme as well before THEY got going.

There's probably hieroglyphics on ancient Egyptian monuments complaining about how kids these days don't respect their parents like they should and they ride their chariots at all hours of the night, and don't respect Horus the way we did when we were their age, dagnabbit!

According to When I Was Your Age... it's been around since at least 2500 BC

Well I'll try my best not to end up like that

Yeah, that's a good idea. That's what made the movie Parental Guidance stink.

That's what they all say...

Care to elaborate?

As one of the reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes said, the movie felt like an overly long "back in my day" joke conveying the previous generation's superiority over supposed modern day practices that don't actually exist in real life. Or at least not to the extent that the movies and TV shows like to portray.

Watched it again. I take back everything nice I said a year ago. Fuck this fucking propoganda filth. Every character is a straw man, every subplot meanders around, bad acting, bad writing, pointless subplots that add nothing, and to top it off, an ending straight out of reddit.com/r/thathappened . There's literally nothing good I can say about this "film".

I don't have a clue why I even remotely enjoyed it before.

@ Quag15

Me and my parents had a similar discussion. Though I think one of said that God could have caused the Big Bang for the First Day, with one of my parents saying that God's power shouldn't be limited.

Anyways, back to something relating to the movie. Didn't agree with the message. The only things I enjoyed are these:

1. Everybody is related [atheist professor is dating the sister of the businessman who chose not to be aware of what's happening to his mother, who is dating the environmentalist dying of cancer who tried interviewing one of the Duck Dynasty guys (forgot which one)].

2. The two pastors (one of whom tried helping the protagonist prove God isn't dead) having car problems, which is preventing them from going to an amusement park.

3. The Muslim teenager getting disowned by her family all because she found Jesus.

edited 11th Jul '15 9:23:06 PM by HallowHawk

Why did you like the Muslim Teenager being beaten for finding Christ? I kind of found it to be one of the more overtly offensive plots in the film.