God's Not Dead

The flood continues.

PLEASE, PLEASE tell me that is a fake trailer...

Also, I honestly can't tell which side the movie is cheering for from the trailer. Neither side sounds all that interesting since... It looks like a cheep movie period.

As soon as I heard "evolutionist", I knew what this kind of movie is gonna be (a sucky one, yeah, but more than that).

I hope the film's theme song is a parody of Billy Joel's "A Matter of Trust".

That dreck is too earnest to be anything other than real. I would despair but there's no bloody point - that side's won. There's no appetite in Hollywood for films like Inherit the Wind anymore, you can't get funding for films that give the Creationists the kind of kicking that they give to "evolutionists". And the makers are too fucking thick to realize that they have won the argument, that the Enlightenment doesn't fucking matter anymore and we are all back in the fifteenth century but with Ipods and modern plumbing.

Easy there, Chicken Little.

This quotation remains as on-the-nose as ever:

What bothers me more is the "creationism or evolutionism", as if people are supposed to take sides. Is it so difficult to choose to believe in a mixture of both?

Well, I suppose it depends on the composition of that mixture. Questions of fact don't really permit differences of opinion. You can believe, to an extent, in a theistic evolution, or that evolution is God's plan (and if it is, then what an elegant plan!), but at the same time it seems rather...odd to say something like "I believe God intervened in the evolutionary process", since that is prima facie a statement of fact that can be analyzed and disproven.

Agreed. It's a tricky issue, when taking into account God's alleged level and scale of intervention (which can range from none to all of it).

On my part, personally, I believe that a God created the Big Bang, or, alternatively, the stuff that caused (or, at the very least, helped) the Big Bang to happen, and then evolution took its own course.

It's just a belief. I like Darwin's theory and I use it to argue my point that evolution took its own course, outside of some sort of manipulation/intervention by a deity.

edited 3rd May '14 8:06:22 AM by Quag15

Golden Mean Fallacy

(Not to mention some mmmm "evolutionists" [I have no idea why they consider this term offensive] for lack of a better word, see creationism as ridiculous and some creationists see evolution as blasphemy)

edited 3rd May '14 12:35:46 PM by PersistentMan

I mean, I suppose there is the idea of intelligent design, which kinda blends the two ideas.

Indeed, and the scientific community considers the intelligent design theory as a bunch of bovine scatology with no credibility whatsoever.

With excellent reason, given it was formulated entirely as a way to get Young Earth Creationism into science classrooms; cf the Wedge Document and William Dembski's admission that ID is just "the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory."

Re: "evolutionist"

Scientists tend to reject it because it is used to color arguments by promoting the idea that evolution is just another worldview, as opposed to, y'know, fact.

What's the problem with that?

edited 3rd May '14 1:14:10 PM by PersistentMan

It's like being called a "blue-skyist" or a "2+2=4ist". The reason creationists use the term is to try to create the impression that there are two equally-valid competing worldviews in this debate. There are not. There is the scientific fact of evolution and the bullshit of creationism.

Well, 2+2=10 in base four. And the sky is not always blue.

edited 3rd May '14 1:32:00 PM by PersistentMan

Might not want to risk a derail thump here, OTC subforum hosts both threads on creationism and general religion/mythology discussions.

If it's not too flame-baity, maybe this could be converted to a general "Christian Films" thread since the discussion seems to be straying away from the topical film? We have the biblical epics thread but that one is a little too specific to encompass the ones mentioned here, I think.

To be honest, several christians, including preachers (and myself, for what is worth) believe in evolution and the big bang pretty vehemently. They just believe God was behind those.

I studied in a catholic school for most of my life, and at one time some teachers tried to ban evolution from being taught in the school. Then the Abbot in charge of the monastery (and the school itself) gave a long, drawn-out lecture on why evolution and the big bang are perfectly Christian concepts that not only should, but ''will' be taught.

I originally thought it was a parody trailer or something because it seems like simply a gender flip of the protagonist from God's Not Dead and essentially the same premise.

The sad thing is, in my opinion, that these films don't have the budget and marketing to get audiences on the level of Hunger Games and Spiderman so that we could get a proper public outrage over this bullshit and maybe never see a film like these again.

Because, frankly, these things are rather absurd.

Allright, maybe I shouldn't have said that people oughta adopt the middle way. However, here's the way I see things: I listen to both sides, I (generally) don't join any of those, and I form my own conclusions and I guide myself through them until someone else provides a better answer/argument or dismantles my own conclusions and provide solid criticism.

My own conclusions often draw the good parts from both sides, because I tend to 'put myself in other people's shoes', that is, to understand and comprehend their position and to try to get to reach a middle term, that is, to 'please Greeks and Trojans'.

I'm a golden mean son of a gun. So be it.

edited 3rd May '14 2:34:43 PM by Quag15

The one thing I see about these movies is that they largely have little impact. That is to say, nobody's being converted. These movies mostly get seen by church youth groups and college bible study ministries. I am a Christian, but I've never liked Christian-themed movies because they always seem to have very little plot (with the exception of Biblical movies).

Which, even then, Biblical movies never try to do anything new with the material. Though... Idk, would that be sacralidge/blasphemous?

Also, when is the last time that someone said, 'Hey, My favorite movie is The Passion of the Christ'? It just doesn't happen because... Christian movies tend to be message driven rather than anything... And it gets boring.

The one of the exceptions I see to this is Prince of Egypt which focused a hell of a lot more on the more human aspects of the story and the relationship between Ramases and Moses rather than the God and Religious Messages.

Also, gorgeous animation.

I think it usually depends on the context. I haven't heard very many people accuse The Ten Commandments, Prince of Egypt, or The Passion of the Christ for being sacrilegious. I think it's because even though they take some liberties with the source material they stay true to the essence of the story.

Contrast that with Noah (which I haven't seen, in fairness) where I understand that Noah has occasional bouts of psychopathy in the movie, among other things. Since the Bible says that Noah was chosen because he was a good man, you can understand why some people might have their jimmies rustled just a tad. It's even more problematic if the Gnostic overtones that many people have noticed in the movie are intentional, since Gnostic thought tends to run a bit counter to what we might consider mainstream Christianity (I say this as someone with a very, very basic understanding of Gnosticism, so take it with a grain of salt).

So, to sum up, it really depends on the movie and the people working on it, I guess.

There are some movies out there that present explicitly Christian themes positively and yet manage to be intellectually and artistically serious (in recent years, The Tree of Life and Of Gods and Men come to mind.) The thing is, though, that once the film stops being a strident rallying call for believers and deals with issues more subtly, people stop considering it a 'Christian film'. Think of it as the same thing as how critically acclaimed science fiction novels like 1984 and Brave New World get shelved in the literature section of bookstores and libraries, rather than the sci-fi one.