Lying for God

By Capt. Fogg

I don't expect much from anything attached to the Breitbart enterprise, whether it's politics or religion or movie criticism and in part because such things are all the same in that venue. Take the review of Ricky Gervais' new movie The Invention of Lying by the Great S. T. Karinick. The movie was made to lampoon Christianity, he says, yet it proves, despite itself, that not only are we better off with God ( the Christian God ) but because belief is the source of all that's good, belief proves itself valid.

" The godless society is unpleasant and uninspired."

he says, never mind that most people would find much more inspiration and cultural development in increasingly Godless and humanistic Europe than in the bigoted, gay hating Bible Belt. Most normal people that is, rather than failed people who find life so horrible and frightening that they have to invent another mystical one to mystically be transported to. Perhaps withdrawal from the opiate of the masses is indeed unpleasant for the addicted, but for others, like me, the flowering of humanism and liberty is to be preferred. Freedom of belief is all well and good but if they would stop mocking and persecuting the sane for their efforts to improve the human condition and further the cause of secular liberty fewer of us would need that fantasy world they find so comforting.

"So what we have here are two worlds. One, without God and controlled by thoughts of evolution, is a spectacularly dreary, unhappy place without love or meaning. On the other hand, even a fictional God brings the world meaning, joy, liberty, and wonder."

Can it be that only someone trapped in the fictional world we call "conservative" could read this without sadness, pity and yes, horror? I find precisely those things in a meaningless and hostile universe. I love the more because of love's futility, I treasure life more for it's evanescence and meaninglessness. I wonder more at the spectacular and vast and complex universe of reality than at the childish little one born of ignorance and legend -- and most of all I'm free without Gods as no man could be with their jealous tempers and wrathful deeds, their narrow minded priests, preachers and divine retributions trapping him in a world of guilt, fear, original sin and self-loathing.

"Thus although Ricky Gervais has publicly said that his film takes an atheist position, it appears that even he cannot imagine a happy, emotionally fulfilling world that does not acknowledge a good many fundamentally religious thoughts, and in particular Christian ones."

What a smug and loathsome statement and how offensive to other religions -- as though love compassion, emotional fulfillment and the rest of the fuzzy fulsome package belonged exclusively to any extant form of Christianity other than the ad hoc and ephemeral chimera he puts together for this argument -- as though history, it's wars, persecutions, tyrannies, oppressions and inquisitions could be disregarded as anomalous and never anywhere was there a Buddha or an atheist willing to lay down his life for his family or his country.

Regardless of how I loath this man's precious, smug and egotistical disdain for non-believers and non-Christians, I have to smile a bit at how he claims Gervais' movie "undercuts" his atheist position, because if even a fictional God is as good, as he says, as a real God; if objective reality is less important than the noble lie, then truthfulness, objectivity and indeed honesty are unnecessary and perhaps dangerous in his happy world of fiction, a conclusion which undercuts everything that, in his conceit, he attempts to prove.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)