Movie Friday: The Greatest Story Ever Told

Someone back in the time when there weren’t a lot of phrases that had been popularly coined began calling the Bible “the Greatest Story Ever Told”, and it caught fire. Despite the fact that the Bible is not a story at all (unless you consider it a bizarre, rambling and bloody one that delves into non-sequiturs every chapter or so), it’s far from the greatest. There is much more insight into the human condition from reading Les Miserables or Roots or even some of the better sci-fi/fantasy titles out there than there is to be found in the Torah. Even if you want to stay in the realm of religion, the Bhagavad Gita is breathtakingly beautiful, or even Milton’s Paradise Lost or Dante’s Divine Comedy is better told story than the Bible.

However, there is some appeal to a story that tries to explain the existence of the world, humankind, and to explain how we got here. The Bible gives us a narrative of how that happened – the problem being that it is all either outright fable or sexed-up oral history. David Christian has a much better story:

This one has the added bonus of being true. While it lacks heroes and struggles between good and evil, it does a very good job of both explaining how we got here, and putting our monstrous self-importance in a context that is sorely needed.

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Movie Friday: Outnumbered

I had a discussion/debate with Scary Fundamentalist about the strength of kids’ “bullshit detectors”. My basic stance was that, given the opportunity and a set of unbiased facts, kids are pretty good at sorting out what is real and what isn’t. However, when you tell them that something is real, they tend to believe you because… well… they’re kids. Today’s video illustrates that:

*Mutter* another video with embedding disabled. Sorry.

While this is played for laughs, it is an incredibly tragic state of affairs that kids are indoctrinated in environments where they aren’t given the skills to evaluate the truth of the axioms they are taught. Sure, I was raised in a religious household (kinda) and was taught to believe in a deity, but I was also taught skills of appraisal of facts, and exposed to dissenting opinions. It’s all well and good to say “let the kids decide for themselves”, but when you insulate people from dissenting opinions, there’s really not much of a decision to make.

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Movie Friday: Trololololo

It’s April Fool’s Day! This year I am celebrating by trolling the hell out of Canadian Atheist, another site I occasionally blog on.

I am putting this up because I fear that people may not understand that I am joking, and hoping that they click through here for more information.

Here are some other awesome religious troll pranks, in honour of this most foolish of days:

Punk’n the Fundie

Fresh Prince Troll

Miss Cleo Calls a Psychic

The April fool hath said in his heart that this shit ain’t funny.

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Movie Friday: Tim Wise and the illusion of “post-racial”

I am depressed.

I am depressed for two reasons. First, I am depressed that no matter how hard I work, I will likely never get as good at talking about issues of race and racism, history and the importance of advocacy as Tim Wise is:

The second reason I am depressed is that it seems like the forces of reason are losing the fight to the forces of revisionist history, post-hoc rationalization and short-sighted self-interest. I realize this post is much longer than what I usually post for Movie Friday (and has fewer jokes), but if you’ve found any of my posts on “the good old days” or the importance of recognizing black history, or really anything that I’ve said about race to be interesting (and the numbers suggest that at least some of you do), then you’ll absolutely love this clip.

Any of you who have watched any black beat poetry or other forms of spoken word, you’ll recognize that Tim uses a lot of their cadence and punctuated rhythm to get his points across. It’s not just a lecture – it’s verbal poetry. Amazing stuff, and I really really hope you watch it.

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Bonus movie: Science smackdown!

This was too good to let go

Sadly, the people for whom this kind of speech is most needed are too stupid to understand all the big words that Rep. Markey used:

“Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to a bill that overturns the scientific finding that pollution is harming our people and our planet.

However, I won’t physically rise, because I’m worried that Republicans will overturn the law of gravity, sending us floating about the room.

I won’t call for the sunlight of additional hearings, for fear that Republicans might excommunicate the finding that the Earth revolves around the sun.

Instead, I’ll embody Newton’s third law of motion and be an equal and opposing force against this attack on science and on laws that will reduce America’s importation of foreign oil.

This bill will live in the House while simultaneously being dead in the Senate. It will be a legislative Schrodinger’s cat killed by the quantum mechanics of the legislative process!

Arbitrary rejection of scientific fact will not cause us to rise from our seats today. But with this bill, pollution levels will rise. Oil imports will rise. Temperatures will rise.

And with that, I yield back the balance of my time. That is, unless a rejection of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is somewhere in the chair’s amendment pile.

Science: making Conservatives wrong since the 1500s.

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Movie Friday: Stewart Lee – Political Correctness

A friend put me on to a new standup comedian:

There is a general misunderstanding that pervades the society we live in, and it comes from a grating lack of historical awareness. I’ve made somewhat oblique reference to it before, but the problem arises when we look at conditions today and assume that they were ever thus. For example, the words “political correctness” have taken on an almost pejorative connotation, implying an over-sensitive “culture of victims” where every word you say must be scrutinized and agonized over. What this view necessarily neglects is the reasons why those practices came to be in the first place. Whatever your feelings on welfare are, for example, there was once a time when there was no state welfare and poverty was a death sentence. Abolishing welfare isn’t an answer to anything, and suggesting otherwise is being criminally ignorant of history.

Stewart Lee points this out in a very dry way:

“…if political correctness has achieved one thing, it’s to make the Conservative party cloak its inherent racism behind more creative language.”

Racism, in a de facto sense, is inherent in conservative ideology and cannot simply be whitewashed over. When we forget our history and the struggles that it took for us to get here (however your feelings might be of “here”), we expose ourselves to the possibility of looking at the world today and crying “injustice” over issues where the alternative is far worse.

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Movie Friday: Show me a God

There’s never been a conscientious believer who has gone through life completely free of doubt. There is an interesting passage in Mark 9 in which Jesus is asked to heal a child with epilepsy, and the father is told that all he has to do is believe hard enough, and his son will be cured (Jesus was an early Deepak Chopra, apparently). The distraught father says “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief!” and his son is immediately cured.

The story is complete bullshit, to be sure, but that line “I believe, help me overcome my unbelief” has been uttered, in various permutations, by the lips of the faithful for as long as people have been told to believe in ridiculous stories and impossible propositions with no evidence.

Tech N9ne turned it into a song:

There is an entire branch of theology called “theodicy” that is devoted to trying to square the circle of things in the world that are evil with the idea of a benevolent creator. Guys like Ken Ham, Ray Comfort and Hugh Ross make the claim that suffering is intentionally introduced into the universe to test mankind’s resolve to turn away from sin. If mankind is able to bear up under the crushing weight of temptation and overcome evil, then he is rewarded with eternal bliss in heaven (citation needed). Of course this is a facile explanation that falls apart under even casual scrutiny. Why would a loving god make such a test? Why not make it easier to be good? Why not create mankind with an inner drive to be good? Why punish those who are innocent of any misdeeds, while rewarding those who sin? Why bother testing us at all if it knows who will pass and who will fail a priori?

The other explanations are that YahwAlladdha is not good at all, but a petty heartless trickster who delights in human suffering, or that it is completely indifferent to the suffering of its creation.

Or, more parsimoniously, that it doesn’t exist at all and you’re wasting your time asking stupid questions.

While there are a lot of reasons to hold onto religion in the black community (community organization has traditionally centred on church groups, the belief in ultimate justice helps you ignore many of the day-to-day injustice you see around you), I am glad to see/hear influential voices within the hip-hop community begin to broach the taboo around criticizing religion. Maybe none are so poignant as this track from The Roots:

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P.S. Sorry about the embedding. VEVO is… I have mixed feelings.