MrTweej's video: God s Not Dead: Atheist Rebuttal Review

-From the trailer to the new movie God's Not Dead, I expected a dramatization of the current philosophical arguments for the existence of a deity. Instead what I got was a movie for Christians who want to spend an hour and a half in the world they wish they lived in, a reenforcement of the clinically diagnosible persecution fetish that some modern Christians seem to suffer from, a slander of higher education, and shameless propaganda meant to demonize atheists as amoral, selfish bullies, and emotional basket-cases who only pretend to disbelieve in the Christian god. -To say I, as an atheist, was disappointed is an understatement. However, the caricature portrayal of atheists I suppose isn't entirely undeserved. In fact, given the rampant ridicule we atheists sometimes engage in, you might say we had it coming. But for a movie that tries to claim for itself the moral high ground, if this wasn't foolish of the film makers, it certainly was ill-advised. -Possibly the most offensive thing about this movie is the anti-intellectual message that college professors and education in general are explicitly trying to corrupt impressionable young minds. This narrative sadly isn't just limited to this movie and seems to be part of a larger movement in Christianity which is leading to a dramatic rise in home-schooling and other forms of destructive intellectual isolationism: -Reading reviews of this movie, I keep coming across the words ham-handed and hamfisted, even from Christian reviewers. It seems they too were expecting a better justification for religious belief than what this movie offers. This film doesn't understand the philosophical arguments, let alone engage them, starting with the title... -God is dead, a phrase popularized by Friedrich Nietzsche doesn't mean that the christian god Yahweh was alive but has died, nor does it mean that he never existed (as Kevin Sorbo's philosophy professor character states). Nietzsche was simply saying that god wasn't a consideration for how most people live their lives. You'd think a philosophy professor would know that but, apparently the straw-man professor in this movie hasn't even read Philosophy for Dummies. -Atheist Professor Radisson doesn't have philosophical justification for what he believes, which you'd think would stack the deck in favor of Christians in this movie. Instead, it does the opposite. By misrepresenting the atheist position, the film-makers are telegraphing their insecurity about the arguments. The entire atheist position is reduced to a quote from Stephen Hawking, a distortion of one Richard Dawkins argument, and the problem of evil, and even these arguments are only discussed as a cartoonishly over-the-top grotesque parody.