Tag: religion

Atheism vs Religion: Take 253: Matthew Chapman's The Ledge

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by S. Brent Plate

Before you’ve even heard of this film, Bill Donohue has, once again, given it a ratings boost by rebuffing it on the Catholic League website. In between press releases on “Bishop Blasted over Gay Marriage” and “New York Times is Gay Crazy,” is a little piece blasting Matthew Chapman’s film The Ledge:

People of faith, especially Catholics, are used to being trashed by Hollywood, but they are not accustomed to films that promote atheism. Yes, there was “The Golden Compass,” an atheism-for-kids effort which the Catholic League successfully boycotted (in fairness, it was the book upon which the movie was based that triggered our response, not the screen adaptation). “The Ledge” is different in that its backers are selling themselves as the real pioneers: they expect it to be a ground-breaker.

The allegorical Golden Compass (2007) was derided by the Catholic League and many evangelicals who claimed it to be a pro-atheist stealth campaign. This was just two years after the allegorical Chronicles of Narnia, which upset some secular-minded people for being too heavy-handed in the Christian sub themes. Before that was Gibson’s Passion, then Scorsese’s Last Temptation, and the see-sawing controversy continues. I doubt The Ledge will make as big a splash, not because it doesn’t raise important issues, but because it lacks the big budget funding that really stirs controversy. Continue Reading →

Atheism vs Religion: Take 253: Matthew Chapman’s The Ledge

Posted on by

by S. Brent Plate

Before you’ve even heard of this film, Bill Donohue has, once again, given it a ratings boost by rebuffing it on the Catholic League website. In between press releases on “Bishop Blasted over Gay Marriage” and “New York Times is Gay Crazy,” is a little piece blasting Matthew Chapman’s film The Ledge:

People of faith, especially Catholics, are used to being trashed by Hollywood, but they are not accustomed to films that promote atheism. Yes, there was “The Golden Compass,” an atheism-for-kids effort which the Catholic League successfully boycotted (in fairness, it was the book upon which the movie was based that triggered our response, not the screen adaptation). “The Ledge” is different in that its backers are selling themselves as the real pioneers: they expect it to be a ground-breaker.

The allegorical Golden Compass (2007) was derided by the Catholic League and many evangelicals who claimed it to be a pro-atheist stealth campaign. This was just two years after the allegorical Chronicles of Narnia, which upset some secular-minded people for being too heavy-handed in the Christian sub themes. Before that was Gibson’s Passion, then Scorsese’s Last Temptation, and the see-sawing controversy continues. I doubt The Ledge will make as big a splash, not because it doesn’t raise important issues, but because it lacks the big budget funding that really stirs controversy. Continue Reading →

We Were Born This Way

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Is it really any surprise that religion’s not going away?  It can’t because we’re born with it.  So says the three-year, million dollar international research project just released from Oxford University.  Nature or nurture?  Decidedly the former.  The project’s co-director, Roger Trigg, told the Daily Mail:

‘Attempts to suppress religion are likely to be short-lived as human thought seems to be rooted to religious concepts, such as the existence of supernatural agents or gods, and the possibility of an afterlife or pre-life.

‘There is quite a drive to think that religion is private. It isn’t just a quirky interest of a few, it’s basic human nature.

‘This shows that it’s much more universal, prevalent, and deep-rooted. It’s got to be reckoned with. You can’t just pretend it isn’t there.’

For more on the study, read here and here. Continue Reading →

Science, Increasingly a Matter of Belief

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Tom Junod, in the latest issue of Esquire writes (link below):

We are not going to live forever. We are not going to have our life spans scientifically amplified to biblical lengths. We will not be able to take pills that will give us the musculature of superheroes or allow us to gorge ourselves while enjoying the health benefits of starvation. We will reach our limits, and, with some hard-won variation, those limits will be — they will feel like — the same limits we humans have always had. We will remain human where it counts, in our helpless and inspiring relation to our own mortality.

Does this sound obvious? It shouldn’t. Indeed, what I should have said from the start is that I believe that we are all going to die, in that science increasingly believes otherwise — and science increasingly has become a matter of belief. Its logic, once pointed at the eradication of disease and infection, is now inexorably pointed at aging and death, which is to say the ultimate questions that were once left to religion. Over the past six years, I’ve written several science stories for Esquire’s annual Best and Brightest issue, and most of them were about scientists who began contending with a particular disease but wound up contending with aging and death as disease — as something that can be cured.

(h/t Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic) Continue Reading →

What is the Public Square?

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No longer the patch of pounded earth in the middle of town, is the public square the shrinking footprint of legacy media? Is it the more than 200 million blogs that exist in cyberspace? Is it the school board meeting? Or the assembly at our local high school? Margaret Somerville, director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, doesn’t define the public square and yet argues that it is the primary contested space in the debate over separation of church and state. As Somerville rightly notes, varieties of faith (those unsavory to her — the “secular faiths” like environmentalism and scientism — she calls “isms”) are myriad and unrestrained (unrestrainable?), coloring all aspects of our lives whether we acknowledge them or not. So why so much concern that the isms are eradicating faith from the public square when she notes that all our messy voices are necessary for democracy to work? They’re not the right kinds of faith, apparently. Our laws are best informed by the non-isms, she argues. Which sounds a lot like an argument for privileging some faiths over others, in the public square, our courts, and elsewhere. Continue Reading →

Different Levels of Credibility Between Religions?

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Hunter Baker blogs at First Things that he is not entirely happy with the way his email interview with Sarah Harland-Logan of Harvard Political Review was excerpted in the final article, “Is Godless Good?” Baker is author of the 2009 book The End of Secularism (“The provocative assertion of the book is that secularism is of little value as a public philosophy and should be discarded as a failed experiment.”) and a professor at Houston Baptist University. So he’s decided to publish the entire interview himself. Continue Reading →