God's Not Dead

Because death is something that happens to things that lived.  If God or god never existed, they cannot die.

So, spoiler alert; I'm going to get pretty specific about this movie which popped up on Netflix as a suggestion for me.  I highly recommend you go watch it for yourself first.

And away we go.

Interestingly, (read: NOT AT ALL SURPRISINGLY) the athiests are portrayed as acerbic, damaged, cynical, dolts.  At one point, the Mormon Missionary type character asked his athiest professor "What happened to you?" and the professor answered with a story about his mother.  In typical Christian fashion, someone writing the script believed that those who question God's existence, do so because God "failed" them somehow.

Do you know that the real answer is?  "What happened to you?"  "I started to ask questions."  I sought knowledge and wisdom.  I began to look at other cultures and understand other beliefs and using my brain I realized it just doesn't add up.

The reality of religion is that as long as you don't question it beyond finding answer to specific religious questions, then it works.  If you believe God helped you find that glove or create cochlear imlpants, you will believe it.  If you look at the pair of gloves and say "Is it possible I just found these?" and look at science and say "Is it possible that humans with more knowledge on this subject than me and with more intelligence than I can understand came up with an idea to make this and it worked?" then you will start to see that the answers to your questions make more sense than God is watching a war occur in the Middle East whilst helping you find a pair of gloves.

It's all in how you frame it.  Both religious folk and athiests will answer questions with words meant to support their own theory.  It's just that religious folk always quote God whilst atheists have to find deeper answers that require more thought, intelligence, and reasoning.

Scriptures
While the Bible and other works of God related fiction are simply meant to be supporting statements to attest the fact that there is a god, they cannot really be separated from the idea of God because it is meant to be true stories of God's influence on humanity.

The movie begins with an argument that God must have created the world because you cannot "disprove", but that's a MacGuffin because there are arguments for the world being created by science just as efficient as arguments that it came from God.  The exact point he makes is that science believes it happened this way so if you interpret Genesis differently than every generation for thousands of years interpreted it, then it says science is explaining it the way the Bible does?  No, that's pretty circular by any standard.  You reinterpret the bible to fit science to fit the bible?

His idea of disproving because you cannot prove is equally weak.  If you cannot prove science wrong without proving it right, then you cannot disprove God's existence without proving it at the same time.  The arguments on both sides are there.  The ones proving/disproving God just happen to lack the evidence used in science and technology.  There may be a lot of evidence to support science OR religion.  Neither proves or disproves the existence of God in an of itself.

Do you know how many creation stories there are?  Genesis is a creation story.  Nothing more.  Do you know how many cultures have stories of a "cleansing" flood with only 2 or a few survivors to carry on the legacy of humanity?  In other cultures, it is clearly a parable to understand "cleansing" our souls.  Or perhaps wishing to cleanse the world of hurt, war, misunderstanding, and those who don't believe the same things we do.  Noah wasn't the first of these stories.

Fiction.  The whole thing.  So, you can't quote Matthew 3:14 to me in order to make me believe.  I can whip out some fiction to quote proving you wrong just as quickly.

Perhaps Hawkings ideas are the creation story of this new religion "science".

Near the end, we had an adorable, sweet, innocent little Backstreet Boys meets Christianity band.  Their words of wisdom were portrayed as some final point to prove this whole thing isn't a huge conspiracy to believe in God, but their point was LAME.

They said God has been there from the beginning.  No, scripture says God has been there forever.

Which discounts every other culture that does not believe in God from the beginning of time.  Before God there were other beliefs!  It's so arrogant to believe that God was there when other cultures believed something different.  It basically says you are right and they were all wrong.  It is equally arrogant today to believe that your religion is right and all others are wrong.  Many religions teach that every other culture in this world is unimportant in comparison to you because your religion is right?  It fits in your brain?  That seems acceptable to you?

Prayer
The reason people who believe in God need God is so that they have a "being" to pray to.  They need someone to pray to in order to feel they have some power, some control over what happens.  God is great when he answers a prayer.  He knows what's better for us when a prayer is not answered.

When you begin to look at the world without the prayer glasses, you don't see an almight power who knows what we need and what's better for us.  You see reality.  Things happen because the picture is much bigger than our tiny human brains can understand.  Good jobs come because we worked hard, made the right impression, and got lucky in comparison to someone else with equal qualifications and connections.  We found the gloves because this time we noticed they were there or we thought of the one place we hadn't looked.  Our brains are not perfect computers.  We miss things sometimes and notice them at others because of how the brain processes information; not because of hiding something and then putting it back.

We cry when something touches us because of the parts of the brain that are stimulated, not because "the spirit moved" us.

When good things happen, it's because it happened.  When bad things happen, it's because it happened.  Whether you think that it was because of God or not, it happened and you cannot change it.  Prayer is not control.  It is empty words in empty space.

Agnostic
Religious people have every right to believe in what they believe in.  Those who believe in God, but do not subscribe to a religion have the right to believe in what they believe in.  Those who do not believe in God have the right to believe in coincidence, luck, hard work, and whatever else they believe.

In the movie, he mentions Agnostic as "having doubt".  Well, Gnosis means "knowledge" and enlightment.  For a long time I called myself Agnostic.  In my definition it meant I had doubts therefore I sought knowledge; whether that knowledge fall into the category of science or some greater thing known as God or "The Universe".

Athiests are not...
Athiests are not angry, selfish people.  This is the stereotype I would like to see diminished.  Religious people have anger.  Religious people are sometimes selfish.  Atheists are no different.

I'm not going to own the word atheist here, but my family goes out every Sunday to help For the Love of Paws and when telling others about it, we have -more than once- been met with the response "That's very Christian of you."

What?  No.  It's human of us.  We don't do it for rewards in heaven.  We do it because our fellow man and animals in this world, right now, right in front of you, require companionship, compassion, and assistance.  In a way, is it not worth more because we do not do it for reward?  Let's leave God out of that one.  Compassion is a trait some people possess and others do not.  It is far from Christian exclusive.

Granted, the kid had a point in the movie.  He accused the professor of being anti-theist.  It wasn't enough to hate God, he wanted everyone to hate God.  This again falls into the stereotype that athiests hate God and want everyone else to hate God as well.  In reality, it's just a lack of believing in a higher power or creator.

They created this entire propoganda film and then blamed the athiest character in it for spinning propoganda!  As far as I'm concerned, that moment was to deflect from the fact that this is a propoganda film!

And who is your spokesperson?
Yeah, the guy from Duck Dynasty.  Yeah.  He's the guy you should go to in order to support the legitimacy of your religious, God arguments.  Honestly, this should be my ENTIRE POINT.  You want me to take you seriously?

Let's discuss the spin those Duck Dynasty guys have put upon the world...

So many times, we argue a point based on what we think the other side believes.  This movie "proves" God by creating this cartoon athiest to be the bad guy.  Athiests are not like that, they do not believe those things.

I'm not automatically discounting the arguments to prove/disprove God's existence.  I'm looking at the bigger picture.  The arguments made by Mormon Missionary (type) were only valid to teach other Christians how to believe in Christianity.

It changes nothing about the reality, intelligence, or science to back up the real claims in this world.