I’m pretty much in agreement with what Staks has already written on the overall utility of yesterday’s documentary report from CNN. Any time atheists are personally humanized and treated somewhat fairly in the mainstream media, it’s a win for us. That said, I have just a handful of nits to pick.
- If you ask a bold question like IS THERE A GOD? then you have to take at least a halfhearted stab at answering the topic question. This documentary barely alluded to the arguments for and against the existence of God, even when speaking with people who surely had an opinion, with the possible exception of a couple sentences from the obscured and closeted atheist preacher called Stan. I watched all the way through, eagerly hoping that they would really get around digging in to this question, and now I wonder if the lower third banner was basically an editing mistake.
- The narrator says that young David Gormley “has chosen a life without God,” and thereby propagates the popular but mistaken notion that we have direct volitional control over the content of our beliefs. If you believe that it is possible to control our beliefs in this way, I challenge you to choose to believe that Thor is the One True God. For extra credit, do this only on Thursdays.
- David Silverman’s casual dismissal of humanists, freethinkers, skeptics was irresponsible and inaccurate. People who self-identify using those labels are telling us something about their ethical, epistemic, or scientific methods and priorities, they are not lying to avoid the dreaded A-word. This one isn’t actually a nit, since David has shown elsewhere that he understands what these various words mean and how they serve to differentiate between disparate concerns. Interestingly, Greg Epstein gives a far better answer to substantially the same question sometime later in the show: “It’s all one community.” This is true enough.
- “…Father of Atheism, Richard Dawkins.” We unbelievers don’t have a priesthood or a founder, unless you count Diagoras of Melos. There is no reasonable sense in which the phrase used here maps on to reality.
- The near total lack of diversity. Atheists come in all shapes and colors and former faiths. There is more diversity at a typical atheist meetup here in Oklahoma than I saw in this film.
- The goddamn hackneyed news template. Basically every atheist news piece I’ve seen starts with an uncritical homage to the place of religion in American culture. Here is an example from a local news station. Here is another example from another local news station. Notice the similarities? Notice how the CNN documentary did the exact same thing? How many stock clips of church iconography and stained glass does the world really need?
Ok, enough grousing. My sincere thanks to Jerry DeWitt and David Gormley for coming out bravely as unbelievers and making us look like kind and decent people to boot. Onward and upward, as they say.
