A new movie trailer for a Christian movie has hit the YouTube. The movie is called, “God’s Not Dead,” and it stars Kevin Sorbo. As an aside, I am a Sorbo fan. He was after all the star of Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda which had one and a half awesome seasons before turning to utter crap. Earlier this year, Sorbo was at the Philadelphia Wizard World convention. Noticing his line was completely empty, I thought about going over to talk to him. Had I known about this film in June, I absolutely would have.
In any case, Sorbo plays the evil atheist in the new Christian film and regardless of all the obviously ridiculous atheist stereotypes lumped into this atheist character, the film does have one thing going for it. Let’s face facts here, the song is kinda catchy.
So I guess this was on my mind while at the PA State Atheist/Humanist Conference this weekend. On Saturday night, after Shelley Segal performed on stage, I was hanging out with her at the bar (not a big deal), and I told her about this crazy idea. Maybe atheists should make more films with catchy music.
There are a few new atheist films coming out like “Hug An Atheist” and “The Unbelievers,” but both are documentaries. Atheists are good at non-fiction and Christians seem to be masters of fiction, but just because our values are routed in reality doesn’t mean that we can’t make some compelling fictional narratives too.
Second, there is a very small pool of atheist musicians in general. Don’t get me wrong, there are many musicians who are atheists, but few who are active members in our community. We need to do better. We need atheist garage bands to start spitting out rock songs. We need dance mixes about Hitchens, Sagan, and deGresse Tyson. We need songs that pump people up and excite them about critical thinking and reality.
Then there is comedy. We are actually pretty good in the comedy department. Still, it doesn’t hurt to promote atheist comedians more. In Philly, every few months we have “Get Real: Comedy You Can Believe In.” They showcase local skeptical and atheist comedians. Their next show is Thursday, September 18th at 8pm.
Granted that the atheist community is still pretty new and we are still trying to find our voice and organize; we need to start stepping it up and really get the attention of the younger generation. Obviously we are winning that fight even with limited atheist centered music, movies, novels, etc., but I think we can do better. I think we can really put our humanist values forward in a big way.
We need to focus more on the fun of atheism. We have some great messages and stories to tell. There is no Hell, people can live their lives with dignity, science is full of wonder, and we can do whatever we want on Sundays. We just have to get these messages out there more than we have.
Atheists are amazingly talented. Being able to break away from dogma has done wonders for our creativity. Now we just need to turn our creative ideas into reality. I think we should be pretty good at that too.
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