"The God Who Wasn't There"

It's been an interesting week for The God Who Wasn't There. Conventional wisdom would have it that interest in going to theatrical screenings of the movie would wane with the availability of the movie on DVD (direct on our site since June 6, and, as of Aug. 23, wider availability through our new distributor Microcinema).

But in the past few days, I've seen some of the biggest crowds since the San Francisco premiere. When I showed up half an hour early for the Sunday screening at the Center for Inquiry West in Hollywood, I was greeted by the surprising sight of a line going down the sidewalk--and the theater was already almost entirely full. CFI West executive director Jim Underdown, the CFI volunteers and I hastily rearranged the Steve Allen Theater risers and brought in new seats. We were still SRO and added a second, unscheduled screening. Then it was down to Costa Mesa for the other CFI screening, and the same thing happened. First time I ever did 4 Q&As in the same day.

Tuesday at the Christianity in Question event in Louisville, it was a fairly full house (and another added screening, but this one because one of the local papers had listed the screening as starting at the wrong time). The audience was a bit different, though--a mix of conservative Christians, liberal Christians and freethinkers. The panel discussion was set up by the press as a potential brawl, but it was really quite civil. The panel included Dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Russell Moore, Highland Baptist Church's Rev. Joseph Phelps and University of Louisville historian Karen Spierling.

The highlight of the evening for me was Moore's unequivocal declaration, "I believe that a corpse rose from the grave and walked around." That's a rough quote (I'll post the audio soon), but he did use and emphasize the word "corpse," which I thought was both very honest and wonderfully damaging to the credibility of literalist Christianity.

The biggest division on the panel was not between Moore and me, however. I think that fundies believe crazy things, but I acknowledge that once you step into their fantasy world where a hateful, disturbed god wrote a book called the Holy Bible, the hateful, disturbed conclusions of Christian fundamentalists do make some kind of internal sense.

Liberal Christianity, despite being non-hateful and on many issues even ethical, is hopelessly incoherent, however. Liberal Christianity says a perfect God wrote a perfect book--but he made mistakes. Or, alternately, liberal Christianity says the book is an extremely flawed and even disgusting work written by men--but special attention should still be paid to it. Liberal Christianity says religion shouldn't stand in the way of science--but a dead man did really rise from the dead. Probably. Or, at least, it's not unreasonable to believe that he did (or that he turned water into wine and walked on water). Liberal Christianity says the love of Jesus is the only way to Heaven--but if some people don't believe that, it's fine to let their deluded souls go off to Hell without even trying to stop them. Or maybe Heaven and Hell don't exist at all--but it's still very, very important to praise this figure called "God." For some reason.

Liberal Christianity wants to drink the Kool-Aid but pretend there's no cyanide in it. And nothing pisses off liberal Christians more than having the incoherence of their beliefs laid bare.

Rev. Joseph Phelps, a liberal Christian (who does, by the way, believe Jesus actually rose from the dead and is capable of saying so in as casual a manner as this parenthetical), dealt with my critique of his brand of Christianity in the easiest--and most empty--manner: by accusing me of being a "fundamentalist" atheist. I'm getting so tired of this line that I usually just ignore it, hoping the audience will simply see through it. But sometime I suppose I'll have to come up with a pithy way of explaining that a person who believes that 1 plus 1 equals 2 is not embracing "fundamentalist" math. He's simply rejected 1 + 1 = 3 as flawed.