More fun

"The Atheist Delusion" and "Atheist Delusion 2".

It seems that more and more creative people are realizing that religion contains vast unexplored areas that are ripe for comedic exploitation. Television and movies, constrained by controversy-filtering gatekeepers, have been unable to express bluntly the obvious truth about religious claims. In the U.S., Christianity especially has enjoyed a special exemption from truly cutting satire. The "comedy" in Oh God*, for example, always reinforces the essential goodness and necessity of God-belief as it gently tweaks certain expressions of it.

But, to make a quite unoriginal observation, as the traditional gatekeepers become less relevant to our cultural conversation, we're seeing the gloves really come off. In the past, the most likely place I can imagine seeing a piece of comedy like "The Atheist Delusion" would be "Saturday Night Live" -- and I really can't imagine it being aired by NBC, even now. The comedy is just too uncompromising in its premise. It assumes the audience is too smart to believe stupid things.

But the changing rules of our conversation about institutional superstition can't help but bleed into the mainstream media. The robotic gatekeepers always look for the "middle," and we're moving the middle. Yay us.

*I remember when I was a deeply believing Christian child, my parents took the family to see Oh God, starring George Burns as the wisecracking Almighty. I was shocked by how sacrilegious the movie was, and even more shocked that the rest of my family wasn't similarly scandalized. That should have been a clue as to how seriously those close to me actually took Christianity versus how seriously they claimed to take it, but for some reason I didn't get the hint.