dwasifar's daily gripe

The other day I went to see the Ricky Gervais film The Invention of Lying. The trailers released in the US don’t fully tell you what the film is about; they treat it as a romantic comedy set in a world where no one knows how to lie, until one man accidentally discovers it.  Fortunately, our good friend Hugo Grinebiter, checking in from the other side of the Atlantic, alerted me to its other theme: the man who learns to lie soon invents religion.  Naturally I had to see it.

The film itself is amusing, and I recommend it, but I’m not really here to talk about that.  What interests me more is the public reaction to the film.

I went to Yahoo! Movies and looked at the film’s grades.  Yahoo provides two cumulative A through F grades – one for professional critic reviews, and one for user reviews.  Most of the time, users tend to rate films higher than critics in the Yahoo Movies venue, but for this film, whereas the critics were generally positive and gave the film an average B rating, the users averaged a C+.  I was pretty sure I knew why that was, and when I started reading the user reviews I saw my guess confirmed.  There were very few middling ratings from users.  People either gave it generally positive marks, or strongly negative ones, and the negative ones pulled the grade average down.  By this point you have probably already guessed that the strong negative responses, rating the film F, were all from offended christians.

There were two main themes expressed in the negative reviews.  One was that the reviewer felt misled by the previews – “false advertising” was a common phrase – because the previews never mentioned the film’s implicit criticism of religion.  And I can kind of understand that, although previews are sales tools and are seldom honest about showing things that would turn away audiences.  You don’t often hear this kind of complaint even though most previews cherry pick entertaining scenes even when the movie is a dud.  But I can see the point, even if it is being applied selectively.  But the other main theme was that the film should never have been made because criticism of religion is self-evidently offensive.

Putting aside for a moment the obvious hilarity of seeing the filmmaker being called a sacrilegious atheist, over and over, by people who cannot even spell “sacrilege” or “atheist,” I am struck once again by the breathtaking hypocrisy of these christian critics who do not even realize they are being hypocritical.  More than one comment contained the suggestion that atheists should not be allowed to infect films with their views because they have other ways of speaking their minds.

It would be interesting to see how many films would not get made if the christian mythos were similarly barred from arts and entertainment.  This amiable and low-key little movie, because it engages in mockery of religion, gets religious people into high dudgeon only because their religious viewpoint completely pervades the culture, including movies and TV – everything from “It’s A Wonderful Life” to “The Exorcist.”  The religious have “Touched By An Angel” and “Fireproof” and “City of Angels” and “Bruce (or Evan) Almighty” and “Expelled” and “The Passion of the Christ” and “The Ten Commandments” and “King of Kings” and the various versions of “A Christmas Carol” and all the other films and television that take the christian mythos, especially the parts about the afterlife and the spirit world, as given.  I can’t count how many times I’ve seen christians express the sentiment that atheists should just suck it up and not get offended at having religion rubbed in their faces everywhere they go – but let this one modest film with its lightweight satire of religion get into theaters, and religionists are screaming bloody murder about how its very existence oppresses and victimizes them.  Well, boo-frickity-hoo.  This is just a tiny sample of how they make atheists feel all the time.  Time for them to suck it up and take it.  Their hypocrisy is matched only by the irony of how unaware of it they are.

It appalls me, here in the 21st century, that we still have to deal with vast numbers of dopes who think calling something or someone “atheist” is prima facie evidence that it’s bad and should self-evidently not be tolerated.  Our message for them should be the same condescending message they keep sending us: if you find it offensive, tough titties for you; no one’s making you believe it, but we pity your ignorance just the same.