:smack: They don’t like hotlinking. Let’s try this again.
http://img222.echo.cx/img222/7551/0043lh.jpg
That movie comes in at number 5 on my list of the 50 most important Hollywood films. I would add that it credited the screenwriter as Nathan E. Douglas, but his real name was Nedrick Young. Young was on the Black List.
Like what?
–Cliffy
I forget he’s identified as an atheist, agnostic, Free Thinker, or something else, but I’ve always enjoyed Monty Woolley’s role in the The Bishop’s Wife, as a man who doesn’t believe but isn’t bitter, angry, or miserable because of it.
Okay, he does go to church at the very end of the movie, but that’s only after angel Cary Grant gives him a bottle of sherry that never goes empty…
I remember a MASH episode where Father Mulcahy said that Hawkeye was an agnostic and there was an episode of Moonlighting where Maddy (was that her name?) told the Bruce Willis character she didn’t believe in god.
Gosh, you’d think what with Hollywood being a cesspool of godless atheist liburals pushing their secret anti-American agenda down our children’s throats, we should have no trouble finding thousands of examples of positive portrayals of atheists in movies and TV! 
You would, wouldn’t you? Instead, we’re like the gays and transsexuals, who also run Hollywood and also never get an honest depiction.
::perplexed::
You know, this is odd.
(Note: Scott has had the sarcasm center of his brain removed.)
Whaa? How dare you, I-- you- he- AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!
::As he shouts, he picks up the computer and piledrives it, then kicks it over, then suplexes the machine, damaging it so that it stops working. He then stands up, breathing hard. His right eye twitches twice in succession::
HOMESTAR RUNNER: Thanks, man! I’d just about had it with that talking toaster.
Huh? Wha-? ::He comes back to normal:: Oh yeah, I suppose my past post were pretty angry, and long with no paragraph marks, and I may not convinced many people, but it seems like the logic holds up, judging from the fact that the majority of complaints I get are that I make blanket statements, and you shouldn’t do that, according to the ethics most people go by, but they were the in the form of a debate, for what it’s worth. Come to think about it, a bit less them half of my OPs have fallen flat. Oh well.
You know, all the criticism I get in threads are usually in the form of remarks from Aeschines, Bricker, Happy Scrappy Hero Pup and mswas, and such, all of whom I do not trust the judgment of. I suppose that when I match them point for point, my arguments against their points go too far towards those people being wrong, and strays from a solid philosophy of my own. Should anyone want to question me on why I am saying this or that, my door is always open.
Skeptics in general are set up as straw men in movies. Part of the problem is that there is a fantasy element to a lot of entertainment anymore, so simply by the premise skeptics have to be wrong. There are exceptions, of course. CSI is a show that I would describe as science-fantasy, but skepticism is lionized in that show. But generally, television and movies will blow an FX budget to assure that there’s no way that skepticism can be taken seriously (where, notice, in real life skeptics dismiss things that generally would be unconvincing in a movie too, such as rubbing crystals and chanting over candles). They have to heavily stack the deck in movies to make belief in the paranormal or alien visitation viable (where in real life it’s “He knew my husband’s name had a ‘G’ in it somewhere!” in the movies its “Come on, man, you just saw blue glowing bolts arc out of his eyes and set people on fire!”). Yes, of course in a fantasy film skeptics are wrong, and they can invent all the evidence they want. But somehow these expensive special effects are presented as a case against skepticism in general.
All this is well and good, but there are certain iconic characters which I can’t think of as anything other than atheists. James Bond, for instance. Or any of Clint’s “Men with No Name”. Can you imagine any of them having any sort of religious belief?
And of course, there’s Indiana Jones. I’d probably peg him as a “reluctant pantheist”.
There’s an old saying in showbiz for gay writers and producers: “If you want to make money, write it gay but cast it straight”. It’s probably the same thing for agnosticism- either make them nominal Christians/Jews or just don’t mention their religious convictions at all.
Their atheism is usually born of personal bitterness (which is rarely the case IRL) or based on straw-man philosophy (“if God existed he wouldn’t allow sickness”). I don’t have the book around, but from the movie quotes section Buck Williams, the lead character [who looks a lot like Kirk Cameron] is an agnostic who becomes Born Again when the Rapture happens while he’s on a flight [gotta admit that would probably do it for me as well, at least on the surface] and realizes that “Silly atheist, God was there all along…”:
Of course my favorite quote is this one:
That’s up there with Loretta Young’s line from The Crusades (1935): “You’ve just gotta save Christianity, Richard! You’ve gotta!”
Hmmm… Sean Connery/James Bond has just made love to a beautiful woman, found out she was an assassin, kills her before she could kill him, overcame dozens of henchmen, and set a bomb to destroy the flying fortress he had been in all this time, which he was taken aboard when he asleep. He parachutes down to safety, and immediately seeks out a church, where he says that prayer from the Petshop Boys song. ( mea maxima culpa, etc.)
That wouldn’t work in the least. In fact, the mental image of those words coming from Connery are making me laugh. In fact, they make me think of the SNL Celebrity Jeopardy skits with Darrell Hammond playing him.
My main point was that your posts are sometime hard to follow. So, instead of agreeing or disagreeing with your points, I just set them aside to ponder over at some future date. Which is why we have had scarcely any interaction on Dope even tho we post heavily in Cafe. FWIW, you seem relatively intelligent and have an interest skewed strongly towards the Arts (both mundane and profound), which I see as a good thing.
So, take this as a belated welcome to the Dope, from one massive posting junkie to another.
As for Bethany from Dogma, isn’t the point of her anxiety at the start that she still believes but has anger towards her beliefs? I wouldn’t class that as an atheist any more than I would the Mel Gibson Reverend of Signs. An atheist would require that there is no God, right? These characters are mad at God.
As for the accurate portrayal of atheists (or religionists, or gays, or scientists, or NAZIs, or Texans, or talking whales, etc…) by Hollywood… Since when has Hollywood been interested in accurate portrayals? (For the most part) Hollywood depicts a characterisation of whatever their flavour of the month is. Some things wil be spot on, most other aspects of the characters are unimportant for the particular story, so they are excluded, or they are exaggerated for the benefit of the storyline.
You gotta be joking…the man has seen the divine power of both the Ark of the Covenant AND the Holy Grail. If he ain’t a devout believer, he should have his head examined!
Reluctant, to the point of being pig-headedly stubborn. Constantly beset by immediate, tangible evidence of the supernatural, but never changes his world-view.
I seem to remember the father on the Waltons being either agnostic or atheist. At least, his wife always worried about him never going to church. But I’m pretty sure he professed at least once that he didn’t believe in god. And he was always portrayed as being a generally good, wise man. Interestingly, Ralph Waite, who played him, was some kind of minister IRL.
NoClueBoy, it’s not that my points are hard to follow, period, it’s that they are hard to understand with a quick scan, so you digest them later. Is that right? If so, I feel a lot better , since until recently, when a large number of complements on another thread began to show up, the only sense I got was that people read them, then forgot, judging from the posts that seemed to go to a point I already made. Thanks!
Oh, and about Professor Jones, well, he is a professor, and as such has read the parts of the bible which do a bad job cutting out references to other gods. Also, in the further adventures of Jones novels, he comes across mystical artifacts from non-christian belief systems.
Would Han Solo qualify as an atheist? At least a skeptic, I’d guess.
He was also witness to the awesome power of Shiva. Thus, a pantheist.
> TWEEEEEEEET !!! <
::: Moderator bloweth his Whistle for attention :::
OK, lissen up, Scott_Plaid and NoClueBoy – Cut it out. NOW. Personal insults are not permitted in Cafe Society.
NoClueBoy, consider youself hit in the face with a custard pie for a gratuitous insult.
Scott_Plaid, when someone insults you (outside the Pit), your proper recourse is to REPORT BAD POST (the little exclamation point in the upper right corner of each post) to the Moderators. You do NOT respond in kind. You do NOT offer gratuitous insults to a batch of other posters.
When the Moderator is called to the thread and finds two people both poking at each other, the Moderator is obliged to chew them both out. If you hit REPORT BAD POST and do NOT respond in kind, then the Moderator only has to chew out the jackass who started it. So, a kindly admonition to everyone: do NOT respond in kind. Do NOT stoop to the level of the name-caller. Summon a Moderator. Then, the name-caller gets whomped across the knuckles with a ruler, while you sit there smugly, smiling with that warm feeling of self-righteousness because you’ve had the last laugh.
We all clear? No personal insults in this forum.