Wednesday 20 June 2007

i’m reading shorthand,
and this is the irony,
it takes a long time.

Anyway, to get back to the concept of Rationalism:
I have just started reading Richard Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’, a lucid and very enjoyable book which sets out Dawkins’ own Rationalist manifesto, if that’s what you’d like to call it. Like myself, Dawkins is an atheist, and this book sets out his own views on God, Religion, and the sad consequences of our living in societies where major decisions are made on the basis of supernatural belief.
Unfortunately, I fear this book will never be read by those who really need to read it, i.e. those people who are trapped in a religious culture and have not been educated to see that there are alternatives to their beliefs.
At the cinema yesterday there was a trailer for a film called ‘Evan Almighty’, a sequel to ‘Bruce Almighty’ in which God (played by a suitably white-robed Morgan Freeman) devolved divine powers to Jim Carey (who was presumably surprised to discover that he hadn’t got them already).
In the sequel, God appears to Evan (Evan! Heaven... Geddit? I'm crying with laughter here, honestly), and tells him that he is to be the second Noah, and must build an ark.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I am sure that this film is likely to offend just about anyone. The Christians will no doubt be offended by the fact that it is pure blasphemy, White Supremacists will be offended (again) by the idea of a Black God, Atheists like myself will be offended simply by the reinforcement to naïve American minds of the concept of Noah’s Ark being presented as historical truth. The rest will simply be offended by the fact that their intelligence is being insulted, since the film looks, well, a load of pants.