Ok, kids, it's going to get a little messy in here. We are going to talk about religion. Specifically, we are going to talk about arguing about religion. People tend to get quite heated on the topic. Many religious people believe that anybody not like them are going to hell, and many nonreligious people believe the religious people to be blithering dunderheads. Of course, there are many levels in-between. Personally, I fall into the atheistic camp, but I like to adopt very much a live-and-let-live attitude. If someone chooses to believe in fantasy, that's their business and it's totally cool – however, it becomes problematic when one's religion serves to interfere in another person's life. This happens a lot, you see; the Christian Right likes to force their twisted morality on the world as much as they can, and I have friends who suffer because of it. It's wrong and it's despicable.
This is also the attitude taken by the late Christopher Hitchens, one of the pop atheists in the line of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. He wrote the provocatively-titled book “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” Shortly after its publishing, he and Presbyterian pastor Douglas Wilson participated in a series of debates on the topic, taking the show on the road. The action was captured by Darren Doane in the documentary Collision
, presented tonight, Thursday, by the Floyd Theater.
(Forgive my mini-review: Mr. Doane got his start directing music videos – as have many directors – but it really shows, as much of the film-work is shaky as hell, enough to be headache-inducing, and many of the transitions between debates are in actuality mini-music videos. Also: Doane is strongly Christian, which is fine, but in a documentary like this, objectivity on the part of the filmmaker is essential for presenting a truly fair and balanced set of debates. He does a fair job of this for the most part, but in a film in which the viewer should be allowed to draw their own conclusions, he chooses to end the film in a very deliberate manner which should rankle any thinking person.)
The Floyd Theater will be screening
Collision
tonight at 5:00. Admission is $1.50 for students and $3 for the general public. The Floyd Theater is located on the third floor of the Student Activities Center on the U of L campus. Complete information can be found at the Facebook event page.
Image: Facebook event page
