Required viewing
Last weekend, I wrote up a 2000+ word post on being an atheist and why I reject religion and anything else supernatural. After reading it through a few times, I decided to throw it away. I did this because I came to the conclusion that there are other people far better at arguing against religion than myself. So, instead of my big old rant on religion, I thought I would post links to a few documentaries and other movie clips on the subject, all created by or involving the British evolutionary biologist and science writer, Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is the author of the book The God Delusion and has been called the worlds most famous atheist.
The Root of All Evil?
A television documentary, written and presented by Richard Dawkins, in which he argues that the world would be better off without religion. It should be mentioned that the title of the documentary was set by Channel 4 to create controversy. Dawkins didn’t like it because the notion of anything being the root of all evil is ridiculous.
Watch on Google video: Part 1 – Part 2
The Enemies of Reason
Another television documentary written and presented by Richard Dawkins. Again, he tackles superstition and dogma, but this time with more focus on the paranormal. He also looks at how health has become a battleground between reason and superstition.
Watch on Google video: Part 1 – Part 2
An atheist’s call to arms
Richard Dawkins’ talk at TED 2002. Dawkins urges all atheists to openly state their position – and to fight the incursion of the church into politics and science.
Watch on ted.com – Watch on YouTube
5 comments
I’ve also been planning to write some sort of essay about my atheism, because I always have to explain it in detail to so many people befor they understand what it means. Many people around where I live are atheists too, but don’t realize it. Many times they call themselves Lutheran (i.e. the fork of Christianity that most people are supposed to follow here in Finland), but when I ask if they believe a god exists, they reply “I’m not sure” or “there might be some higher power” or something along those lines.
Or maybe Lutherans just suck at being Christians. :P
Yeah, it’s the same situation here. Although, I have read that Sweden apparently is the least religious country in the world (yay!).
By the way, I just watched a documentary from 2006 called Jesus Camp and it was deeply disturbing. It’s about the evangelical christian far-right brainwashing their kids into becoming some kind of christian Hitler jugend. At the risk of becoming an atheism crusader, I think I need to blog about it.
I’ve seen Jesus camp. Interesting, to say the least. Pop documentary at its best.
I just came across a song by Everclear addressing religion AND the upcoming election in the US at the same time. You got to love the title: Jesus was a democrat.
And you may or may not have seen this, but I tried to sum up my feelings regarding religion at large in this photo. I think I managed alright.
The thing I liked about Jesus Camp was that it wasn’t particularly biased. There wasn’t any tricky editing or comments taken out of context (a la Michael Moore). The crazy woman in the film actually believed what she was doing was good. Turns out, the camp has since been shut down due to public outcry and threats and vandalism against the camp.
Additionally, Ted Haggard, the pastor of the “New Life Church” resigned after it was made public that he had purchased sexual services as well as methamphetamine from male prostitute Mike Jones. Oh the hypocrisy!
Edit: Very nice photo by the way, Linus.