God and smiting

It finally took pinching myself and a bit of a self-arm-twisting, but I finally visited my local DVD store and picked up a copy of the Steve Corall's latest DVD release, Evan Almighty. This film is obviously a sequel to those who know about the first film, Bruce Almighty starring Jim Carrey (whom also plays a character role in the film Dumb & Dumber, just to give people notice).

Okay, so if you're not familiar with the first film it goes something like this: God (played by Morgan Freeman) finally answers "Bruce" and his prayers for a better life. To make a long story short, God gives Bruce his powers to see what it might be like having unlimited domain in the universe for a temporary amount of time until Bruce comes to the "moral" of the story that human beings can't do God's job as well as God can. Yeah, I know, it's pretty stupid stuff and I know just exactly what you might be thinking at this point: Well, why the hell not? After all, doesn't it say in the Bible that God made man a "perfect" creation? Is God so smug that he puts us to a limitation scale and boasts of his universally sovereign power? If that's the case, God is a real smug cornhole, and that's that.

Alright, so the second film focuses more on a character from the first film known as Evan Backster whom becomes the main character of the second film running into contact with God, blah, blah, blah. In the movie, Evan is elected Congressman and hopes that his campaign will "change the world." Then, God comes into the scene to tell Evan to build an ark. Yep, this takes after the mythical story of Noah's Ark as found within Genesis (if you take a look at some of the "Special Features" on the DVD rom you'll hear an interesting bit where the director wanted the ark used in the film to match "historical records" which tells you allot about who is behind the production of this film and how they are planning to continually push Creationist propaganda into the media and elsewhere just for a little profit for their Jesus-camps and pedophile priests). And this is where it gets interesting. Now, maybe the director didn't take a good enough look at the book of Genesis when he sought out writing the script to this movie, but according to the Bible it says that God promised Noah via a rainbow that he would never send such a destructive flood to mankind ever again:

Genesis 9:14-15

14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.

Despite what the Bible says however, and being that the film's director is most likely a fundamentalist Christian, the producers of the film wanted to have God create a second global flood. What makes this even worse is that God describes the Noah myth as "a story of love" not of His wrath upon the sinful. That's how it goes throughout the rest of the movie: God is showing "love" by destroying the Earth with a great quantity of water. If you're a Christian and this somehow doesn't register well with you, perhaps you should be reading more of your Bible.

That's right folks. The Bible contains all of the same wishy washy garbage as does the movie itself. Somehow, God demonstrated his "love" to Abraham when he commands him to kill his own son and then to have that backfire as a sort of brutal strip tease (I know how those are, and believe me, they ain't pretty), and most importantly for Christianity, God shows "love" by sending himself in human form only to be nailed to a cross just to please his own deviance. Talk about a ridiculous fairy tale. Sheesh.

As an atheist I willingly choose to reject such doctrines. But, more importatingly aside from my own personal affairs, you have to wonder why there are such things as "Christian apologists". These type of people know what the Bible says inside and out, letter for letter, word for word, page by page. Yet, they continue to defend the notions that love comes about through torture, genocide, and crucifixion. If the Christian God does exist, he is the type of being that psychopathic freaks like Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka Kansas and Michael Jackson talk about when they use the word "God."

And besides all of the nasty theological implications in the film, the directing and scripting is just godawful. For one, the director picks a black man to portray the role of God? The director of course did this in the first film, but I mean, for sheesh's sake. A black man? Isn't God supposed to be the god of the Jews? How many Jews do you know that are black? Seriously....

My second issue with the moviescripting is the flood scene: There was no "global flood". In fact, the only flood in that film was one that destroyed the city dam and the city's urban areas. Then the water just literally dried up. What a waste of money! They didn't even have the nerve to create a global flood effect! Those cheapskakes, sheesh!

What I set out to do in this article was to explore pre-Christian theology. Christians are always hung up on the idea of their God being "merciful", "forgiving" and "all loving." It's almost as if they completely ignore the Old Testament. Why? I thought the entire Bible was the inerrant divinely inspired Word of God? And the Christians that do acknowledge the OT's content dismiss it as being of a "different time period." Well, I'll tell you what I think: I'm disturbed by it all, each and every part of it. The fact that we still live in a society where most people do not accept evolutionary biology is frightening in itself. I fear we may at some point regress back to Old Testament times, and I can only hope I will be long dead before then.