The God Who Wasn't There

I watched Brian Flemming's documentary, The God who Wasn't There, a couple of times over the holidays. If you're a secularist, an atheist, a non Christian, or one of those Godless metaphorically-minded Christians, you should see it. I think you'll love it. You'll love the way the arguments are presented. You'll love Flemming's dry, yet searing wit. And you'll love the sound track. My inner Frenchman certainly did.

But if you're a biblical literalist and a fundamentalist Christian like myself, this film will make you angry, so angry that you'll want to go out and destroy something, much like our Lord destroyed Sodom because a few of its citizens rejected Lott's offer to allow them to rape his daughters in lieu of porking his visiting angels.

Well, maybe I'm going a bit too far. Fundamentalists may like the blood and gore in the part of the movie that addresses the popularity of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Noting that it is by far the highest grossing Jesus film (adjusted for inflation, Jesus Christ Superstar made $55 million and The Last Temptation of Christ, $13 million compared to The Passion's $370 million and still counting) Fleming ascribes its popularity to its violence. I can't argue with that. After all, 109 of the The Passion's 128 minutes feature some of the most extreme depictions of torture, gore, and suffering ever captured on celluloid. And that's what the director intended. Flemming drives that point home by showing us a clip which would have required a stage hand to squirt a small geyser of blood from outside the camera's frame.

In Flemming's words:

Mel Gibson could have made his Jesus movie any way he wanted to. And he chose to make it this way. And he was right. Christians said: "Yes, this is the film we want."

And people wonder why we embrace torture. Well, if it's good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for a bunch of foreigners.

Fundamentalists may also enjoy another scene, Flemming's interview with Scott Butcher of raptureletters.com, a website you can use to contact your relatives to let them know you've been raptured. I learned a lot of things from that interview. For instance, did you know that Saddam brought Madonna in to christen "Literal Babylon" or that commercial airlines never team two Christian pilots together to ensure that their planes won't crash during the rapture?

The rest of the film is for the secularists and metaphor-minded Christians. They'll enjoy its refutation of the historical evidence for Jesus, the overview of the religious right's influence on politics, and Flemming's fiery interview with the director of the Christian school he attended as a child.

Now that I think about it, there is one more scene Fundamentalists will enjoy. It's the scene where Flemming denies the Holy Spirit. They'll love it because they know that it means that Flemming is going to burn in Hell.

You can purchase a copy of The God Who Wasn't There here and see the trailer and a few clips here.