The Unbelievers, A New Film Starring Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Werner Herzog, Woody Allen, & Cormac McCarthy

The so-called New (or “Gnu”) Athe­ism arrived at a time when fear, anger, and con­fu­sion over extrem­ist reli­gion had hit a fever pitch. Sud­den­ly, peo­ple who didn’t pay much atten­tion to religion—their own or any­one else’s—became intense­ly inter­est­ed in reli­gious crit­i­cism and debate; it was the per­fect cli­mate for a pub­lish­ing storm, and that’s essen­tial­ly how the move­ment began. It was also, of course, pre­dat­ed by thou­sands of years of philo­soph­i­cal athe­ism of some vari­ety or anoth­er, but “new” athe­ism had some­thing dif­fer­ent to offer: while its pro­po­nents large­ly hailed from the same worlds as their intel­lec­tu­al predecessors—the arts, polit­i­cal jour­nal­ism and activism, the sci­ences and aca­d­e­m­ic philosophy—after Sep­tem­ber 11, these same peo­ple took the dis­cus­sion to the pop­u­lar press and a pro­lif­er­a­tion of inter­net out­lets and well-orga­nized con­fer­ences, debates, and meet­ings. And their expres­sions were uncom­pro­mis­ing and polem­i­cal (though not “militant”—no shots were fired nor bombs det­o­nat­ed).

In the wake of over a decade of con­tro­ver­sy unleashed by “new athe­ism,” a new film The Unbe­liev­ers (trail­er above) fol­lows two promi­nent sci­en­tists and stars of the movement–evolutionary biol­o­gist Richard Dawkins and the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist Lawrence Krauss—as they trek across the globe and explain their views. Dawkins and Krauss receive sup­port from a cast of celebri­ty inter­vie­wees includ­ing Ricky Ger­vais, Wern­er Her­zog, Woody Allen, Cor­mac McCarthy, Sarah Sil­ver­man, Ayaan Hir­si-Ali, and sev­er­al more. The film’s web­site has no offi­cial release date (oth­er than “2013”), but it does fea­ture links to online buzz, both glib—Krankie snarks that the trail­er makes it look like Dawkins and Krauss have packed in the sci­ence and start­ed a band—and sub­dued; the evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian Post does lit­tle but quote from the press pack­age.

These cham­pi­ons of rea­son-over-reli­gion have always had pow­er­ful crit­ics, even among those who might oth­er­wise seem sym­pa­thet­ic (take Marx­ist lit­er­ary crit­ic Ter­ry Eagleton’s charge that new athe­ism is noth­ing but counter-fun­da­men­tal­ism). Then there is the host of reli­gious detrac­tors, many of them respect­ed sci­en­tists and philoso­phers them­selves. One notable name in this camp is famed geneti­cist Fran­cis Collins, who head­ed the Human Genome Project. Obvi­ous­ly no denier of the explana­to­ry pow­er of sci­ence, Collins nonethe­less argues for faith as a dis­tinct kind of knowl­edge, as he does in the inter­view excerpt below from an appear­ance on The Char­lie Rose Show.

The debates seem like they could rage on inter­minably, and prob­a­bly will. I, for one, am grate­ful they can hap­pen open­ly and in rel­a­tive peace in so many places. But as the same sets of issues arise, some of the ques­tions become just a bit more nuanced. British pre­sen­ter Nicky Camp­bell, for exam­ple, recent­ly presided over a large debate among sev­er­al promi­nent sci­en­tists and cler­gy about whether or not all reli­gions should accept evo­lu­tion (below). While Dawkins and Krauss ulti­mate­ly advo­cate a world with­out reli­gion, the par­tic­i­pants of this debate try to shift the terms to how sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery and reli­gious iden­ti­ty can coex­ist with min­i­mal fric­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Nev­er a First Human Being

Some­thing from Noth­ing? Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss Dis­cuss Cos­mol­o­gy, Ori­gins of Life & Reli­gion Before a Packed Crowd

Alain de Bot­ton Wants a Reli­gion for Athe­ists: Intro­duc­ing Athe­ism 2.0

Josh Jones is a writer, edi­tor, and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

Listen to ‘Why I Am Not a Christian,’ Bertrand Russell’s Powerful Critique of Religion (1927)

The Eng­lish logi­cian and philoso­pher Bertrand Rus­sell was con­vinced that the reli­gions of the world are not mere­ly untrue, but that they do griev­ous harm to peo­ple. That con­vic­tion is very much in evi­dence in his 1927 speech, “Why I Am Not a Chris­t­ian,” read here in its com­plete form by the British actor Ter­rence Hardi­man.

Rus­sell begins by estab­lish­ing a very gen­er­al and inclu­sive def­i­n­i­tion of the term “Chris­t­ian.” A Chris­t­ian, for the pur­pos­es of Rus­sel­l’s argu­ment, is one who believes in God and immor­tal­i­ty and also in Christ. “I think you must have at the very low­est a belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wis­est of men,” says Rus­sell. “If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not believe you have any right to call your­self a Chris­t­ian.”

Begin­ning with the belief in God, Rus­sell points out the log­i­cal fal­lac­i­es in sev­er­al of the most pop­u­lar argu­ments for the exis­tence of God, start­ing with the ear­ly ratio­nal argu­ments and mov­ing along what he sees as the “intel­lec­tu­al descent” of Chris­t­ian apolo­get­ics to some of the more recent argu­ments that have “become less respectable intel­lec­tu­al­ly and more and more affect­ed by a kind of mor­al­iz­ing vague­ness.” Rus­sell then goes on to explain why Jesus, as depict­ed in the Gospels, has nei­ther superla­tive wis­dom nor superla­tive good­ness. Although Rus­sell grants Christ “a very high degree of moral good­ness,” he asserts that there have been wis­er and bet­ter men.

The speech was pub­lished in 1957 in the book Why I am Not a Chris­t­ian and Oth­er Essays on Reli­gion and Relat­ed Sub­jects. The text is avail­able online, and you can click here to open it in a new win­dow. This record­ing will be added to our Free Audio Books col­lec­tion. Although Rus­sell is address­ing the major­i­ty reli­gion of his own coun­try, he is equal­ly crit­i­cal of all reli­gions. He leaves off with these words:

The whole con­cep­tion of God is a con­cep­tion derived from the ancient Ori­en­tal despo­tisms. It is a con­cep­tion quite unwor­thy of free men. When you hear peo­ple in church debas­ing them­selves and say­ing that they are mis­er­able sin­ners, and all the rest of it, it seems con­temptible and not wor­thy of self-respect­ing human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be bet­ter than what these oth­ers have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowl­edge, kind­li­ness, and courage; it does not need a regret­ful han­ker­ing after the past or a fet­ter­ing of the free intel­li­gence by the words uttered long ago by igno­rant men. It needs a fear­less out­look and free intel­li­gence. It needs hope for the future, not look­ing back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far sur­passed by the future that our intel­li­gence can cre­ate.

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Relat­ed con­tent:

Face to Face with Bertrand Rus­sell: ‘Love is Wise, Hatred is Fool­ish’

Bertrand Rus­sell and F.C. Cople­ston Debate the Exis­tence of God, 1948

Bertrand Rus­sel­l’s ABC of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty: The Clas­sic Intro­duc­tion to Ein­stein

Listen to a Brief History of Papal Abdication

Benedykt_XVI_(2010-10-17)_4

Pope Bene­dict XVI’s announce­ment of his retire­ment yes­ter­day morn­ing sent the inter­net into a tizzy, not to men­tion the thou­sands of Catholic insti­tu­tions across the world. The first ques­tion on everyone’s lips seemed to be “can he do that?” And since no pope has in 600 years, there doesn’t seem to be much prece­dent for it. Well, in a spe­cial and time­ly edi­tion, the new pod­cast Foot­not­ing His­to­ry presents the “admit­ted­ly very sparse” his­to­ry of papal abdi­ca­tion. It has indeed hap­pened before, but “almost nev­er with­out scan­dal.”

Lis­ten to the brief his­to­ry above and vis­it Foot­not­ing History’s home­page for more fas­ci­nat­ing his­tor­i­cal foot­notes.

Josh Jones is a writer, edi­tor, and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

Monty Python’s Life of Brian: Religious Satire, Political Satire, or Blasphemy?

Before I saw Mon­ty Python’s Life of Bri­an, I only knew that reli­gious peo­ple did­n’t like it, which intrigued me. Then I found out that some reli­gious peo­ple like it very much indeed, which real­ly intrigued me. Build­ing its sto­ry on a satir­i­cal par­al­lel of the life of Jesus Christ, Life of Bri­an could nev­er have helped draw­ing fire. But the Pythons knew how to use it: “So fun­ny it was banned in Nor­way!” read one of the film’s posters, and indeed, the Nor­we­gian gov­ern­ment put the kibosh on its screen­ings, as did Ire­land’s, as did a num­ber of town coun­cils in Eng­land. “As a satire on reli­gion, this film might well be con­sid­ered a rather slight pro­duc­tion,” writes Richard Web­ster in A Brief His­to­ry of Blas­phemy. “As blas­phe­my it was, even in its orig­i­nal ver­sion, extreme­ly mild. Yet the film was sur­round­ed from its incep­tion by intense anx­i­ety, in some quar­ters of the Estab­lish­ment, about the offence it might cause. As a result it gained a cer­tifi­cate for gen­er­al release only after some cuts had been made. Per­haps more impor­tant­ly still, the film was shunned by the BBC and ITV, who declined to show it for fear of offend­ing Chris­tians in this coun­try.”

All this con­tro­ver­sy came to a now-infa­mous 1979 tele­vi­sion debate: In one cor­ner, we have Python’s John Cleese and Michael Palin. In the oth­er, we have con­trar­i­an satirist Mal­colm Mug­geridge and Bish­op of South­wark Mervyn Stock­wood. You can watch the whole broad­cast on Youtube (part one, part two, part three, part four). In the extract above, you can hear Cleese argue that the film does not, in fact, ridicule Jesus Christ, but instead indicts “closed sys­tems of thought” of the type drilled into his con­scious­ness dur­ing his board­ing school years. Palin takes pains to under­score its nature as not whol­ly a reli­gious satire, but more of a jab at mod­ern Eng­lish soci­ety and pol­i­tics trans­posed into the Bib­li­cal past. Mug­geridge and Stock­wood, while den­i­grat­ing Life of Bri­an’s cin­e­mat­ic mer­it all the while, nonethe­less see in it a dan­ger­ous poten­tial to cor­rupt the youth. But it turns out that they’d shown up at their screen­ing fif­teen min­utes late, miss­ing the scenes which would have told them that Jesus Christ and the hap­less Bri­an of the title are two dif­fer­ent peo­ple. Indeed, Bri­an is not the mes­si­ah. The les­son here: watch Life of Bri­an in full, as many times as it takes to get you draw­ing your own non-received con­clu­sions about reli­gion, soci­ety, and com­e­dy.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mon­ty Python’s Best Phi­los­o­phy Sketch­es

Mon­ty Python’s Away From it All: A Twist­ed Trav­el­ogue with John Cleese

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Pope John Paul II Takes Batting Practice in California, 1987

Pope John Paul II had a mixed lega­cy. Some good, some bad. But what­ev­er your take on him, you have to give him this — the Pon­tiff could swing a good bat. Vis­it­ing Cal­i­for­nia in 1987, the 67 year-old Pope head­ed to the bat­ting cages and start­ed lin­ing sin­gles and dou­bles, maybe even a few triples. As the video pro­ceeds, we dis­cov­er that the switch-hit­ting Pope had pre­vi­ous­ly honed his bat­ting skills in the Vat­i­can Soft­ball League. The clip con­cludes with the gra­cious hosts giv­ing the Pope the roy­al treat­ment, treat­ing him to a nice 1980s-style ener­gy drink in a sty­ro­foam cup. Pret­ty posh. h/t Metafil­ter

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All You Need is Love: The Beatles Vanquish Pastor Terry Jones in the Big Apple

New York­ers go out of their way to avoid Times Square, espe­cial­ly at this time of year. What­ev­er the sea­son, it’s sure to be a mob scene of slow mov­ing tourists, mis­er­able Elmos, and loose screw loud­mouths preach­ing mes­sages of intol­er­ance. In this milieu, Flori­da pas­tor Ter­ry Jones is noth­ing spe­cial, and cer­tain­ly less pho­to­genic than the Naked Cow­boy.

Film­mak­ers Hei­di Ewing and Rachel Grady trailed the Quran-burn­ing, effi­gy-hang­ing, failed Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date there any­way, to cap­ture his “mes­sage to the Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty” on the 10th anniver­sary of Sep­tem­ber 11.

Bystanders roll their eyes and hus­tle past, but only one young woman attempts to engage him direct­ly, smil­ing as if she knows that Jones’ is the sort of shell game you can’t win.

That is until one man breaks into a spon­ta­neous ren­di­tion of All You Need Is Love, the lyrics pulled up on his smart­phone. Was this brave per­for­mance moti­vat­ed in part by the pres­ence of a film crew? Who cares, as ran­dom pedes­tri­ans and staffers from the near­by TKTS booth join in, pro­vid­ing a fine alter­na­tive sound­track to the hate spew­ing from the bull pul­pit. In Ewing and Grady’s edit, the Bea­t­les are a force strong enough to drown him out.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day would like to teach the world to sing in per­fect har­mo­ny.

 

Google Digitizes Ancient Copies of the Ten Commandments and Genesis

If dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy pos­es any threat to the mar­ket for words print­ed on real paper—and the jury is still out on that one—then it must also be cred­it­ed for expos­ing us to texts from the ancient world.

Last fall we post­ed about how the Israel Muse­um dig­i­tized the Dead Sea Scrolls, near­ly 1,000 texts found on the north­west shore of the Dead Sea in 1946. They are the ear­li­est known sur­viv­ing man­u­scripts from what is called the Hebrew Bible. Dig­i­tiz­ing the texts—most were on parch­ment but some were writ­ten on bronze or papyrus—allows view­ers to zoom in to exam­ine the writ­ing and even the paper fibers of hun­dreds of frag­ments.

Now the Israel Antiq­ui­ties Author­i­ty has expand­ed upon the col­lec­tion. Housed in the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Dig­i­tal Library are the ear­li­est known copies of the Book of Deuteron­o­my (which includes the Ten Com­mand­ments) and Chap­ter One of the Book of Gen­e­sis.

Each scroll frag­ment was scanned using spec­tral imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy that allows for the recov­ery of writ­ing that had fad­ed to near invis­i­bil­i­ty over the years. The boon for schol­ars is clear, but for reg­u­lar folks this archive is bet­ter than a muse­um vis­it. The Leon Levy site is search­able by dis­cov­ery site, con­tent and ancient lan­guage.

Google is mak­ing its mark as a major facil­i­ta­tor of cul­tur­al preser­va­tion. Anoth­er recent project with ties to ancient texts and his­to­ry is Caminos de Sefarad, a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Red de Jud­erías de España to cre­ate a dig­i­tal map of Spain’s Jew­ish her­itage.

More than 500 land­marks from the Sefarad—the Sephardic Jews before they were expelled from Spain and Por­tu­gal in 1492—are ful­ly anno­tat­ed with cur­rent pho­tos, text and spe­cial details. Vis­it Rib­a­davia, a once-pros­per­ous city in Spain’s north­west moun­tains, and learn about Jew­ish wed­ding tra­di­tions from the Mid­dle Ages. The Jew­ish Quar­ter of Léon is called the Bar­rio Húme­do (Wet Dis­trict) and is known today for its fine wine and food. Use the time­line to keep your­self ori­ent­ed in chrono­log­i­cal his­to­ry and click Street View to see this vibrant dis­trict as it is today.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work at and thenifty.blogspot.com.

The Wonder, Thrill & Meaning of Seeing Earth from Space. Astronauts Reflect on The Big Blue Marble

On Decem­ber 7, 1972, the Apol­lo 17 crew took a pho­to­graph of earth that became known as “The Blue Mar­ble” because of the whor­ling clouds above the con­ti­nents. Not the first image of the earth from space, it remains one of the most arrest­ing. To com­mem­o­rate the for­ti­eth anniver­sary of “The Blue Mar­ble,” Plan­e­tary Col­lec­tive, a group of visu­al artists, philoso­phers, and sci­en­tists, released the short film Overview (above) at a screen­ing at Har­vard this past Fri­day. Overview takes its title from author Frank White’s phrase for the per­spec­tive of the earth as seen from space: “The Overview Effect.” White’s book of the same name uses inter­views and writ­ings from thir­ty astro­nauts and cos­mo­nauts to build a the­o­ry about the psy­chol­o­gy of plan­e­tary per­spec­tives.

The film is a pre­lude to a fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary called Con­tin­u­um, and it intro­duces many of that project’s themes: the inter­de­pen­dence of every­one on earth, the neces­si­ty of adopt­ing a plan­e­tary per­spec­tive, and the meet­ing of cer­tain reli­gious expe­ri­ences with the sci­ences. Through a selec­tion of inter­views with five astro­nauts and philoso­phers asso­ci­at­ed with think tank The Overview Insti­tute, one gets a thrilling and vic­ar­i­ous expe­ri­ence of what it’s like to see Bucky Fuller’s “Space­ship Earth.”  Across all of the respons­es emerge the cen­tral themes of Earth­’s uni­ty, and its fragili­ty: we’re all in this togeth­er, or else, the film con­cludes.

Espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing is the inter­view with Apol­lo astro­naut Edgar Mitchell; he comes to see his expe­ri­ence in mys­ti­cal terms, as a kind of intense med­i­ta­tive state known in San­skrit as savikalpa Samad­hi, a union with the divine. Dr. Mitchell’s attempts to inte­grate sci­en­tif­ic prac­tice and human con­scious­ness par­al­lel those of Plan­e­tary Col­lec­tive and The Overview Insti­tute, all of whom seek in their own ways to help the human race achieve a shift in per­spec­tive sim­i­lar to what the astro­nauts expe­ri­enced, a shift so well artic­u­lat­ed by Carl Sagan in his Cos­mos doc­u­men­tary series and his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot. Inspired by anoth­er icon­ic image of the earth from space, Voy­ager 1’s pho­to from 4 bil­lion miles out, Sagan’s mus­ings took a mys­ti­cal turn, but nev­er left the ground of sound sci­en­tif­ic rea­son­ing. His “Pale Blue Dot” has become a metaphor for a sim­i­lar per­spec­tive as White’s “overview effect,” albeit one con­sid­er­ably more detached. Watch Sagan’s words brought to life below by ani­ma­tion stu­dio ORDER.

via @kirstinbutler

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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