When Ben Stein’s Expelled movie was released, it was criticized by some skeptics because they thought that the crew had used duplicitous methods to conduct their interviews. Whether that was the case or not, I do not know, but it seems as though the newly released Religulous movie (starring Bill Maher) not only used extremely deceptive tactics to secure their interviews, they also needed to sneak past security to do so … see here:

http://www.tektonics.org/religuguff.html#cmvisit

Sad that they had to resort to such tactics … sadder still that such a movie was made at all. I’d love to see a serious film depicting the religious excesses in North America done with charity and made with the purpose of making things better … but this is clearly not such a film. One review mentioned Maher as being the “Michael Moore of religion” (due to his pseudo-documentary style) … not necessarily a compliment, there.

Everyone else is writing a blog post about the most recent mockumentary so I figured I should too … until I read this great post on Boston Bible Geeks (HT: Tektonics) about the movie, which already sums up a lot of my thoughts about the movie pretty well:

Seriously Maher-ulous, Part I

I have not seen the movie and don’t plan to, given what I’ve heard about it. Maybe once it’s on TV but I don’t really want to support this kinda thing.

I do have one comment though … think about what would happen if a group of Christians made a movie like this mocking Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. The Christians would be blasted in the media as being intolerant and bigoted. Why then is it totally acceptable for Maher, an atheist, to do the same thing? Could it be social & media bias against anyone deemed as being “religious” (and, I’d say, Christians in particular)?

Yesterday I stumbled upon this interview, which was not included in Richard Dawkins’ “Root of All Evil?” movie. Here Dr. Dawkins interviews Dr. Alister McGrath, who currently teaches at Oxford University, the same school as Dr. Dawkins. Dr. McGrath has earned two PHDs from Oxford, one in molecular biophysics, and the other in theology. Here it the interview (provided by Dr. Dawkins himself) in its entirety:

You can also download the video in .MOV form (88mb)

Dr. Dawkins comes off relatively well in the video. Although he refers to some of his critics as “fleas” on his website, he does seem to have a certain respect for Dr. McGrath. It was refreshing to see an exchange between a prominent atheist and theist done in a respectful manner, but I would have much rather seen a real discussion between the two, instead of Dr. Dawkins posing all the questions (and his own views) with Dr. McGrath continually forced to be on the defensive.

I must comment that, although I thought Dr. McGrath handled the interview quite well, I don’t entirely agree with some of his responses. There were just a couple times where, as I watched and listened, I thought “No, no! I think I have a better reply than that!” While it no doubt seems rather presumptuous of me to disagree with someone like McGrath who holds two PHDs and has published dozens of books and academic articles, nevertheless I’ll try to make a few follow-up posts to this entry where I give my own responses to some of Dr. Dawkins’ questions.

Related Reading:

• The God Solution: A Reply to the God Delusion – One of my professors wrote this upcoming book (release date July 10 2007) that proposes a response to Dr. Dawkins’ popular book The God Delusion.

I can see that this ridiculousness is probably going to be fairly big. Already the old Da Vinci Code Blog was spammed by someone advertising the official website. (Posting twice from the same IP within minutes under different names.)

So I made up a page explaining some of the many problems with the James Cameron documentary “The Lost Tomb of Jesus”, aka “Jesus Family Tomb”. It contains links to several other pertinent resources on this topic. Click below to read it:

Feel free to pass the link around, copy it to your own site, hang it on your fridge, whatever. I’ll work on it some more later when I have more time; this is a “preliminary” version. We already went through this once with the lamentable Da Vinci Code, and now it’s started all over again …

Related reading: In addition to my page linked above, a “Top Ten” list has been posted to Christian Newswire: Ten Reasons Why The Jesus Tomb Claim is Bogus: Leading Scholars Say Discovery Channel ‘Documentary’ Makes for Good TV, Bad History and Bad Science