Monday, October 29, 2007

Anti-atheist bigotry: Saving Grace

So the TNT show Saving Grace is on. I bothered to finally watch the pilot and holy shit. That's some crazy bigoted nonsense. There's certainly the possibility that somebody has a bunch of those qualifications just as it's possible that a number of Mexicans are lazy and stupid... and that some show might only include those individuals. But, there's a certain point where there's no more "maybe this just happened."

So about ten seconds into the show Grace (the main character and eponymous individual) proclaims atheism. So Grace smokes, drinks, has sex with married men, flashes old people, parks in handicapped places, abuses police sirens (she's a cop and has access but uses it for joy riding), scoffs at ethics, has no hope for kidnapped children, encourages others people to ignore their children, and has promiscuous sex.

While drunk driving, she manages to runs over a guy and says "Dear God, please help me." -- Whooshed off to the grand canyon by an angel. *eye roll* *groan*


Other fun bits:
Brother/Priest doesn't want teeth kicked in for giving her a Bible. In the next scene Grace spills liquor on it, then she finds red grand canyon dust in her shoe.

She meets the angel again, because she needed to rule out crazy and explains some things... or rather doesn't:

Problem of evil: "doesn't work that way."

That was the angel's odd response. Babies are drowned and children molested because... it doesn't work that way. The Holocaust, the Boxer Day Tsunami, Fraggle Rock... it just doesn't work that way. An all powerful, all good God wouldn't prevent evil? That doesn't work that way. I would prevent those things if I could! So either, I'm not good for wanting to do that, or God is not powerful enough to do that, or God is not as good as me.

Why can't he give her the answer: "there's no room for faith."

Really? AN ANGEL FROM HEAVEN SWOOSHER HER OFF TO THE GRAND CANYON... and you can't be told why the crazy nonsense makes sense when it obviously doesn't because that would ruin faith? It's a pretty sick meme when the idea that if there were evidence it wouldn't be as meaningful. This is an odd self defense meme religion has cooked up. It certainly defends it from the truth: the only reason anybody says you need faith is because there's no evidence.

We don't have any evidence, so we can only accept it on faith. In fact, this clearly implies from a rather empiricist standpoint that only lies require faith to believe as most truth has good reasons.

Rather than that we get this: We don't need evidence, in fact, if we had evidence then the belief would be shallow and meaningless... like your belief in reality!

Now, maybe Grace is just messed up and that's it. And though, the show title says "Saving" and "Grace" in the title the atheism is just link in the chain. Clearly, I'm not suggesting this show casts alcoholics in a bad light, Grace may just happen to be one.

Well, she wasn't the only atheist in the show. There was also a suicidal child-molesting pedophile teenager who did drugs, whose last act was to ask Grace, "Do you believe in God? Do you believe in God!?" Grace, now having had actual evidence presented to her says "Yes." -- Kid says, "you're an idiot" and jumps over the edge (he was on some bleachers) killing himself.

It isn't just me right? Being a non-suicidal, non-smoker, non-drinker, non-pedophile, non-teenager, non-drunk-driver, non-drug-user, non-adulterer, non-handicapped-places parker, non-old-people-flasher, non-ethic-scoffer, non-promiscuous-sexer, non-bible-booze-spiller atheist... who has not only read the Bible, but the Koran and several chapters of the BoM. I'm not wrong to think that maybe they are portraying atheists in a bad light, right?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Definitely not just you.