The God Who Wasn't There

So, the post finally delivered my free DVD from the Blasphemy Challenge I undertook recently. I honestly will report that I began the movie from my usual perspective as a skeptic of any claims Brian Flemming was going to make, even to the point of picking apart his scholarship.

However, Flemming spent very little time on the historicity of the Bible and its stories and, instead, focused on the personal journey he was relating. It was one I can very easily sympathize with, right down to my shared reactions to some of his interview subjects.

The first few minutes dealt with whether or not Jesus actually existed and what evidence we have for that story.




He uses various tellings of the story of Jesus, from past cinema efforts, with a probably intended humorous effect of how silly they were. Once he closes the case on Jesus, and he does so in a most convincing manner, the remainder of the film is spent in interviews with various people of various persuasions of scholarly aptitude. He lets the argument go back and forth between the proponents of each side of the question of whether religion is good for you even as he continues to poke some well-deserved fun at the more outrageous or simply crazy statements of certain believers.

He ends his journey where it began, for him. He winds up back at the same kind of religious school I attended as a child and relates the same kind of internal turmoil on his beliefs as I all too clearly remember. He concludes with a Blasphemy Challenge recital of his own and I couldn't help but come away from the hour long film with a smug sense of vindication that someone else, so similar to me in thought and background, had created such a pointed and decisive attack on those dogmas I was taught to fear.