Considering One Frustrated Media Student's Biblical Interpretation

In response to Jon & Nick:

I think the video made by this media student guy was intended to trump the argument that if Biblical writings are considered infallible truth from God, and all statements the Bible makes must be true, then it follows that nothing in reality can or should disagree/conflict with this truth. But it doesn’t make sense then that the meaning of a couple of very basic Biblical statements, “The fool has said in his heart there is no God. They are corrupt, their deeds are vile, and there is no one who does good,” would require intense contextualization or hermeneutical approaches to defend its own truth value. The burden of proof is not on the Atheists here but on the Christians for maintaining the authority of the Bible when claims such as this can easily be proven untrue. It’s a common misperception by Christians that “good” Atheists/Agnostics don’t exist, and by “good” I mean that they have a keen sense of moral agency while also having quite intensely defined political values and concerns as citizens. But this non-existence can be cited to the contrary – even to the affect that they are also quite happy in their position for living out their own personal and economically productive lives, and do not constantly view themselves in a perpetual state of “angst” or even "despair."

In my opinion and experience, the video does offer strengths in pointing out the existence of a serious minority of Atheists/Agnostics. In quantifying how many precisely and the percentage of Atheists as compared to Christians, I would simply hesitate when accepting any statistic as accurate or valid, although I think this guy has the general idea correct that there are more Christians than known Atheists. I’ve heard the idea over and over that many Atheists are very likely afraid to “come out” for fear of retaliation and thus the statistic may be inevitably skewed by not including those people. There are other reasons/criticisms on this as well that Nick and Jon addressed for which I agree, but I have intended to keep this post as brief and to the point as possible.

I do also agree with Jon & Nick in that I don’t see how he makes his conclusion any more compelling by equating good Atheist people as Atheist movie stars. It makes the video's conclusion on a whole, weak. Unless he meant to show that if things we enjoy (e.g., like movies) are good actions, then obviously we must know these are good Atheists and so good Atheists exist and the above Biblical statement cannot be true. But if “good” means being a moral person (which I think it should mean & the Christian God would have meant it to mean), then citing celebrities as good Atheists can’t be convincing since the sole fact that they were in a movie says nothing about their moral character as a person. But just because the video is unconvincing in this way doesn't mean there aren't any good Atheists out there, which is obviously not the case.

As Nick said, the video seems to portray both Atheists and Christians in worse-case extremist scenarios. Although the video was made by a disgusted Atheist and meant to address Christians, exceptions to the general rule of what defines Christian people and Atheist people must be taken into account. If in some circles the possibility exists that a person would be considered “such-and-such” then for this guy’s purpose he says let’s lump them together into this category (hence, the video interprets the Atheist designation as including Agnostics which is an entirely different position on many grounds & illustrates only the extreme right-wing Christian designation and further implies that these people are all un-intelligent idiots without a coherent response to such a Biblical claim). If it’s not considered that it’s possible “All Atheists are not bad” and “All Christians are not bad,” then I could see where conflict could easily erupt among people in both camps attempting to interpret the video. Strict dichotomies eliminate diversity in realistic thought, and in theory it’s easy to make this mistake when trying to gain traction with such a pluralistically complex issue. Ultimately, however, the video lacks the weight I think it was intended to have based on these limitations/omissions.