"The Screwtape Letters"; "The Atheism Tapes": a sly dig, maybe. The presence in the title of the A-word is also significant, as the film is made of "extra material" collected by Jonathan Miller, the British polymath, while making the BBC program "Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief," which in America was renamed "A Brief History of Disbelief" in order to be less offensive to potential corporate underwriters.
The title is almost the only playful thing about it. Jesus, though truly human, is never in the Gospels reported to have laughed, and neither it seems do his contemporary critics. Perhaps this God-business is only for the serious. Once or twice I smiled, as when Colin McGinn, discussing the so-called ontological proof of God's existence, said something like: "It is easier to be unpersuaded than to say exactly what is wrong." I think he was paraphrasing Bertrand Russell.
There are six parts, one each for Miller's interviewees, who for the record are, besides philosopher McGinn, the physicist Steven Weinberg, playwright Arthur Miller, biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Daniel Dennett, and, presumably for "balance," the British theologian Denys Turner, who called Dawkins a fundamentalist. I'd say what else he said but none of it made enough sense to remember. Jonathan Miller has some very colorful socks and an odd way of stretching his arms and playing with his fingers.
Here's a joke. A small town in a very remote location is populated by fundamentalist Christians who are afraid that, at the Second Coming, Jesus will not find them and they'll be left behind in the rapture. So they build towers on the edges of town and hire some of the local beggars to sit atop them in shifts looking for Jesus to come again in all his glory, in which case they are to signal him to the town. One day a traveller is passing by and sees a man sitting in the tower. "What are you doing up there?" he calls. The former beggar explains the whole thing. "Well," says the traveller, "that's a helluva job. How's the pay?"
"The work doesn't pay much," the beggar answers. "But it's steady."
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