A Night of Go(o)d TV
Since I started writing this blog, I’ve begun to see religion everywhere. It’s in the politician’s speech. It’s in the tiny gold cross around a stranger’s neck. It’s there when someone sneezes. It’s the basis for half of the stories on the evening news. Well, last night I watched three hours of TV, and it was in every show I saw.
8pm ABC
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
I’m sure almost every one of my readers has seen this at least once. On the surface, it has absolutely nothing to do with religion. However, I realized last night that it’s all about faith.
Every year, on Halloween night, Linus sits in the most “sincere” pumpkin patch he can find and awaits the arrival of the Great Pumpkin. He claims that the Great Pumpkin will rise up out of the pumpkin patch and fly through the air to bring toys to all the good children of the world. To the other children, it is obvious that Linus is delusional, but despite their taunting, he spends every Halloween waiting instead of going trick or treating or going to parties. He tells them that they’ll be sorry when the Great Pumpkin comes, because He won’t give them toys. My favorite part is when Linus accidentally says “if the Great Pumpkin comes” and then quickly realizes his error. He corrects himself and says “I mean WHEN he comes.” He says that one little slip like that can make the Great Pumpkin pass you by. When the show ends, the Pumpkin has once again let Linus down, but he confirms that he will again sit in the pumpkin patch the following year.
I don’t think I really need to call out all of the parallels between Great Pumpkinism and Christianity. It’s a pretty straightforward comparison. If you knew nothing else about Charles Schulz, you would guess him to be an atheist from watching the Great Pumpkin special. However, this is the same man who gave us A Charlie Brown Christmas, in the middle of which Linus reminds the other children of the true meaning of Christmas by recounting the Biblical story of the birth of Christ. Schulz, like most Christians, is perfectly willing to accept one cockamamie story on blind faith, while eagerly discrediting all the others. Typical.
8:30pm ABC
According to Jim
In the opening scene of the show, Kyle is drawing a picture and asks his father (Jim) what color god is. “Blue,” says Jim. Kyle says that he’s drawing a picture of god playing soccer. Jim tells him that’s ridiculous. God plays football.
9pm ABC
Commander in Chief
This show didn’t deal directly with religious issues, but the entire episode was about a Muslim terror threat against American elementary schools. In real life, we are threatened by religious extremists every day while being protected by other religious extremists. Does anyone feel safer?
10pm CBS
Close to Home
A housewife sits at her kitchen table with eyes closed and hands folded as she recites Psalm 23 under her breath. She is covered in the blood of her husband, who she has just stabbed three times in the back with a butcher knife because god told her to.
This episode was excellent, but hard to watch. The main character, Annabeth Chase, is the prosecuting attorney. The killer, insisting that she is not crazy, fires her lawyer for suggesting insanity and hires a religious fanatic who tries to make god the defendant. She realizes that she has an all-Christian jury, and challenges them to defy god by returning a guilty verdict. Annabeth has to walk a tightrope. She knows that if she seems to undermine the defendant’s faith, she will lose the case despite overwhelming evidence. At one point, Annabeth has an assistant searching the Bible for “precedent.” He tells her that while god does a lot of killing in the Old Testament, he never instructs anyone to kill (and follows through with it). This is false, but most of the Christian 85% of the audience won’t know the difference, having never read the Bible. CBS is smart enough not to offend viewers with demonstrable facts about their faith.
The background story in this episode is about Annabeth peparing for the baptism of her baby. She is a Presbyterian, and does believe in god. She says that she doesn’t believe the defendant because god wouldn’t tell someone to kill her husband. It made me wonder. If the message god had supposedly delivered was consistent with her notions of his nature, would she have believed? The vast majority of Americans believe in god, but if you tell most of them that you’ve seen him or chatted with him recently, they think you’re crazy. Why is that? Why does the average Christian believe Paul when he says that he met Jesus on the road, while he would not believe me if I said I met Jesus at the mall? Curious.
~I AM~
October 26th, 2005 at at 12:21 pm
Charles Shutz, the creator of Peanuts was not shy about the biblical influence on the development of the strip. http://www.geocities.com/chogrefmov/article90.html
I see it too…Even in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, Buffy always wears a cross around her neck…
October 26th, 2005 at at 12:31 pm
That last show you described made me think alot about those who kill because God tells them to.
“If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.”
-Thomas Szasz
October 26th, 2005 at at 12:39 pm
Aaron,
That’s a good quote. I think that’s going to be my quote of the week next week.
October 26th, 2005 at at 1:19 pm
The shows that really bug me are the supposed ‘documentaries’ on the History Channel, A&E, and now Discovery Channel. The History Channel in particular has almost become the History of Jesus channel. I make regular complaints to these networks about their religious bias and lack of skepticism.
October 26th, 2005 at at 1:34 pm
My TV hate is when you get programs discussing the ’science’ of the bible on discovery channels. I LIKED discovery channel and used to find lots of their programs very informative but now it is just way too much religious crap. So called experts discuss ‘miracles’ as if the bible were a factual account of real events as seen by witnesses.
The assumption is that the events like raising the dead or healing the sick were witnessed by somebody who saw Jesus do this stuff just HOW is in question: miracle or trickery.
October 26th, 2005 at at 2:38 pm
Actually, Charles Schulz considered himself a Secular Humanist:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Schulz
and interestingly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the brainchild of Joss Whedon, an avowed and very outspoken atheist:
http://www.fireflyfans.net/news.asp?newsid=267
October 26th, 2005 at at 3:18 pm
Me too, LJ. I haven’t watched it, or anything, in nearly two years, but even back then it had begun to stink of Xian propaganda (as I call it). There is nothing to discover about Xian fairy tales but the gullibility of believers… so if the Discovery Channel has turned into a secretive psych experiment, I guess I’m okay with it. Otherwise, someone needs to reverse course and bring it back to where it once stood, on solid, observational, reality-prone ground.
October 26th, 2005 at at 3:32 pm
The History channel drives me just-plain batty… their religiously-infused shows often show a direct contrast with factual history, and a strong fundamentalist influence. I’ve taken to showing my local atheist friends when we gather at the house over Guinness- it has become a running joke among us. No wonder the average Christian thinks atheists don’t know history– their preacher and their real god (the glowing squawk-box) both feed them utter BS.
October 26th, 2005 at at 3:34 pm
Thanx Franc,
I had no idea you had a blog. Im adding your blog to my links list!
October 26th, 2005 at at 3:34 pm
LOL I meant to spell it “Frank” sorry about that.
October 26th, 2005 at at 4:03 pm
In relation to that, Newsweek basically has turned itself into religious propaganda every other issue.
October 26th, 2005 at at 6:41 pm
I just did a post about how there was too much infusion of religious crap with purported scientific television channels on my blog. I completely agree it little by little gives more credence to the religious and less room for argument to atheists. I don’t believe for one minute that this is an accident. Our way of life is slowly being eroded from the inside out in America. It’s the same way other religions and traditions were outdone 2000 years ago. Christianity dominates. It drives competing cults to the fringes and into extinction. It absorbs what it can or needs to to keep ‘progressing’. History is written and re-written around biblical accounts and up to religious standards. After awhile, it is impossible to tell an actual account or fact from its religious counterpart or replacement.
The only differences today are 1: they cannot overtly kill heathens for not buying into their delusions, and 2: We can fight back with an established body of scientific knowledge.
The main problem we haven’t figured out yet is that the religious who dare to push their agendas on everyone will stoop to any level to get what they want. We have not been able to do that because of ethical concerns. We must learn to weed these efforts to contaminate the intellectual society out of the sphere of public influence and to ridicule their stupidity, ignorance, and greed.
October 26th, 2005 at at 9:13 pm
Sigh, it’s even in the World Series. Yes, I know that athletes frequently point to the sky when they do something dramatic (score a touchdown, hit a homerun, etc), or thank their invisible friend in the sky for their athletic talent after winning a game. But I don’t mean these individual displays of hallucinogenic beliefs. What irks me is that, during the seventh-inning stretch of EVERY World Series game, the network (Fox) does not break to commercial but instead insists that we hear a live rendition of “God Bless America” which is sung by some celebrity at the ballpark. We don’t get to hear them sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” which is the usual seventh-inning-stretch tradition. No … now that there’s a national audience, we HAVE to hear someone sing about how my country’s relationship to the Invisible Pink Unicorn.
Thank reality for the mute button …
October 26th, 2005 at at 9:17 pm
Er, that penultimate sentence above should read “sing about my country’s relationship” etc. Oops.
October 27th, 2005 at at 12:11 pm
When I was in high school our neighbor, who was my mom’s friend, would often tell my mom and the other neighbor women folk that she talked to god and that god “told her to not get a job and stay at home all day” living off the money from her parents (she was divorced). I’m pretty sure that my mom didn’t believe that bullshit even though she’s religious herself. But when we discussed it she never would say “oh yeah, she’s lying of course”, she would leave this ambiguity in there as if she were afraid if she criticized this her whole worldview would collapse. I simply told my mom that I didn’t like her hanging out with friends that would outright lie to her everyday.
October 27th, 2005 at at 8:52 pm
I AM:
I dunno, maybe we’re making small inroads here.
For 1 thing, people are more willing to make fun of their alleged deity. There was once upon a time when doing that was blasphemy, & punishable under the law (in England, for sure: probably still is, in some of the more backward states).
I saw a flick last year, called Time Changer (pre-atheist days), which was a mix of sci-fi & apologetics, where a deeply religious man went forward in time (19th to 20th century). While it’s not anyone’s cup of tea (present company), it was actually semi-decent. Anyways, it illustrated the HUGE changes over the length of a century. 1 instance (it was kinda funny), where said hero went to a movie theater, & came running out shouting “Stop the film! 1 of the characters took the lord’s name in vain! Stop the film!” had me LOL. Another scene showed him talking to a science class, & he began lecturing (the 20th century class) about how there is no science w/o the bible. He got a stern tonguelashing from the extant teacher.
Long story short: yeah, the ubiquitous nonsense still remains, but it’s nowhere near as invasive (that I know of, outside of maybe Indiana & Oaklahoma) as it once was.
If we keep chipping away at it, day-by-day, hopefully, it’ll be regarded by our descendants as an old wives’ tale.
Hopefully.
Fingers crossed.
October 28th, 2005 at at 8:34 am
Regarding Charles M. Schulz you’re mistaking his characters views for the authors views. Just because a fictional character holds certain views does not mean, that the author/inventor of the character holds the same views.
October 28th, 2005 at at 11:06 am
For a less-theistic take on The Great Pumpkin, check this out:
http://www.escapepod.info/2005/10/27/ep025-the-great-old-pumpkin/
The short story “The Great Old Pumpkin” (for those who haven’t read it) mixes the GP story from Peanuts with a Lovecraftian/Cthulu-like viewpoint. It’s pretty funny.
(Also, my friend Toby Chappell was the composer of the soundtrack for this reading of it, so be sure to listen with headphones to get all the details.)