Charlie Productions : How To Anger God

The concept of blasphemy has always felt rather too human to be divine. However even by including Him as a character in some of our films, it feels like God may be getting the last laugh on us.

Blasphemy is, according to Wikipedia, "the disrespectful use of the name of one or more gods" and if there is any omniscient presence in our lives then it clearly is the Wikipedia. Actually the Wikipedia is delightfully like the God of the Old Testament since it's often wrong, full of spurious and/or out-dated nonsense and is often asking for a donation.

According to the Catholic Encyclopaedia blasphemy is "a sin against the virtue of religion" which I prefer as a definition since it makes it all the plainer that it's people who are getting upset, not God. After all if there were a God and He were all powerful, all knowing and all over the place then it seems highly unlikely that He'd be that easily offended. Or if He was, He wouldn't sulk about it. He'd either be the Big Guy and ignore it or he'd smite things asunder and have another flood. He wouldn't need an apology or a law or two thousand years of hand wringing over what counts as blasphemy and what's actually just fair enough and free speech and what we fought the war for.

Anyway, clearly you can't anger God because He's either better than that or not there. However I should probably tread carefully because as has been more than adequately proven over the years, you can anger religious people because they are there and they're clearly not better than that. But it's a conundrum that's worth considering, because surely whilst God must be too Almighty to be offended by blasphemy (otherwise He isn't really a God), what surely would anger him would be witnessing those who claim to follow his commandments wasting so much of their time and energy getting angry about something as inconsequential as blasphemy when they could better spend their time quietly getting on with helping the sick and the needy.

This is something to bear in mind if you find yourself getting offended when watching those of films of ours that touch upon religious matters. If there is a God, He isn't going to care about a silly film that depicts Him as a grumpy man with a glued on beard, half as much as He may care about you wasting your energy writing me and angry email about it. So since, unlike me, you wouldn't want to anger Him, I'd just forgive me and move on, like He has.

Especially since I have a guilty feeling that we've actually managed to betray our atheist ancestors by even giving the Big Guy a walk on part in the first place. I mean, atheists making films about God is a bit too close to vegans eating cheese just to prove they don't like the taste. It's too late, you've eaten the cheese, you're not a vegan. Do we not, in fact, when we blaspheme, enter into a dialectic in which God is always one part of the syllogism? By poking fun at God, rather than just ignoring Him, do we, in fact, blaspheme against Richard Dawkins? This could be a problem since Richard is clearly actually in existence and, unlike God, has no a priori reason to be morally above suing us.

Tits.

Charlie Productions believe passionately in doing things and always trying to stop in time for tea.

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