Saturday, April 28, 2007

More on the Atheism series

I'm still working through my emotional response to this programme :) . I felt proud to be one of these intelligent, informed atheists, but mostly I was just poleaxed. Rather like Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud, or We're Here and We're Queer, the first time I heard either of those proclamations.

Ah, I've just realized what made the show so unusual - there was no presentation of the "other side." In American politics, the media is supposed to present "both sides" (in reality fulfilling the equal time requirement most unevenly), and that approach has bled over into its coverage of almost everything else, particularly anything the least controversial. So that, instead of telling us what's what with global warming, or the Shroud, say, of Turin, we hear from scientists on the one hand and true believers on the other. The viewers are left to "make up their own minds", as if there were no factual aspect to the matter.

But the British atheism show ONLY presented information about the course of atheism throughout history - no religious types got to have their say! Most unusual!

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