Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
Sunshine movie poster: Image credit Fox Searchlight PicturesI can hear the Dobsons, Robertsons and Falwells screaming that headline at their audiences now. Bill O'Reilly will develop an elaborate conspiracy theory on how Hollywood is subverting moral values by making people question their belief in god. Actually, working on one movie caused one actor to become an atheist. Except, he kinda was already.
Actor Cillian Murphy says that after working on the yet to be released scifi film Sunshine caused his view on the existence of god to change from agnosticism to atheism:
He says, "I was agnostic before this film. Now I'm very much an atheist.
"Not just because I spent time with these guys--they just confirmed what I'd always suspected.
"For me, the film ultimately is a battle between science and religion, or science instead of fundamentalism."
Sunshine is set 50 years into a future where our sun is dying. A spaceship is launched with a device that is hoped will reignite the sun's nuclear furnace but out of radio contact with Earth the mission starts to come apart. Aside from the obvious question of why humans needed to be sent on a mission that could probably have been handled much better by a robotic spacecraft, Murphy seems to not realize that he was already an atheist to begin with before starting work on the film.
Agnosticism is of course one form of atheism, and is in fact what most atheists mean when they say they don't believe in a god. Atheism literally means without god and deals with one's belief while agnosticism means without knowledge (gnosis is derived from the Greek word for knowledge and refers to spiritual knowledge). Thus one can be either an agnostic or a gnostic atheist depending on whether you believe it is possible to know if a god exists (or not). Most honest atheists will tell you that they are agnostic atheists because true knowledge of the existence of a god is impossible. On the other hand, a gnostic theist would be someone who knows that there is a god (or at least thinks they do) and likely many believers would find such a person as insufferable as a gnostic atheist.
While I have a feeling that this film won't be hard science fiction, it's an interesting premise and the movie is directed by Danny Boyle who directed Trainspotting so it just might not suck. You can catch the trailer here.
As we all know from Capra's late bloomer "It's a Wonderful Life", every time a bell rings, an Angel gets his wings. Bell hanging from the ceiling, Soft-Air pistol, lots of BB's and some boredom. "POP! ring! POP! Ring! POP! Ring!" By my count, there's another 67 baritones for the Celestial Choir....
In my neverending quest to avoid actually writing, I found this quiz over at Living The Scientific Life. As we all know, it's those high school stereotypes that really define us and really, aren't we all burning to know whether we're nerd, geek or dork?
According to this silly blog quiz I'm a nerd which is interesting because I tend to refer to myself as a geek, leaving the nerd designation for an earlier generation of techies who concentrated primarily on hardware hackery. Which is fine. I'll proudly call myself nerd. I just wonder when I'll be getting my Λ Λ Λ membership kit in the mail.
So how about you? What culturally marginalized high school social clique do you belong to?
The movie starts on a remote Scottish island called "Summer Isle". Sgt. Neil Howie (Edward Woodward, in a straight-arrow performance that combines Sam the Eagle with Oliver North, while managing to be thoroughly British) has come to investigate the disappearance of a local child. No one on the island seems to have heard of her, or even much cares that someone might be missing. No, they're all busy copulating like wild rabbits (or, rather "Lovely March hares"
and indulging themselves in a series of cheesy Summer of Love rip-off musical numbers that are extremely pagan and which fortunately contain enough nudity to be extremely lusty without exploitative. All of this irritates the shit out of our protagonist, who is so thoroughly Xian he has pieces of the One True Cross embedded in his rectum. read more »
