This reboot of Left Behind is actually an imitation of a bog-standard disaster-on-a-plane movie.
But even in its attempt to slavishly imitate a specific genre of movies Americans got tired of in the 1980s, it couldn’t come anywhere near the quality and enjoyability of another take on the genre: 1980’s Airplane.
It’s a very ugly fantasy–the demonstration of a very broken psyche on display in the lewdest possible manner–and though the movie itself isn’t a critical masterpiece, seeing that fantasy marched across a screen for that runtime made me feel like I was reading some Nice Guy’s short story about his revenge on all those high school girls who rejected him long ago. It was that obvious and that disquieting to see this movie and think, “This is what they really think of us.”
To my astonishment, a quick search on Netflix revealed not only the new version of the movie but also the original Kirk Cameron version–and the two Kirk Cameron sequels. I feel like a five-year-old on Christmas morning suddenly. I’d say we’re set.
Logical Christians care a lot more about being correct and soothing that cognitive dissonance than they do about anything their Savior is supposed to have actually told them to do. And now they’ve got metaphysics to do that with.
We’re going to be heading back to God’s Not Dead next week, but before we do that, I wanted to finish up something we were talking about last time we covered the Handbook for the Recently Deconverted: one of Christians’ very favorite apologetics tactics, the Argument from X. A while ago, Read more
We’re about to plunge into actual apologetics works and examine their authors’ major ideas and claims. Before we do that, let’s just real quick-like run through the field as a whole so we’re all on the same page. I’m sure it didn’t take long at all for the earliest Christians Read more
Last time we talked about apologists, we talked about their first big mistake: that they start with a conclusion and find some kind of logic that will get them to that conclusion. That’s called arguing top-down. In bottom-up arguing, one starts with observations and measurements and builds the argument around Read more
I’ve compared the efforts of Christian apologists to watching a Roomba repeatedly hit a wall, and nowhere do we see that analogy in action better than with a circular argument. That was one of the early topics I tackled here here on this blog like a year and a half ago, but I want to discuss circular arguments because since then I’ve noticed even more that Christians like circular arguments–almost as much as this tuxedo cat likes riding its Roomba.
When a horrible remake gets made of a movie that was already horrible to begin with, though, that’s when things have potential to get really bad. Left Behind is one such movie franchise.
Welcome back! Last time we talked about how Christians share many qualities in common with Nice Guys™. Modern Christian fundagelical culture has produced a bumper crop of Christians who are singularly incapable of recognizing when their input is desired or requested, who genuinely think that they’re doing people a favor Read more