Woody Allen interviews Billy Graham on Religion

This article below makes we think of the lady tied to the Railroad in the Schaeffer video.

Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism

(Modern man sees no hope for the future and has deluded himself by appealing to nonreason to stay sane. Look at the example of the lady tied to the railroad tracks in this above video as a example.)

Francis Schaeffer took a look at modern day humanism and he showed how pitiful “optimistic humanism” is. Schaffer points out this weakness of the humanistic view:

With my reason I can find absolutely no way to have meaning, morality, hope or beauty if the universe I am living in only an existial absurdity. This would plunge me into dispair, but that is not where I stop. I say to myself “There is hope” even though there is none, “There is help on the way” even though there is none. “We shall overcome” even though there is nothing more certain than we shall be destroyed.

Woody Allen, the caustic, agnostic grew-up-Jewish director who often toys with delusions in love and life, takes on what he considers the big delusion — God — in his new movie.

• Find Faith & Reason blog on Twitter, Facebook

“We need some delusions to keep us going,” Allen tells The New York Times. In You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, which opens next week, Allen says,

The people who successfully delude themselves seem happier than the people who can’t. I’ve known people who have put their faith in religion and in fortune tellers. So it occurred to me that that was a good character for a movie: a woman who everything had failed for her, and all of a sudden, it turned out that a woman telling her fortune was helping her. The problem is, eventually, she’s in for a rude awakening.

Oddly, that seems to make the NYT interviewer go directly a reincarnation question, perhaps unawarenearly one in ten Americans believe both in God and in reincarnation, according to the 2008 General Social Survey. Allen answers,

Neither seems plausible to me. I have a grim, scientific assessment of it. I just feel, what you see is what you get.

This is pretty much Allen’s standard God riff. Until You Tube yanked the tapes for copyright reasons, you could once see Allen him try it out on Rev. Billy Graham — although the stalwart evangelist drew almost as many laughs as Allen.

Perhaps his childhood upbringing in an “unreasonable enforced religion” led the one-time Allen Stewart Konigsberg, now Woody Allen to use humor as a survival too. He once told a biographer:

It was a joyless, unpleasant, stupid, barbaric thing when I was a child and I’ve never gotten over that feeling. If you’re talking about religion it’s one thing; I don’t hold Jewish religion with any more seriousness than I would any other.

Allen qualified that by adding that he benefited from Jewish values and cultural habits which he described as “respect for books and learning and the higher professions” and an “appreciation of theater and music.”

But those are fringe benefits, not matters of faith. This may explain why, when the Jewish journal Moment asked 70 Jewish writers, thinkers and cultural figures this spring what “What does it mean to be a Jew today? they didn’t include Allen.

Related posts: