Atheists and Religious Entertainment

Now this is strictly from my own personal observations and I'd be curious to see how common this is, but in my experience, the folks who seem to enjoy movies, TV and other forms of entertainment with highly religious overtones or even with religion as the central theme, are atheists and agnostics.

It's something that at first glance seems rather counter-intuitive, but the more I thought on it, the more it started to make sense to me.

Here's the thing, most of the out of the closet atheists I know are pretty well read and educated about religion, more specifically Christianity. This is largely out of necessity, we find ourselves in debates rather frequently about the merits, validity and inconsistencies of the bible, so we have to know our stuff. This has led to a familiarity wit the subject material, so it's easier for us to follow any stories that use the bible for inspiration. We know the major players and the events referenced most of the time. In fact, I'll go out on a limb here and say in a lot of cases we're more familiar with the subject than most believers out there. Again though, this is based on my own experiences. In a lot of ways it's just like seeing any movie based on a book you've read, because you've read it, odds are you're more likely to watch.

But here's the thing that I think really makes atheists enjoy this genre more than those of faith... We know it's based on fiction. Let me explain. When you go see a movie or TV adaptation of a book, you rarely want to see exactly what's in the book. Part of the enjoyment is to see what kind of spin the scriptwriter will put on familiar material. A good example of this is the recent Walking Dead TV series. I love the comic, but they've taken the core concept and plot and gone in some different directions and fleshed out characters that were rather one dimensional in the books. It's nice to see someone take the cannon of an existing series in a new and interesting direction.

However, if you're someone of faith and you're watching a program that takes your holy book and turns it on it's ear, you're less likely to enjoy it because unlike me, it's perhaps challenging what you perceive to be true, while I'm just enjoying a different take on a old story.

Now before anyone goes and gets offended, I'm not saying this applies to everyone of faith, I'm sure there are tons of religious folk out there that enjoy a good blasphemous bit of entertainment too. But again, in my experience, it's the atheists out there that seem to be able to enjoy it more.