Review of Kirk Cameron's films

I was really not interested or in the mood to watch this film, let alone write about it. But when you have time on your hands, and when your masochistic side of you wants attention, you browse through online looking for good facepalm material. Now, I have been dealing with Ray Comfort a lot lately, and more to come, but when I saw Kirk Cameron make an ass of himself on Facebook and on Fox, I remembered that he made some movies lately. Saving Christmas just came out, but he made two more: Unstoppable and Monumental. So I figured, might as well review these as a warm up.

For the following review, I will write down what Kirk says and does on the films in italic, while my responses to each point will be in normal font.

Unstoppable

Basically this film is all about addressing suffering and death. Kirk shares stories about friends dying, him and his wife helping at cancer summer camps, and there's a whole lot of pulling at heart strings. This is one of the main reasons why religious propaganda are despicable.

Kirk basically starts off with the premise that there is a God (no surprises there). He does not make any attempt to prove there is one (again, no surprises there). So, with that premise, he asks why does God allow suffering? Kirk says this leads most people to atheism. 
Completely ignoring there are many reasons why people become atheists. I did not become an atheist because of suffering, I became an atheist purely out of critical thinking.

So how does Kirk attempt to explain why there is suffering in the world: Kirk starts off by sharing the creation of man according to Genesis. He says God created the first man literally from dirt and breathed life into him. Kirk says this man was Adam and was created in the image of God, given authority over the land and all it's animals. 

And here's the real kicker: they show a bald white guy covered in mud, who later cleans himself by a small waterfall. Already SOOOOO much wrong with this. For starters, it's common knowledge by now that the first humans originated in Africa, and the cradle of civilization started Sumeria where modern day Iraq is located.

Second of all, as biologists will inform you that the FEMALE is the foundation of a species, not the male. This is one of the many things that Western religions got horribly wrong. Have you ever wondered why males of mammalian species have nipples?

Third, again, as any biologist will tell you, a new species of animals does not start with one person. You need a group of creatures, not one pair.

Back to the movie, Kirk says Adam "named" each animal, and Kirk notes that when you "name" something that means you have authority over it. But he wondered where was his female? Kirk says "this was the only thing that was not good in creation." Kirk says Adam could not provide for himself to make it good, he had to rely on someone else to make it good. So God put Adam to sleep and made a female out of his "side" and made something Adam had never "seen before"... a woman. And Kirk says they are both "beautifully and perfectly designed to complement each other.... and he names her." 
Remember when Kirk said when you "name" something that means you have authority over it? So following Kirk's logic, man has authority over woman because man named woman.

This is straight out of Kirk Cameron's mouth, and I didn't twist the movie script. Kirk Cameron just basically said that man has authority over woman. (and yet Kirk Cameron and his partner Ray Comfort have the gal to diss atheists who point out that the Bible says men have authority over women.)

Also, it's very strange that creationist like Kirk Cameron and his partner Ray Comfort, always declare "creation was good" and yet Kirk here just admitted something wasn't good with creation before Sin. This comes to show how Kirk and his creationist ilk haven't been hones with us.

Kirk then says that man and women were given "dominion" over the Earth and all it's animals. 
This is one of the most damaging parts of religion, thinking man is above nature like a god. All this is is some religious-inspired anthropomorphic-centric thinking, similar to making us believe that humans are the center of the universe. 

Besides, it is not even accurate. If there is one species that has dominion over the world, my vote goes to bacteria. They have by far dominated the globe, even in the air.


Kirk says that Adam was put in charge to tend to the land and make it beautiful, but to also protect it. Protect it from what? Kirk says a serpent entered the garden, and Adam should have "smelled it a mile a way, ran to it and and crushed it." 
But what Kirk fails to share with his audience is where the serpent came from and who made it?....oh that's right, God made the serpent. In Genesis 3, it says God himself made the serpent, and made it as the most cunning of all animals.

So here's the story so far: God makes an world that is not entirely good, makes a single man and a woman from his rib. Next, the two humans are tricked by a serpent created by God and bring Sin into the world, and that is the reason why evil exists and why all suffering imaginable exists. What the actual f**k? Does nobody else see the big problem here?

For starters, remember the creationist position that when "God created the world, it was good"? So if the world was "good" before the Fall, and evil and suffering did not exist yet until man sinned.... but the very serpent destroys this entire scenario. The serpent itself shows an agent of evil existed before the Fall, so already we can tell evil was not created by the Fall because evil existed prior to the Fall, therefore the existence of evil is not the fault of humans. And who created this evil? God created it! And God, being the all-knowing Creator of the universe with his grand divine plan, must have planned this entire thing to crash and fail, resulting in a world of pain. If Christians think this wasn't part of the plan, then they admit that a mere creature like a single snake can thwart the grand divine plan of the infinite creator of the cosmos. How fucking embarrassing. 

Second of all, if you were the infinite creator of the cosmos, and you wanted to created a "good" world, why would you place a cursed tree on your beloved planet and why would you hold one species out of a billion species to be held morally accountable? That would make you the ultimate speciesist. And why would you hold these ape creatures morally accountable if you did not create them with the knowledge or understanding of right and wrong, thereby knowing the dire importance of not eating a cursed fruit? And if you wanted this world to remain "good" why put this cursed tree within walking distance of these humans who apparently don't know any better? If you were so smart that you could create vast galaxies of billions of huge stars, why couldn't you have figured out to put the "cursed fruit tree" on a high unclimbable mountain far away from humans, or on a far away unreachable island, or even plant it on Venus for fucks sake?! Somewhere where humans can't reach it and screw up your plan for a good creation. How hard is that to figure out? Or why not creating the cursed fruit tree to begin with?

Consider this, if you heard that a single father was watching over his two children, both under the age of three, left the house while he deliberately left his two children locked in a closet with nothing in it except for a opened can filled to the top with rat poison... and all he did was say "be good children and don't drink or touch that poison" and closed the door on them....would you call that parent "loving"? Of course not, you would call that parent a monster and call Child Services because that father is insane and clearly not fit to look after children. If either of the children died or became ill, we would not blame them in the slightest. Why? Because they're infants, they did not understand right or wrong, or understand the danger of rat poison. All the blame would go directly to the father, and rightfully so, because he knew better and created the certain conditions he put his children in.

And it's the same with the God character of the Bible. Kirk's beloved book says that God created the world and created man without knowledge of good and evil. And yet this God put them in a garden and deliberately placed the cursed tree (equivalent to the rat poison) in the garden, and even worse God deliberately created a middle-man to convince the humans (who didn't know any better) to eat the cursed fruit. God is just as bad, actually worse, than the father in my alternate scenario.

Of course Christians and creationists like to over look this factor, usually by saying "it's not that God punished Adam and Eve for not knowing better, it is simply because they disobeyed God" which entirely overlooks the problem of creating a cursed fruit tree to begin with, within walking distance of the garden, and deliberately creating a mischievous middle-man to get the humans (who still didn't know better) to disobey. But even still, we never call a infant (who doesn't know better) for drawing on the wall with a crayon as "immoral" or blame them for being "disobedient." You make take their crayons away, but would you get a shot and then inject these kids with a deadly virus? No, that would be monstrous. You may think that is overboard comparison, but it is not. In fact, it low-balls it. Yahweh decided to go beyond creating and unleashing viruses unto his children for misbehaving, and created every single deadly disease and every horrible thing imaginable. (Cancer, ebola, small pox, polio, whooping cough, diphtheria, tetanus, mumps, rubella, venom, heart disease, and the list can go on and on)

Back to the movie, Kirk says when Adam and Eve first sinned, God clothed them in the skins of beasts. Kirk says this is because if you are going to act like beasts, you are going to look like beasts. 
Then God is an idiot. He already created humans as beasts, for humans are animals by definition. So either God or Kirk Cameron was unaware of that fact.... who am I kidding, it's ONLY Kirk Cameron's fault for not knowing that fact, after all he never has proven the existence of his god, so that only leaves Kirk.

Next we see a reenactment of Cain and Abel story, but only the ending part where Cain kills Abel. Jump back to Kirk, Kirk says Adam and Eve had only two sons, and one killed the other, and Abel was the good child who did the "right thing" and then God protects Cain with a mark and says "if you go after Cain, I [God] will come after you."

I wonder if anyone else paused this video at the moment where Kirk says "Adam and Eve had only two sons" and asked out loud, so how did Cain and Abel have children? This is a hot topic that creationists hate to address. Because it points out the only way that Cain and Abel, the only children of the first humans, needed to engage in incest with their own mother or with a sister in order to have children. And what does the Bible say about incest? Oh yeah, it's forbidden and bad.

It is often times hysterical how creationists try to rationalize this problem. Look at Kirk Cameron's ministry partner Ray Comfort try to explain this away:

There you have it people, that is the farthest reach of Ray Comfort's feeble intellect.

Before I move on to the rest of the movie, there is another thing I want to address with the Cain and Abel story. But before I go there, let's walk through something first.

Imagine a father watching from a distance as his baby son grow up and develop. Though absent, the parent has strict rules on how that child should behave, rules the parents admits he told the child. He watches indifference as the child unwittingly starts to break those rules. Only when the child has become so naughty and so troublesome does the parent act. And what is that action? The parent does not communicate with the naughty child, instead he has a quiet word with his favorite child (yes the parent has a favorite child, and throughout the time that he has watched through indifference as he watched the naughty child grow up, he has been very attentive of his favorite child). So the action the parent takes is commanding his favorite child to commit fratricide. "Go and kill your brother" the parent says, "your brother is just too naughty to live anymore." What would you say about such a parent if they were to act in that way?

Why bring this up? After the Jews left Egypt in the Exodus story, God took them into the Promise Land, but the land was already cultivated. So God told the Jews (his favorite children) to eliminate all the Amalakites and Canaanites. Kinda refutes the idea of a "all-loving" god if you ask me. And before anyone can speak of that the Amalakites were "too evil and too far gone" let me remind them of the biblical story of Nineveh. God sent Jonah to the city of Nineveh to warn them of their bad behavior that has made God angry and that they were leading down a path that could lead to their destruction. There seems little difference in the naughtiness of the people of Nineveh and that of the Amalakites, but God sends the people of Nineveha lifeline and not do the same for the others.

Why do I bring this up? If killing your brother is biblically wrong, as Kirk Cameron is strongly making it to seem is the case, then why would God command fratricide? All humans, of all shapes and sizes and of all geographical locations, are all related and we all belong to the same species.

So the Cain murdering Abel is portrayed as horrendous in this film, but nobody talks about God commanding that the Jews commit genocide on their family. Or how about when Moses commands the sons of Levi to slaughter their own family in their own camp in Exodus 32. In Exodus 32, when Moses did not return from Mt. Sinai, thousands of the Jews started worshiping another god. Moses comes down later, see's what they are doing, gets angry, and God says "kill them all." So Moses rallies the sons of Levi, and they go throughout the camp and kill 3,000 of their own. Brothers killing brothers, sisters, and other family members and friends.

I am surer my readers get my point. Biblical stories are just one huge clusterf**k, there's no real direct moral lessons here. If God knew that brothers killing brothers was "a bad thing" (so much that he cursed the bad brother), then that would mean fratricide is just simply bad. But then, numerous times throughout the Old Testament, God commands people to commit fratricide. That means God is commanding a bad thing, and he knows it. What do you call an entity that commands a bad thing and knows it's a bad thing, and does it not just once but numerous times? I have a handful of appropriate words: evil, monster, tyrant, murderer, criminal, etc.

Even the simple-minds of Kirk Cameron and other Christians and creationists should be able to grasp this. For example, Kirk Cameron has used an argument constructed by his ministry partner, Ray Comfort. Ray Comfort's go-to argument, his Are You a Good Person? tactic, basically does like this: if you've told even ONE lie, you are a liar. If you have stolen ONE thing in your life, regardless of value, you are a thief. I've already written a blog refuting this crap, but I'd like to apply Ray Comfort's logic in this argument to his God. If God has done one bad thing (in this case fratricide) then that would make him bad. It's simple logic. Though Christians like Kirk Cameron will never openly admit this, they would rather hide behind calling their god "holy" or "righteous." It's sick and twisted. Like a Muslim calling their beloved Prophet "good" despite the number of people he murdered. Even Nazi's praised Hitler in very high regards, but their labels of Hitler do not eliminate the fact that Hitler was pure evil.

Kirk says the Bible says God "created the universe out of nothing and then created man from dirt." Kirk says "we can buy that" and then talks about God flooding "the whole world." But then he suddenly talks about how hard it would be to sell this story to a room full of directors, because the hero becomes the villain. 
Whatever happened to "we can buy that"?



But let's back up a bit, can we buy that? WHO CAN BUY THAT?


I know millions of people do, and they tell their kids that they [the adults] have solved the questions to the universe by the time the kids first learn to tie their shoelaces. But all they have done was solve a mystery with another mystery... which ultimately answers absolutely nothing.





Kirk then revisits the Adam and Eve story, and says the details make the story less bad. 
This ought to be good.

When Adam ate the fruit and sinned, God showed his mercy by not killing him and still having hope for him.
That didn't take long. *wink*

If Adolf Hitler, at the height of his regime, held a gun to your head and then at the last moment decide to spare your life, would you look up to him as a good person?

Let's not forget a crucial point in this story: humanity was set up. It was God who created the first humans, who were made unaware of sin or unaware of the concept of punishment or right and wrong, and it was God who created the serpent/agent-of-evil to convince the humans to do something naughty, and it was God who created the cursed fruit tree right in the humans special garden. And God, being the all-knowing universe Planner, knew that man would fail and allowed it to happen. And yet, Kirk expects us to think that the Yahweh character in his book is somehow the "good guy"?

God provides them with clothes and food, he gives them more children and sends angels to watch over them. 
How does that excuse the entity (which has yet to be proven real) that screw up everything?

Where were these angels when the serpent entered the garden, ever think about that???

If God had agents to watch over his creation, where were they when the serpent decided to meet Eve for the first time? The Bible says that angels can interfere with humans (one even stopped a father from killing his son), so the angels could've done something to stop Eve from listening to the serpent. The same book, the Bible, says a human's faith can "move mountains," but surely the power of Yahweh is greater. So why couldn't he move a mountain and bury the wicked serpent under it? The Greek god Zeus was capable of this feat, where he literally buried the horrid monster Typhon under a mountain (the fiery lava of volcanoes is Typhon's spit).

And then God makes a promise that should give them hope, that a descendant of Eve will come and crush that serpents head and "fix all of this." 
If you already knew what was good for them (a world without suffering), why not create a world without suffering to start with? Kirk thinks that God already did that, but Kirk ignores the part of the story where God deliberately creates the cursed fruit tree and the serpent.

Kirk says God showed his grace and kindness when he did not kill humanity after what Adam or Cain did. Abel's death wasn't ignored, he would be forever remembered like a Hall of Famer who approached God "the right way by faith." 
So God is a good guy for not killing the only three humans in the world when one killed the fourth?

And God put a stop to evil by flooding it and allowing a piece of the world to float on the waters to start a new world. "A new and better world is being birthed through tragedy. The world is born again." 
So a while ago, God showed "grace and kindness" for not killing a guy who murdered his brother, now he is a hero for wiping out the billions of species, even children and the unborn?

And how is committing global slaughter a "stop to evil"? This is just another religious attempt to twist everything backwards by calling the one committing world genocide as the "good guy" for stopping evil, even though the "good guy" was the one responsible for creating the evil to begin with.

Was Heaven, the realm of eternal bliss and happiness that's free of pain and suffering, made whole without tragedy? If so, then there would not be any need to create a world that requires tragedy, especially if you are omnibenevolent creator. If not, then you suck as a creator god and Heaven is a lie.

Kirk says then God used a rainbow as a sign of a promise to never flood/Judge the world again. Kirk says the Bible does not use the word rainbow, just a bow. And God hung that bow in the clouds, putting away his "war bow." The bow is pointing to the sky, arrows pointing to God. And then God becomes a man as Jesus and takes the punishment of sin, so Kirk says the bow (i.e. wrath of god) pointing upward was God's wrath towards himself that he accepted on the cross to save humanity.
When you "hang up a bow" on a wall.... do you leave an arrow nocked in it's string? I hope not.
It's just a bow on a wall.  
But Kirk says everything goes back to usual, and man moves away from God. At the Tower of Babel, all men come together "under one language" and a "one world government" makes a Tower so they wouldn't be "scattered across the Earth" when that was what God told them to do. 
Again, creationist Kirk Cameron taking a fictional myth as if it really happened. Not surprising, because creationist have to lie to make their case (there is no other way), after all they are in the business of infiltrating school textbooks with lies such as the "Loch Ness Monster" was actually real and that which proves "dinosaurs coexisted with man." (no exaggeration, no bullshit)



After talking about the Tower of Babel, Kirk says the Israelites were surrounded by savage cultures. He literally says that the Romans (and several others) were a culture of death. 
Funny how Kirk accuses the Assyrians and Babylonians and Greeks and Romans as a culture of death when the Israelites were the ones stoning their own people for crimes like picking up sticks on Saturday.

The Israelites believe that Yahweh gave them 613 strict laws, and guess what the punishment for breaking the majority of them are? DEATH. Say what you want about the Romans, Greeks, or Babylonians, but it is unfair to label them a "culture of death" and exclude the Israelites.

Then we get into Jesus, the guy who would come to crush the serpents head. Kirk says that Jesus fulfilled all the Law and prophecies. 
First off all, the historical evidence of there ever being a Jesus Christ is severely lacking. Like King Arthur, Jesus appears to be just a myth.

Second of all, assuming that there was a Jesus, we already know he didn't fulfill any of the prophecies set for the messiah. The fact that Christians say that Jesus will "fulfill the prophecies upon his return" is an admission that Jesus failed in his task, and nothing in the Torah says that the messiah comes around on his second term.

But then Jesus dies, and resurrects, comes back for 40 days, then he leaves. He leaves his followers to be killed, fed to the lions, crucified upside down. 
First of all, there is no evidence that Jesus died and was resurrected.

Second, his followers did not die as reported. For starters, we do not have any contemporary evidence that Peter was crucified upside down. This was a story made up almost 200 years after Peter died.

Finally, even if his followers did die for their faith, so what? Does conviction mean truth? People die for their beliefs all the time. That does not mean the beliefs are any more true or real.

Kirk says that Jesus flipped death on its head, and used his death to change the world by allowing his enemies to kill him and thus died for his enemies. Kirk mentions that Jesus was nailed to cross and was "alone."
Alone? I recall the story saying that Jesus was crucified next to two other criminals. 


So why is there suffering? Kirk says he has hope that God brought salvation unto humanity and will use those tragedies "for his greater glory and for our good, because that is what he has been doing all along." For every death, God is pushing his purpose and commitment unto you. 

Kirk says pain and suffering no longer becomes a question mark, but now pain and suffering becomes a exclamation mark that declares "God is good."
Right.......... God is so good that he either sends rapists to rape children (like pastors and church boys) because it is all part of his all-knowing plan OR he merely does nothing and watches and says "when you are done, I'm going to punish you, unless you pray then I'll forgive you."




All this talk of pain and suffering, if I had the power to stop a rapist from raping someone, I would. That is the difference between me and Kirk Cameron's god (that and the fact that I exist). And already I have demonstrated that I am more moral than Kirk Cameron's god.

 If you saw a person horribly abusing a child, would you intervene? Would you think that it is your moral duty to stop it and protect the child?


If you have answered "yes" then you too have demonstrated that you are more moral than the god of the Bible.... which means it's followers worship something that doesn't share your sense of morality who planned to for the child to be abused in the first place.


Final point; the question of suffering still remains a big question mark, and all Christianity has done was attempt to mask it with empty promises of goodies for the "saved."


To sum up this film: HORRIBLE. I wouldn't even give this film half a star.

Not only was this entire video based on the unproven premise that there is a god, and that god happens to be the Bible god of Abraham, but the arguments it makes to justify why there is suffering in the world are completely illogical and twisted inside-out.

All this film does is try to make the bad guy look like the good guy, which may be easy to get away with for those who are not familiar with the stories of Christianity. But unfortunately, the atheist the Godless Wolf here knows much more about Kirk's Bible than he ever has.

If that wasn't bad enough, it's full of creationist bullshit. The garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, Noah's Flood, Tower of Babel... all fictional stories that never happened (and we KNOW they never happened), all used to justify why there is suffering. With these fables with a sprinkle of cute words, all presented in a matter-of-fact way to make grieving parents and suffering people smile by feeding them big piles of smelly lies.

I don't wish Kirk Cameron to feel suffering, but I do wish he could feel shame.

Monumental

Starts off with some guys chattering, then appears Kirk Cameron. Kirk says that people say the country is going to Hell. 15 Trillion dollars in debt, families are getting divorced, teen pregnancy is a problem, drugs and alcohol. 
Let's see, 15 trillion dollars in debt. I recall the U.S. doing very well under the surplus thanks to Pres. Clinton. Where is that surplus now? You can start by thanking Pres. George W. Bush for starting two wars on a credit card and money borrowed from China, as well as cutting taxes for the rich and the collapse of teh stock market. Granted the GOP have the worse job creation record since Herbert Hover.

Families are getting divorced... failed to mention that the Evangelical Christians (which is what Kirk Cameron is) have the highest divorce rate.

Teen pregnancy... look no further than the failed policies for abstinence-only programs. Seriously. Compare California and Texas. California boosted it's sex education in schools, teen pregnancy then hits an all-time low. Texas still boosts abstinence-only programs, now Texas leads the nation in repeat teen-pregnancy. That shows what a demonstrable failure the policies of the religious-right are.

Drugs and alcohol... first of all, alcohol is thee drug in this country. Presidents drink it, parents drink it, clergy drink it, this beverage is served and sold to all Americans of the appropriate age who are free to consume and get as piss-stinking drunk as they want.... and that is the way it should be for any country that calls itself "free." And I would argue that the War on Drugs is an absolute failure and we ought to stop it right now.

Kirk says when you go to a local high school, what used to be shameful is not celebrated. 
No examples given.
Not even I have any idea what he's talking about.
The only guess I have is sex. I guess sex way back in the day "shameful"... in the Dark Ages.
High schoolers in the fifties were having sex and liking it, as were the high schoolers in the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, all the way to the millenials. Back when Kirk Cameron was a high schooler, kids in school were having sex and they liked it and celebrated it.

So I do not know what high schoolers must be doing now that used to be considered "shameful" but is now being "celebrated."

Kirk says we used to be proud of our motto "in God We Trust" now teachers are afraid by the law if they say it in schools. 
Americans have mixed feelings on the "in God We Trust" motto, but let it be known it was not America's motto. America's motto was "Out of Many, One." Frankly, I for one think we should absolutely get rid of the "in God We Trust" motto, it was a BS motto that a handful Americans convinced the government to adopt in the 1950's when America was competing with the Soviet Union. In other words, the United States sold itself out to appear to be as opposite as the Soviets in almost every way possible.

Kirk says that if you let a country go bad, tyrants rise up (showing Pol Pot, Hitler, Franco)
Not going to even bother.

Kirk says people in church don't worry about it, because the bad is a sign that Jesus is coming. Kirk is not on board with that, because it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
For once, Kirk Cameron and I agree on something, but I have my sincerest doubts that Kirk actually believes that himself.

Kirk wonders what happened to this country, and says the answer has got to be "simple" and maybe that is to look back and see what made this country "successful, healthy, prosperous, and secure in the first place."
Simple? The very fact that Kirk Cameron thinks that the answer is simple is one of the very things that is wrong with the U.S.A. 

As John Stewart once said, "what is wrong with this country is not that we face haven't faced these problems before, we face a deficiency in our problem solving mechanism. And the reason why we face a problem in our problem solving mechanism is that a good portion of this country has created an alternate universe on which the issues that we face... where our problems are amplified and our solutions simplified, and that's why they won't work."  

And was America a "successful, healthy, prosperous, and secure"? Perhaps, but there are many other words to describe it, but if you want to focus on the nice words, then you have to take in consideration the dark part of history as well as the good.

What made America prosperous? You can say that there was a lot of land and opportunity... but you also have to take into account how they got the land. Spoiler alert, it involved a lot of bloodshed and the removal of the natives who were there first.

So what does Kirk do? Kirk goes to England, meets Sue Allen and they talk about the pilgrims. They talk about the time when it was forbidden to own a Bible in English, because as they discuss, if they had a Bible in their own language they could start studying it and think for themselves. Sue says that the State, the queen, and the monarch controlled the clergy as their mouthpiece to control the people. Kirk says when the government tries to control the church, it leads to tyranny and oppression. Sue says that if you separated yourself from the church, you step away from the monarchs to like treason, and the word "Puritan" was given a bad name. Kirk then says King James was a tyrant on steroids who tripled the debt and hunted the most devout believers. That's why the pilgrims had to meet in secret to study the Bible, but they planned to escape.
Here's something left out of their talk. This was around the time when the Catholic Church held a lot of power in Europe, including England. Thomas Moore was one of the many men in London who was killed for owning a Bible in English. Last century Thomas Moore was made a saint, and it was only in the year 2000 that Pope Paul made Moore was made the patron saint of politicians. But the main point is this: the idea that the church exists to desecrate the "word of god" is nonsense, the church is the only owners of the truth.

Sue retells a tale of the Pilgrim men on a Dutch ship headed into the the mother of all storms, that pushed them toward Norway. And they prayed to God to save them. She says "hundreds and hundreds" of vessels were lost in that storm, and yet this ship with the Pilgrims survived and made it to Holland. She asks "how miraculous is that?"

I'll answer that for you Sue.... it's simply not.

A miracle would be if the Pilgrim ship flew into the sky. A lone ship surviving a storm while others don't is not a miracle.

Kirk then goes to Leiden, Holland to learn about John Robertson. Kirk meets with Dr. Marshall Foster of the World History Institute. Foster says the Pilgrims could not go anywhere else (France, Germany, Scotland) because millions of people were being persecuted and dying. Later on, Foster says "400 years later, the liberty that the world now enjoys is because these people had the faith to lay their lives down in the wilderness 400 years ago."
This guy is resting the freedom and liberty of Western society on a handful of Pilgrims from Holland who never got involved in government?

The scene then shifts to Plymouth, Massachusetts, where we see the Mayflower II, the modern reproduction of the ship that carried the Pilgrims across the Atlantic. Dr. Foster vividly describes conditions on the Mayflower. Foster goes on to relate the hardships faced by the Pilgrims during their first winter. He notes how none of them chose to return to England when the captain of the Mayflower gave them the opportunity to do so, even though nearly half of their group had died. Cameron’s next interview is with Dr. Paul Jehle of the Plymouth Rock Foundation, who tells about the writing and significance of the Mayflower Compact. The Mayflower Compact was a government/civil charter signed at sea by all the Pilgrims and crew members and brought to American colonies at Jamestown in 1620.

What I fail to see is how a charter signed at sea brought to a colony that no longer exists has any real significance. When the United States were formed, they were no longer "colonies", they set up their own committees and meetings and they formed a new government, a secular government, and passed their own laws. They didn't consult with the Mayflower Compact.

Kirk hears about the Pilgrims dying in their new settlement, but choosing to stay. Kirk keeps thinking about what he learned in school, that the "white man" came over to America and abused the Native Americans and threw them into reservations. What Kirk learns that did happen, but also "abuse was going both directions." Kirk notes that conquistadors were coming in and pillaging the land, "but the Pilgrims were not apart of that." Kirk says the Pilgrims came with their families and were not looking for a fight. But Kirk says the relationship with the Pilgrims and Native Americans was not "perfect" and things went wrong, but Kirk says unlike other people the Pilgrims treated the Native Americans as equals, not as animals. Kirk says according to William Bradford, the Pilgrims killed one of their own under the testimony of two Native Americans... Kirk says that shows that they had a system were all are equal under the law.
Does Kirk Cameron really think that this is the first time in human history were a group of people take the word of outsiders against one of their own? Like the Pilgrims were the first to consider outsiders testimonies?

"There is nothing like bones to remind you of your heritage." - Marshall Foster

I'm pretty sure those words uttered by Foster flew right over Kirk Cameron's head. After all, Cameron is a creationist who does not believe bones reveal anything about the heritages of species, including his own.

As more of the story of the Pilgrims is told we also see the Pilgrim Hall museum, scenes from the recreated Pilgrim village at Plimouth Plantation and the grave marker for Governor William Bradford. The film also gives an extended analysis of the symbolism of the National Monument to the Forefathers in Plymouth, which was dedicated in 1889. Foster says that the monument was built to teach the people if they lost their liberty, it would show them how to regain it. Foster says what the monument shows us is the only successful way to find liberty in the world. The top of the monument is a lady named Faith pointing to Heaven. "They knew that the only Faith that could be true liberty was a faith in the one true god and his Bible." Foster says that the other statues were tied to faith "because without faith it falls apart." The next statue is Morality (the internal liberty) who has the Ten Commandments in her left hand and the Scroll of Revelation in the right (signifying the Bible); there's a small statue called the Evangelist; another statue is Law, Foster says the principles of God's law are put into civil law; next is Education, who is opening the Book of God or the Book of Knowledge, Foster says it was the parents job to educate the next generation (Kirk notes that these people did not send their kids to a government school) and there is a small statue by her side of an old man (grandfather) pointing to the Ten Commandments and a Bible, he is Wisdom, and there is a globe right next to him (because he is teaching his grandchildren how the world works from a Biblical perspective); finally we get to the statue Liberty. Foster says throughout history, of all the ways were liberty was attempted to be reached, only this one was successful.

Here is something Kirk forgot to mention about Plymouth’s National Monument, which was built in 1910 under the leadership of Freemasons, though from just watching Cameron’s documentary you would think the Pilgrims themselves helped construct it 300 or so years ago. They didn't. Hell, even the Statue of Liberty is older than the Plymouth monument. 

Maybe that's why Kirk never heard of this monument in history classes when covering the history of the Pilgrims. 

And if misleading the audience wasn't shameful enough, Cameron used the part about education to bemoan how parents can send their children to “government schools” where they are trained to be “slaves to the state,” generating an entitlement culture that breeds government dependence rather than reliance on faith

Cameron, in seeking to find out how America went from a country of Liberty Men to a fallen people, glosses over how the mythical country of Liberty Men considered African Americans, Native Americans and women to be inferior and endorsed slavery, racism, and discriminatory and violent treatment of women. He also neglects to mention that in Plymouth religious liberty was nonexistent and religious dissenters were mercilessly persecuted. For instance, people were not allowed to become Quakers or even give aide Quakers and Quakers were even executed by the colony’s government. So much for liberty right?

Just as damning, Cameron conflates the Pilgrims with the Founders: the film gives the impression that the Founders had the same religious convictions and beliefs in the role of religion in government as the Pilgrims. Never mind that more than a few of the Founders were members of the Church of England, the very same church that Cameron noted persecuted the Pilgrims.

For the rest of the rest of the Founding Fathers, Kirk wants to know if the Founding Fathers were a bunch of Deists, agnostics, atheists, and such as people say they were. So who does Kirk talk to? The "leading expert in the country" Cameron consults to give information about the faith of the Founding Fathers is David Barton.
That's right, Kirk Cameron consulted a pseudo-historian, and the rest of this section of the film is Barton and Kirk propagating that the US Congress bought, printed, and distributed Bibles (called "Congress Bible") to schools because they wanted the children to learn it, thus proving they were not a bunch of ungodly lot or wanted religion out of schools.

Chris Rodda already debunked this whole “Congress’s Bible” crap, noting that Congress simply passed a resolution on the accuracy of the edition of the Bible of printer Robert Aiken and did not purchases or print copies of the Bible, pay for the printing or print the Bible for use in schools. “The words ‘a neat edition of the Holy Scriptures for the use of schools’ are taken from a letter written by Aitken, not the resolution of Congress,” Rodda writes, “The only help Aitken ever got from Congress was the resolution endorsing the accuracy of his work.”

I've addressed this Aitken Bible lie many times before -- in blog posts, in a YouTube video after Barton trashed me on his radio show last year, and, of course, in my book, Liars For Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History. In fact, because the lies about Congress and the Bible are the most popular of all the Christian nationalist history lies, I made this subject the very first chapter of the book. The chapter, titled "Congress and the Bible," debunks all the myths and lies regarding the printing, financing, distribution, or recommending of Bibles by our early congresses, most of which are variations of the same three stories -- two involving the Continental Congress, and one an act signed by James Madison. The chapter also includes some related lies that have, quite disturbingly, made it into the opinions of Supreme Court justices in a few First Amendment cases.

She also notes that the Aitken Bible was first called “The Bible of the Revolution” not during the American Revolution but in 1930 by people who were trying to sell copies of it, and Aitken himself “ended up losing over £3,000 on the 10,000 Bibles he printed.”

This is one of Barton’s many false tales [1] [2] about American history and it should come as no one’s surprise that he will be prominently featured in Cameron’s documentary about American history, even though Christian academics have emerged as some of Barton’s leading critics.

Some far-right Christian commentators are also upset with Cameron, with one claiming that he is misrepresenting America’s “pagan” history as Christian.

Next Kirk goes to Boston and meet Herb Titus who says that "separation of church and state" was not the goal in this country. His proof, he takes Kirk to Harvard and shares that the "founders of Harvard" did not exercise separation of church and state, and cites a writing on a wall near the entry to the front yard at Harvard University that is about the coming to this land and setting up a civil government. Titus says this plank says if you want a civil government it has to be based on a certain morality, and that morality comes from the church. Titus says a nation that tries to build itself not on God's law will ultimately self-destruct. Titus says we live in God's world, "not in Darwin's imagination" where we are held accountable to laws like don't murder or steal.

This Titus guys sounds less informed than a Holocaust denier.

In what world did Titus or Cameron expect us to believe that the founders of a school in Massachussetts had anything to do with the Founders of the United States.

Harvard was set up by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636, over a hundred years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the drafting of the Constitution and the Amendments, including the one that established a wall of separation of church and state.

So what Titus is trying to do is make it seem that one school in Massachusetts that first taught Congregationalists and Unitarians, somehow shows that those who came to the colonies were trying to make a religious country. Even if that where the case for the colonies themselves, it still completely ignores the core issue: when the representatives of the colonists gathered to form a new, independent country from Great Britain, they had a secular government in mind -- and that is the truth, even if Titus chooses to ignore it.

Another truth that Titus may ignore is that morality is not based on the Christian faith. Not at all. If you want to set up a moral government, as the plank on the Harvard wall implies, you use ethics not fairy tale books. On top of that, Christianity itself does not teach us to be held accountable for things like "don't murder or steal" because Christianity is a cult of the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free-card. According to Christianity, you can literally break every law on the books, but you can still escape and cheat punishment if you take advantage of a loophole and repent.

So morality does not matter. The believer can be the most vile person in the world, it doesn't matter because they are still going to Heaven. The atheist can be the most saintly altruistic nicest person ever, it doesn't matter because God is still going to damn them for the crime of non-belief. A convicted criminal can get into a Heaven, but non-belief is worse than any other crime there is. That is why in the New Testament when Jesus was crucified next to two criminals, only the one of the two who accepted Christ as their Savior went to Heaven when they died on their crosses. So that is Christianity for you, nothing is worse than non-belief, it does not matter what you have done or how horrible you were, the only criteria into escaping Hell and getting into Heaven is gullibility. That's it.

The final truth that Titus may ignore is the demonstrable reality we live in where evolution is a fact. Just as gravity is real and not part of "Newton's imagination" the same is true with evolution. It is real, not part of "Darwin's imagination" it's part of reality.

In the last section of the film, various leaders in Washington give their views on how the spiritual legacy of the Pilgrims and the Founding Fathers might be recovered and how Christianity came in and created the greatest country on Earth and allow them to be industrious and prosperous. 
And as I already showed, the film conjures up a connection with the Pilgrims and the Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers made a secular Constitution based on ideals of freedom, not spiritualism.

The movie also ended with warnings about secular government and democracy run amok, with one guest repeating the myth that Adolf Hitler was a democratically elected dictator.

But did Christianity contribute to this country being industrious and prosperous?