Have you ever heard of the movie The God Who Wasn't There? It purports to be a documentary that exposes the falsehoods behind Christianity. Some of their evidence is rather less effective than stellar, such as the fact that many present-day Christians don't know the origins of their religion. So what?

Funny thing, though: I know one of the people they interviewed for their film. I haven't talked to her about it, because she comes off pretty poorly in it. However, the best I can tell is that they went around some Christian music festival asking random people "gotcha!" questions.

They also tout the founders of Snopes.com as being involved in this project. Wow. They used to list "The Raving Atheist," but last I heard he converted to Christianity or something, so they scrubbed that reference.

Anyway, now they have a new way of distributing their DVD. All you have to do is make a video of yourself saying "I deny the Holy Spirit," post it to YouTube, include some referring stuff in the text, and The Rational Response Squad will send you the video. The idea is that you need to be willing to commit blasphemy, specifically the Unforgivable Sin against the Holy Spirit mentioned in Mark 3 and Matthew 12.

I'm really sorry to disappoint the Rational Response Squad and everyone else behind The God Who Wasn't There, but unbelief is not blasphemy.

Speaking of Unforgivable Sins, there is another way to ensure that one is not forgiven by God: refusing to forgive others. “If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins." (Matthew 6:14-15).

So this becomes a problem, it seems, for those who wish to define blasphemy against the Holy Spirit as anything other than refusing to forgive others.

And for those of us who have a hard time following through on the command to forgive those who wrong us - once or 70X7 times.

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