Portrayal of Athesits and Theists in Movies/TV?

[rocketpig]

Armads said:

rocketpig said:

I don't buy into this at all. I think there are plenty of characters who may be atheists in the writer's head but just don't bother delving into that portion of the character because, well, atheism is BORING. It doesn't make for a good story.

Religious undertones are fun because there's so much meat there to wrangle around into a fully-developed character. After all, most religious stories are interwoven with strong morality tales, quests for knowledge, and all the juicy stuff that makes a story interesting.

Atheism just doesn't provide that kind of material.

Atheists usually follow some form of philosophy since atheism itself is a singular belief, belief that there is no god.  It must be accompanied by other beliefs.  This actually allows atheist characters to have much more depth in their beliefs than christian characters.  So no it has nothing to do with how interesting atheism is. 

Consider this, there is an atheist sect of Judaism and christianity, there are buddhist atheists, there are atheists who simply follow rational explanations and don't attempt to guess beyond that and more belief systems that fit well with atheism.

I don't see how an Atheist character can have more depth, especially because your average Atheist's belief system usually doesn't revolve around their Atheism at all. In place of Atheism, their belief structure could revolve around politics, government, personal morality, etc... just like any religious person, minus the religion. There's a key element missing there and as I said earlier, there are probably several Atheist characters that just don't talk about it. Someone could know me for months and never realize that I'm Agnostic, bordering on Atheist (as in I refuse to believe there is any kind of benevolent God but accept that there may be a higher deity).

I'm not saying that it's impossible to make an interesting Atheist character, just that most of the interesting parts of the character probably won't revolve around their Atheism (Bones is a good example).