Upstate NY atheists offer to show "The Interview"

[rug]

December 19, 2014 7:20 PM
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BUFFALO - An atheist organization that says it relies on the right to express unpopular opinions is offering to show "The Interview" at its upstate New York headquarters.

Center for Inquiry President Ronald Lindsay says Friday in a letter to Sony Pictures that shelving of the satirical film sends a troubling message about censoring ideas that may offend some people.

Lindsay says the Buffalo-based Center for Inquiry believes so strongly in the right to express even unpopular ideas that it's willing to risk showing the film.

He says the center would show the movie in its auditorium and open it to the public free of charge.

http://www.newsday.com/news/region-state/the-interview-movie-atheist-group-center-for-inquiry-sends-sony-letter-offering-to-show-film-1.9732922

http://www.centerforinquiry.net/newsroom/center_for_inquiry_to_sony_let_us_screen_the_interview/

[hrmjustin]

1. Good for them! K&R

[Jim__]

2. Sony has been warned against any distribution of the film.

They've been told that any distribution, even due to theft, will have the same dire consequences as the original warning. I know, they've past the blame along to the theaters, but I don't expect them to allow any showings.

[unrepentant progress]

3. Paul Kurtz is spinning in his grave right now at CFI being referred to as an atheist organization

[rug]

4. Yup.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/10/local/la-me-humanists-20101010

[unrepentant progress]

5. CFI lost a huge donor right after that escapade

I can't remember how big, but it was on the order of a quarter of CFI's revenue was being contributed by a single donor. Presumably one who was personally loyal to Paul Kurtz.

I had a number of friends who were ousted from CFI during the putsch. Sour grapes on my part, but I dislike the clown show that CFI has become.

It's all sadly ironic too because Lindsay was handpicked by Kurtz. He had considered the guy a friend.

Still, it's hard to argue that there wasn't a fair dinkum of founder's syndrome afflicting CFI in Kurtz's later years. Rolling CSICOP and CSH up into one big spitball of doubt just left the resulting mass directionless and moribund.

[rug]

6. The founding program was right on the mark.

It looks like in 2010, with all the hype about Harris et al., that some of them got swept up in the notion that atheism is more that just what it is, simple nonbelief in god(s), nothing more or less. There are many paths to that state of nonbelief that do not even require skepticism or inquiry, or secularism for that matter, things that the CFI stood for. The irony is that the ideas that accreted to atheism then bore a lot of traits of ideology, which Kurz spent his life opposing.

Too bad. Well, it's only been four years. Maybe things will turn around.