Preamble

I give this a 3/10 not because it's "bad", but for specific reasons. I initially gave this a 6/10, but after more thinking, I realized I feel 3/10 about what the movie is portraying and doing. I re-evaluated my rating, and started out with 5/10 (neutral), working my way up/down based on things I like/dislike about what I noticed was shown (and not shown), which I'll share below.

Since this movie says it's based on a true story, I'm giving 2 opinions for each point/scene I mention

• A = my opinion if the portrayal is mostly accurate to the true story

• B = my opinion if the portrayal is mainly a decision by the screenwriter & director to put in the film

Points

To save time and keep this focused, I'll mention only 3 big things I noticed

• Lee, the husband/father, is shown asserting his beliefs of atheism to his daughter in a way that "leads" (influences) her, which his wife, Leslie, gets upset about, due to an implied agreement they had about giving their daughter free choice of belief. There are several other scenes depicting Lee as condescending, intolerant, and generally unpleasant while he's an atheist, and then at the end of the movie when he turns Catholic/Christian, he's all-of-a-sudden kinder, more accepting, and more loving.

  • A: Lee's behaviour has nothing to do with beliefs or religions, but is simply due to his and Leslie's lack of effective communication skills in how to resolve differences of opinion and discomforts in a relationship. If they spoke in NVC (Nonviolent communication) or similar languages (like CNC, Core Needs Communication, a system I created based on NVC), then Lee and Leslie's relationship would've been perfectly fine, in fact it would've been even more loving.
  • B: I dislike the way these scenes were laid out, because I think it's an attempt to paint a negative image of atheists, and contrast this against a positive image of Catholics/Christians. Some might say this is "propaganda" or "brainwashing", and I can understand why. From my cognitive science background, I can say this is a manipulative way of portraying things in either direction, because for one, regardless of whether or not people use their beliefs as justifications, behaviour is completely separate from beliefs about religion.
    • And for two, it portrays atheists as "mean, condescending, intolerant" people, and Catholics/Christians as "kind, loving, caring" people, when there is 0 connection between religion and "meanness or kindness" (people on both sides are both mean and kind, depending on the person & situation), and it polarizes the audience between theism and atheism, when there's actually a middleground: agnostic (which I am); the film briefly mentions Dr. Waters is agnostic, but never mentions anything else about it

• Various people throughout the movie make certain false statements with confidence that nobody else in the movie points out as being nonsensical. For example, I think Leslie says "Faith is the evidence of that which we cannot see"; this is oxymoronic and makes 0 sense, because faith is confidence in the absence of evidence. Another example is the movie psychologist, Dr. Waters, saying with 100% certainty "what you're proposing is completely impossible", "Hallucinations are like dreams. They happen in individual minds. They don't spread like the common cold", and "...it's one thing to be mesmerized into making animal noises [but] it's quite another for 500 people to have the same dream. To be honest, that would be an even bigger miracle than the Resurrection itself"

  • A: Generalized statements like these are commonly used by cult leaders and others repeatedly to manipulate and brainwash others into believing whatever they want, but when you think about them critically, you realize they "sound good", but are completely false. The problem is most people aren't aware of or haven't researched the definitions of words like "evidence", or scientific fields like psychology, to be able to recognize when certain statements are misleading or not

    • For Dr. Waters saying "what you're proposing is completely impossible", I would not trust anything that someone asserts with 100% confidence, especially if they claim to be, or position themselves as, an expert in a field like psychology, when we as a civilization still don't fully understand the brain & mind, and how they work yet
    • For Dr. Waters saying "Hallucinations are like dreams. They happen in individual minds. They don't spread like the common cold", there's a lot of missing context not being said here. As far as I currently know:
      • Firstly, hallucinations are not like dreams, but are a confusion of the brain between imagination and sensory perception, where dreams happen while the brain is "sleeping" and is organizing the information/experiences it has collected during when it was "awake", so it's vastly different
      • Secondly, "They happen in individual minds. They don't spread like the common cold" is technically true, because hallucinations are not a viral infection, but they do spread in other ways. The movie does not address how many individual minds can "hallucinate" about the same thing, particularly when considering "group think" or "crowd psychology". One well-known category of examples of this is "The Mandela Effect".

  • B: I know movies must be short enough to retain an audiences attention, as well as fit within a time-scope of typically 1.5-2.5 hours (unless it's Lord of the Rings), so a lot of stuff has to be left out for this purpose, but there are key points that "disprove" or more accurately "support the nonexistence of" the Resurrection which are conspicuously left out, such as with Dr. Waters, "The Mandela Effect", as well as how hypnosis really works

• One thing mentioned by Dr. Waters, the movie psychologist, is "the father wound", which is not a psychology term, but a religious one.

  • A: I'm confused about why a supposedly agnostic psychologist would mention a religious term, instead of a psychology term, to describe Lee's behaviour
  • B: I think "the father wound" was clearly spoken and outlined with the intent for the audience to search up the meaning of this term (which I did), which to lead them into religious communities and websites (which I found) in the hopes that they would convert the audience by giving the audience the perception that they're doing their own research and coming to their own conclusions, when in fact they're being directed to biased sources

Conclusion

I did like how they showed various historical accounts, texts, and items, and some of the research and study behind them, but overall, this movie brings me back to the moment I rejected religion and decided to be an atheist for a time, because I asked simple questions, and people did not answer them, instead asserting that I must conclude their belief system is factual, simply because of a lack of evidence to disprove it. There are two terms I know for this:

1. The legal term: Argumentum ad ignorantiam (appeal to ignorance; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance ); a fallacy asserting that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false, or that a proposition is false because it has not yet been proven true

2. The other term: Evasion ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evasion_(ethics) ); an act that deceives by ignoring the question, acknowledging the question without answering it, questioning the question itself, attacking the question itself, attacking the person asking the question (ad hominem), refusing to answer with or without a reason, or stating a true statement that is irrelevant or leads to a false conclusion

I've had past experiences with people using methods to convince, persuade, or otherwise manipulate people into believing religious beliefs, and was very uncomfortable with them. Now, as a cognitive scientist who's learned a lot about psychology and neuroscience, I have more vocabulary to express why I was uncomfortable with them. People on the atheism side often use similar arguments, but I generally see neither group of people using effective communication skills to truly understand the other.

I used to be atheist, but now I'm agnostic, because I realized it doesn't matter what is factual or nonfactual. What matters is whether or not your thoughts and behaviours are creating comfort, happiness, and growth in yourself and others. That's it.

I'll share a quote I like from Marcus Aurelius:

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.