The Blasphemy of The Invention of Lying: Give It a Second Look

You've never seen a movie like The Invention of Lying. This movie is a stunningly straightforward fable about a world where humanity has never evolved the ability to lie. In this world, people speak humorous, hurtful, and most importantly - honest - words. They tell each other when they're thinking of killing themselves; one waiter even informs his patron that he just tried a little of her drink before serving it to her. It is a world of absurdity and honesty. Do I need to mention, there may be spoilers ahead?

Ricky Gervais (you might know him as the boss from the UK version of The Office) plays Mark Bellison - the world's first liar. After evolving the ability to say something that "isn't," he realizes that he can create the world he wants for himself thanks to gullible humanity, who have yet to evolve the need to detect a liar. His lies range from the mundane ("My name is Doug") to the audacious ("I'm an Eskimo"). What caught my attention, however, and prompted me to write about the movie here is a rather large "lie" which Mark tells to his mother on her deathbed.

Facing an "eternity of nothingness" and nihilism, his mother expresses her fear of an empty afterlife. Quickly, Mark makes up a fabulous lie. He tells her that she's wrong about what happens when you die. He tells her that where she is about to go, she will see family who have passed on, and there won't be any pain or sadness. He tells her that there will be only love and happiness and that everyone gets a mansion and gets to be young again.

After his mother dies, the doctors beg Mark to tell them more about what happens when they die. "I get to see my mother again!" remarks one of the nurses. Soon, Mark has a following, and all of humanity want him to explain metaphysics, theology, and the afterlife to them. Eventually, Mark has to explain a whole system of who God is ("There's a man in the sky who controls everything") and what sends a person to "the bad place," ("Three awful crimes like rape or murder"). Mark Bellison also apparently favors a quasi-Calvinistic God who "decides who goes to the good place and who goes to the bad place; he also decides who lives and who dies." He explains that this man in the sky causes all natural disasters and all sicknesses. The people react with violent anger: one man screams out, "I say [expletive] the man that lives in the sky!" A woman says, "We need to stop that evil [expletive] before he kills us all!" (We certainly get a taste of what the natural man thinks of a sovereign God now, don't we?)

He then goes on to explain that the man in the sky is also responsible for all the good things that happen to us, as well. The people conclude, then, from Mark's "revelation" to them that life is "kind of a test." A montage of hilarious newspaper headlines then follow: "FINALLY - A Reason to be Good," "Man in Sky Continues to Give AIDS to Babies," "Man in Sky Murders Forty Thousand With Tsunami," and my personal favorite, "Man in Sky Allows Woman to Live to 104 Years."

My first reaction to the film was outrage at the film's blasphemous concept. I mean, clearly the film is presenting God as a fiction which is only made up by liars. I stewed about it for a couple of days, but then something occurred to me. The film is blatantly telling us something about the writers of the film: they don't believe that God is real. That's obvious. But it tells us something even more important about the atheistic worldview. By the film's own admission, the atheistic worldview is inadequate to address the true needs of humanity. Give the atheistic worldview, according to the film, people have no reason to be good. Given the atheistic worldview, according to the film, people have no satisfying way of bravely facing death.

I would have preferred that the filmmakers had steered away from doing religious satire altogether, but there are definitely layers on this onion that can be peeled back. What one finds is the subjective truth that the filmmakers are biased against God, but one also finds the objective truth about humanity that they need God in order to be full, good, and complete persons.

Also, I couldn't help but laugh, wondering how many arminians in the theatre got mad at the man in the sky when they found out that he controls everything. Oh, how I laughed. Like I said, you've never seen a film like it before.