Jon's Ego (in print form!)

Are All Fictional Atheists, By Definition, Wrong?

This is my chain of thoughts while sitting on the subway yesterday afternoon on my way to a practice:

• Maybe I’ll write a sketch or something about religion.
• But I don’t want to do something stupid with like bigots with southern accents or whatever.
• What’s another way?
• What if there are fictional characters and they recognize they’re fictional characters but disagree about whether they’re fictional characters in like a movie or a book. And they go to war. And it’s like religion or whatever.
• Wait. If I write these characters, then doesn’t that mean that the only “true” religion would be to worship me as a God?
• If I’m God, does that mean that every time I create a character who is, say, Christian, that that character is wrong because I created him and I didn’t create a son named Jesus who died for his sins?
• If that were the case, then that would mean that all fictional Christian characters (or characters of any other faith) in the history of…literature (?)…are wrong.
• Then that would mean that, say, those Christian movies starring Kirk Cameron are really just the story of someone reaffirming his or her incorrect faith. That’s depressing.
• But, wait. That’s wrong. Because anyone who would write one of those movies is probably Christian himself and that would mean that the writer intends for the fictional universe he’s created to have had a Jesus in it and, since he’s the creator, him thinking there’s a Jesus is the same as creating one.
• So that means that every fictional character ever who is written as thinking there is a God is right because every fictional character has a creator.
• And that means that every fictional atheist is wrong because they would believe that there is no creator or guiding hand and that’s exactly what the writer is.
• That’s sound, right?

I brought these ideas up with my improv team at practice and we agreed that, for a fictional Christian character to be right, the writer would have to intend for the universe they are creating to have a Jesus and also think that there is an afterlife. We proposed that this information go in scene descriptions.

INT. POLICE STATION - NIGHT

DET. GLENN MARKOS, 40s and haggard, stares at pictures of a brutal murder scene. His desk is a mess. Papers are strewn everywhere. Old, half filled coffee cups are pushed to the side. Also, this is a universe where Jesus, my son, died for everyone’s sins. When people in this script die, they arrive at a paradise where they are judged for the choices they made in their life.