I enjoyed writing my CRAP Alert post yesterday. Very cathartic. But there are some serious points in it and while I might be overstating the case when I spell them out here, I think it’s worth doing just to be clear.

The truth is I genuinely do support the right of people to publish this kind of information. I am against pretty much all forms of censorship and am very much in favour of giving people good information so that they can make an informed decision themselves.

Ever since I found it a few years ago I have been very impressed with the CAP Alert website. The “American Culture Ministry” owns it and their plan is to review films for objectionable content. In this context, “objectionable” means anything that does not fit in with their fairly strict interpretation of the Bible. They claim that their reviews are objective¹ as they use the WISDOM scale². I absolutely support the rights of groups such as this to take all the fun out of entertainment.

I found this interesting article that “demolishe[s] the myth that faith strengthens society.”

While we’re frequently told that religion provides a moral basis for a civillised society, the study found “that secular societies have lower rates of violence and teenage pregnancy than societies where many people profess belief in God.”

How can that be?

“Consciously or subconsciously, those who are “born again” or “chosen” have diminished respect for others who do not share their sect or their faith. Convinced that only the Bible offers “truth”, they lose their intellectual curiosity and their ability to reason. Their priority becomes not the world they live in but themselves.”

This is incredible. And I don’t use the word lightly.

The site in question is the CAP Entertainment Media Analysis Reports. Here you can find hundreds of “reviews” of movies and ratings of how well they conform to one interpretation of good Christian values. They claim that it’s objective but there are a number of opinions about the faith that would not be shared by all.

I think pretty much all of my favourite films do very badly on their scale. I have not checked through all of them yet but two of the best ones so far are for The Incredibles and The Passion of the Christ. They both score roughly the same, yet the former, a typical Pixar movie with all those hallmarks that Disney films used to have, has “…behavioral, moral and value implantation dangers” while the latter, despite depicting a man being nailed to a cross, “…is [only] a movie.”