In the 48-minute documentary, The Trouble With Atheism, level-headed host Rod Liddle presents the conflict in belief between Raging Atheists and Fairly Benign Christians. Perhaps he felt that Raging Atheists and Raging Christians would be a bit much for the average viewer, and of course, who could we root for if everyone is a jerk?

Other beliefs tend to be ignored, which was probably a good idea because they would just clutter up the battlefield and we’d have had a melee rather than a good old organized battle between two well-defined sides.

The toughest of the tough-guy atheists in the movie are Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins, who manage to hold their noses high in the air while still looking straight at the interviewer. They have a veneer of level-headedness on the topic of No-God-Absolutely, but their very snotty superiority could make even a level-headed atheist want to dash out to the nearest church for salvation.

A certain condescending half-smile is carried by those who regard themselves as superior to everyone else, which seems to be the case with Dawkins and Atkins. When asked about the immorality of atheists such as Chairman Mao who killed God-knows how many people, Atkins’ smile widened a bit and he replied that Mao believed in Confucianism. There’s a flimsy argument that a phony smile can’t cover up.

It does give one pause to think about the killing of 20 million people under the Soviet regime of atheist Josef Stalin, as well as Hitler’s ungodly murder of millions more. Which brings us to a strong point in the movie, that the rationalism of atheism apparently doesn’t give rise to an assumed superior morality but rather the opposite.

Liddle also included a couple of decidedly goofball atheists, one of them protesting in front of a church, probably feeling that he was doing the parishioners a favor by announcing the good news that God wasn’t at home today, and never would be. The other, Ellen Johnson, president of the American Atheists group, is so rude that it’s funny.

On the Christian side, Dr. John Polkinghorne is a physicist and an Anglican Priest. He’s as level-headed as they come. There are other Christian scientists, and ordinary humble priests and ministers, too. They seem like a bunch of nice guys.  They all tend to be gentle and kind and one assumes forgiving of the misguided Evangelical Atheists.

The Chosen Atheists are more exciting, though, for the same reasons we are drawn to gangster movies rather than to movies about Sunday School teachers who don’t sin.

We get a look at Darwin, the cornerstone of support for the Atheists, and his crumbling stance in the face of modern science. And there is a strong conclusion favoring the need for a God-given morality among we human beings. The atheists here use arguments that religion has killed millions of people, but that has had more to do with the politicizing of belief rather than the belief itself.

In the end, I can forgive Liddle for stacking the deck against the atheists, because they are the ones on the attack. If they would have remained in their own sphere, as I’m sure many atheists and Christians do, things would have been different. So different that we probably wouldn’t have had this fun and interesting movie.