CNN aired an hour long documentary about “inside the world of non-believers” tonight. I had mixed feelings about it.

The opening bit was about an atheist student whose parents announced that he was dead as far as they were concerned. It really exposed the inhumanity of fanatical Christianity. In general it portrayed atheists in a positive light.

Everything was framed in terms of religion and church. We got shown lots of atheists who are basically reconstructing church without Jesus — Jerry DeWitt and Greg Epstein, for instance, who may be very good guys, but stained glass windows and sermons and sitting in rows of pews on Sunday morning really isn’t atheism.

Atheism looks awfully white and male. There was a woman in the segment on the Harvard Humanists, and that was about it.

The commercials! Gah! CNN is next having a documentary on “Finding Jesus” — they aired one spot which was all about how scientists are using science to find fragments of the True Cross. BULLSHIT.

It ended rather querulously, wagging a finger at the in-your-face tactics of David Silverman, and once again, turning to church-like atheism as an alternative.

I think it was a net positive for atheism — it did consistently portray atheists as normal, decent people. It did not, however, reveal what was “inside the world of non-believers”. CNN was unable to see atheism as anything but a version of religion, and clearly sought out frames that would fit that perspective.

Apparently atheism is also something that only white men do. At the end they mentioned that atheism was part of religious diversity in America…but it would have been nice to have shown some of the diversity within atheism.