New Venue
I’ve been invited to be a contributor at Secular Perspectives, a blog associated with the Washington Area Secular Humanists.
My first piece is up now, and begins thus:
Have you ever watched a movie where some people are stuck in a broom closet or a train compartment, and wondered “Gee, I wonder how they managed to fit the camera operator in there with all those people”?
The trick, of course, is that they don’t: there’s a set with four walls that make the closet, and they remove one of the walls to allow the camera to shoot the scene. Then they can replace that wall and remove a different one, to shoot the scene from another angle.
All of these pieces of film are then edited together so that as you’re watching the movie as it cuts back and forth from one shot to the next, you’re also seeing scenery and props jumping in and out of existence (with the occasional revealing mistake — glasses inexplicably filling up, cigarettes magically growing longer and shorter, and so forth).
A similar phenomenon goes on in arguments and claims about gods.