The word "god" is one of those that we throw around a lot, as a culture, without ever rigorously defining it. This isn't inherently a bad thing; we refuse to rigorously define practically all the nouns we use. But in the context of this kind of conversation, that lack of definition can trip us up.

Christians tend to have a very specific definition of "god," and they call it "God." I'm gonna stick with the capital-G spelling to refer to the more-or-less consistent Christian idea of the deity, which is close enough to the Jewish and Muslim ideas of the deity for purposes of discussion, and because otherwise I'll get sick of typing God/G-d/Allah.

It's a fairly easy proposition to debate the existence of God, because God is well defined for those people who believe in Him. The Christian/Jewish/Muslim God is fundamentally like us, or I guess more to the point we are held to be fundamentally like Him. God has opinions, God has likes and dislikes, God has intentions and ambitions and emotions. God can be happy or sad. Whether you hold the opinion that God created us in His image, or whether you think we invented God to be like us, the net result is the same: God is fundamentally a person.

Lots of people have trouble believing in that. I'm one of them. I don't know if I can go so far as to say I definitively don't believe in that notion, but I'm so far down the path of "I don't know" that I'm effectively a non-believer.

But when we start talking not about God but about god, I get fuzzy.

A lot of non-Christian/Jewish/Muslim/whatever belief systems postulate that multiple gods exist, and that they're all jerks, basically. From our lofty perch at the zenith of all human achievement we can look down and tsk-tsk at those belief systems, dismissing them as naive rationalizations of the fact that life is nasty, brutish and short. Crops all died? The rain god is angry. Another tribe burned our village? The war god is angry. Jaguar ate my sister? The jaguar god is … hungry. Something. Life sucks, so we conclude that there must be some malevolent, or at least mercurial, intelligence directing the myriad ways and means by which it sucks.

I call this the theology of paranoia. There are gods, and those fuckers are out to get us.

Personally? I find this philosophy a lot easier to buy into than the notion of a parental deity who loves all of us dearly but who lets that malaria thing have a pass anyway and who takes an inappropriate level of interest in just how much time I spend soaping up my privates in the shower.

Sure, we can get all reductionist on this shit. We can study hard and learn all about how climate works and come up with metaphors based on imaginary Chinese butterflies, but at the end of the day, it still all boils down to "dammit, sometimes it just don't rain." But this is the part where Pascal's wager comes into play. If you deeply, sincerely believe that sometimes it just doesn't rain and there's nothing you can do about it, but there are those who believe there's a rain god with a hardon for animal sacrifices … is it really all that unreasonable for you to toss a goat on the bonfire once a month? Couldn't hurt, right? I mean, it's stinky, and you're out one goat, but other than that, it's an easy precaution to take. And plus, it's something to do. Life without purpose is boring.

But what if we expand our definition of "god" even further? For all their differences, the God of Abraham and the rain god with the yen for overcooked mutton still have one fundamental thing in common: They're like us. They're rational beings, entities with minds. The choices we make in life influence the deity in some way. Burn a sheep and the rain god is pleased. Masturbate and God won't answer your prayers. There's a system, and there are rules, and all we have to do to get what we want all the time is to figure out what those rules are and play by them. We can map inputs to outputs in a way that makes logical sense to us, even if, like the rules governing what is and what isn't kosher, seems pretty arbitrary sometimes.

But what if god isn't like that? What if there is a god — some kind of entity that causes things to happen somehow — and it has a mind, but its mind works in ways that are so different from ours as to be totally incomprehensible? You sacrificed a sheep yesterday, and it rained. You sacrifice a sheep again today and it doesn't rain. Why? Because yesterday your sacrifice pleased god, and today it didn't. There's no simple, linear relationship between what you do and how god reacts, because god isn't like us.

Of course … how would that be different from there being no god at all? Maybe on a practical level it wouldn't. But it would remain the case that there is a deity out there, making the sun come up and the rain fall and the jaguars eat our sisters. There's just nothing we can do about it.

What if god exists, but it actively hates us?

What if god is an animal?

What if god is a plant?

It comes down to this: It's a fairly straightforward problem to subject Christianity, or any other organized belief system, to a sort of informal scientific method. Line up a set of if-then propositions and look for the fallacy. It's not a perfect test, obviously, because belief systems are mazes of twisty little passages, all alike. But it's possible, in the broad strokes, to say that "If what you believed is true, then this would be the case, only it's not, so you're wrong."

But even if your reasoning is both applicable and correct, the very best you've done is to invalidate that one belief system. You've convinced yourself that God, as defined by thus-and-such set of beliefs, cannot exist. You haven't convinced yourself that god cannot exist, any more than you've convinced yourself that all men are Socrates.

Your question, Dorkman, was what do we believe and why do we believe it.

I believe in awe. I believe the universe is a bigger, more wondrous place than the human mind will ever be able to comprehend. I believe that in my best moments, just before sunrise, when everything is quiet and still, I can occasionally catch a glimpse of the vastness and the beauty of the universe out of the corner of my mind's eye, not enough to understand it, but just enough to be aware that it's there.

I believe that certain truths are absolute. I believe it's impossible to construct a universe in which parallel lines in a plane never intersect and yet the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is equal to something other than pi. I believe that we have, through our reason and our imagination, discovered certain inviolable facts … and I believe this makes me sad. Because I believe I prefer to imagine infinite possibility than definitive, easily comprehensible truth.

But more than anything I believe that if the Christian God exists — or the Jewish one, or the Muslim one — I'll be intensely disappointed. Because I want to believe that there's more. I want to believe in the ineffable, in the infinite, in the incomprehensible. And if this whole thing, the whole entirety of existence, was thought up by an omniscient, omnipotent deity who, deep down, really isn't very different from me … sigh. That just seems like a waste of a perfectly good premise.

I want there to be a god. And I want that god to be a rhododendron a trillion trillion light-years across. And I don't ever, even in the fullness of deep time, want to understand it.

Aw, man. You guys went and made me think.

Trey puts it best. The four-friends-in-your-head format works really well, 'cause you guys have gotten into this groove of just talking about whatever the hell you feel like talking about. Maybe it's scene-specific comments, maybe it's discussion of a larger context, maybe it's a totally tangential rathole, but I dig it because it's organic like the best conversations I have with stupefyingly smart, slightly tipsy people.

On the other hand, I'd really love to geek out on the in-depth VFX stuff.

So … urr. I'm torn. Of course doing two commentaries would be great, but that's twice the work for you guys, and if you think I'm gonna start paying twice as much for the weekly download, you're nuts. Ahem.

But if I had to choose just one and only one … sigh. Yeah. Bring on the regulars. Your work is awesome, Mr. Zoic Guy Person, but I'm Sophie and you're the kid I just don't love as much. Now pardon me while I go schtup my neighbor and eat some cyanide.

(Also: Teague, did you just give away your IM address on a public forum? Stalkers ahoy, man.)

"The Professional."

Or "Leon" if you want, but I vote "The Professional" since it's the one I still have after lending my "Leon" DVD out and never getting it back.

I'm not a military guy, so I can't speak to veracity or whatever. But as a movie guy — er, guy who watches movies and dreams of making them — I'll say that "The Hurt Locker" never really clicked for me. And it was for reasons you guys did a good job of articulating, I think. It's structured like a character piece, but the characters are so tightly wound as to be inscrutable. Like you guys said, parts of the movie are so freakin' suspenseful I nearly gave myself a cramp while I was watching it. And the bit with the Capri Sun was really nice. But overall, as a film … I've seen better. Seen worse too, but I've seen better.

Here's my thing about the Iraq war: "Apocalypse Now" was released in 1979, but production started on it in 1976, less than a year after the fall of Saigon. We're now nearly seven years past the official "end of major combat operations" in Iraq, or whatever you want to call it, but I don't think anybody right now can unambiguously state whether we've won or lost. I think that lack of a definitive conclusion one way or the other makes it hard for anybody to tell a story that's in the time and place of the Iraq war without being about the time and place of the Iraq war. I think "The Hurt Locker" did about as good a job as any film I know of being set in Iraq but not specifically about Iraq, but it was still tied down by geopolitics.

If it'd been up to me, I'd rather the whole subplot with the kid, Beckham, had been cut. Or, contrariwise, I wish it'd been a breaking point for James of some kind. Instead, it seemed to me that James got obsessed with the kid and made a series of, like, criminally bad choices because of it, and then … well, life goes on. I wanted to see some consequences from that, on a character level if not on a plot level.

Anyway, yeah. Good commentary.

Oh, and hey: a few years back I got to attend a private screening of "Gunner Palace" that Jon Powers held while he was promoting War Kids Relief. Matt's absolutely right: It's a film worth watching.

Trey, my guy-on-the-Internet-I'd-like-to-call-friend, you're not wrong. She chain-snake-trapped me for about three months. Oh, the drama.

And I'm tickled to death by the notion of somebody googling up World of Warcraft jargon so as not to seem uncool.

Oh for crying out loud.

Did anybody here not play a Tauren hunter?

To be honest, I kinda never liked this film all that much. I didn't hate it or anything; it just didn't click for me. Probably a combination of minor factors that all added up to "yeah, not for me."

Which is disappointing, 'cause I read the novel as a kid and loved it. I picked it up during my "stars on the cover equals aliens equals crazy delicious" phase, and it wasn't at all what I'd been expecting, but I dug it anyway. But when the movie hit it just didn't light me on fire.

So this is one of the ones I've been listening to sans movie. But I think I'll put it on my Netflix and give it another chance.

On another matter: Tauren hunters represent! I'm a recovering World of Warcraft player myself — one day at a time, baby — and now I'm all tempted to dive back in.

Best newspaper-headline-style summary of "2001" I ever heard:

'Astronaut battles computer, becomes giant baby'

Ohgoddammit. The correct answer is "Oh, you should get a Facebook page, Jeff! I'd totally be your friend! And we'd play Mafia Wars or whatever Facebook people do."

And then I'd be all "Oh, no, no, you don't want to be friends with somebody as plain and dull as me."

And you'd be all, "I don't think you're plain. In fact…" and you'd reach out and let my hair down, and take off my glasses, and the music would swell…

But you. You blew it. You're stuck going to the prom with that shallow cheerleader with the big boobs who always puts out, instead of sitting on the damp grass in the park with me and drinking champagne from the bottle you stole from your parents' fridge before you put your tuxedo jacket around me and I lean my head on your shoulder while we watch the sun rise over the mountains.

Wait. What were we talking about?

It's okay to be mean to me if you want. At least then I'd feel something.

cut cut cut

It has recently come to my attention that one of your fearless company has not see "Black Hawk Down."

This wants fixing.

Grr. South Park is one of those shows that really ought to be higher on my radar than it is. They serve it up online for free, for crying out loud. But for some reason, I find myself spending months totally unaware that it exists, then going on all-day-Sunday archive binges to catch up on whole seasons.

Maybe I'm in the low-expectations crowd. I've always liked South Park but never loved it, if you know what I mean, so it never really lets me down. It's an amusing 22-and-a-half minutes or whatever.

Also? If Cartman's cover of "Poker Face" doesn't win some kinda Nobel peasy-prize, there's no God.