Abstract
In this paper I analyzed the video called “The God Drug” published at www.youtube.com where the director of the video defends his idea of an atheist comparing religion to illegal drugs like weed, ecstasy, and lsd. In the video we can see short sentences describing each scene where the scenes were grabbed from different films or pictures that can be found on www.google.com. The director explains on his or her youtube channel that the name shown is not real because he has been threatened to death. Endangering his or her life the director expresses a different point of view than does that believe in an almighty creator of the universe. Analyzing the video on how he or she uses the strengths or weaknesses on the author use of ethos, logos, and pathos it’s going to teach me more on these specific theme.
Keywords: Lysergic acid diethylamide
Visual and Rhetorical Analysis on “The God Drug”
Religion has been a part of this world since the beginning of times. We as human beings cannot accept things just as they are and try to find a reason for everything that surrounds us. Some believe in just one omniscient god and some believe in innumerable saints. As part of this world we are pushed to form part of the many religions that exist and most of the time it goes through tradition of a person’s family or society.
In the video that I’m about to analyze the director is an atheist who compares god to drugs like weed, ecstasy, or lsd. As you see the video you can tell that it is an atheist movement that tries to make a theist to doubt about their god or goddesses. We can also point that the video is especially designated for the people that are really religious and can be categorized as addicts to it by the way they act and how they make religion not only being part of their lives but even more important too.
At the beginning of the video the director uses pathos to get in the viewer’s mind emotionally telling the audience “I’ve gotten drunk, I’ve smoked weed, I’ve taken ecstasy, I’ve dropped acid” pausing for a second and then getting to another slide with the question “have you ever done God?” with this strong comments it captures anyone attention and then it goes on with some of the examples on how being “on God” compares to the things that happen when someone uses other kind of drugs.
On the second part of the video the director uses ethos to put examples on how religion can be similar to drugs by showing pictures on how people sometimes hear, see, or feel things related to God. The pictures shown are realistic and some have been on the news described as miracles that show prove that god exists, but in the video they show the images as some of the things that happen under the influence of illegal drugs.
Finally the director uses logos with the scenes that he uses from 2 different movies Domino and Black Hawk Down. This is used as evidence that religion is bad or wrong because it shows some warscenes caused by religion and soldiers praying on top of the mountains than going to war and kill for what they believe. With these scenes it also captures some pathos along its way because the strong scenes of war. I really think that the video missed more stuff like this because it was very hard to find the rhetorical part of logo on the whole video and what I found wasn’t really what I was looking for but it was something related to logos.
When analyzing the text and the visual used altogether we can come to the conclusion that the visuals are the main focus since it’s a video. Although both of them complement each other very well the visual takes the viewer to another dimension where he or she can find some of the answers that have been wondering in their minds involving the existence of a God, the visual definitely cover all those blank spaces that are not shown in the text because of the images used and the music really gets you into the video too.
The analysis of this video has really taught me how to understand a video because of the questions I had to answer during this analysis.The video made me think about all of this and change somehow my way of looking to religions. I think that the topic is really interesting and hope to find a better source for the next assignment because this video was home-made and was not really professional as I would have liked to be. The director’s weaknesses are more than the strengths but he needs to practice more on the text that he uses because I feel there is some text missing in some parts of the video.
