Somebody does a Master’s Thesis on…

Joss Whedon, Firefly, and Faith.

It would be fun to sit down with Whedon and try to get a bead on his views here. I think he is a self-described atheist. The trouble is that many “atheists” of his age bracket are as squishy as self-described Christians of the same age. I think “pagan” is generally a closer word, since huge numbers of Americans have a cloudy belief in something beyond this world, but feel as though trying to define or even understand it is arrogant. As near as I can tell, Whedon respects “faith” but, in the words of Shepherd Book, seems not to care what it is faith in. He seems, if you will, more Aristotelian than Platonic, interested in the concrete interactions of human beings (and starting there) than in big Platonic questions like What is Truth? How do we know what “the good” is? Is there anything beyond this world? etc.