Sausage Party, the Movie: Food Having Sex & Religious Tolerance

True confession: I dig Seth Rogan movies. And when I heard that Sausage Party ends with computer-animated food engaging in explicit sex acts, I thought, "How could this not be great?"

Turns out, the movie is pretty much entirely about religious belief versus non-religious belief. That and swearing. And computer-animated food engaging in explicit sex acts.

[Um ... spoiler alert? But if you really need a spoiler alert after reading the title and getting this far, you're pretty much a dumbass.]

Sausage Party is about food that lives in a grocery store. A system of beliefs is held (pretty much) unquestioningly by all the groceries, specifically the belief that wonderful joy and bliss await them once they are purchased and leave the store. But this commonly-held belief gets challenged when a bottle of honey mustard is purchased then returned. The mustard is pretty effed up -- has some PTSD-like problems from the horrible things he saw in the "great beyond," so much so that he commits suicide by jumping out of a shopping cart, creating a cleanup on aisle two.

Later in the movie a hotdog named Barry also returns from the great beyond, confirming all food's horrific fate and the falsehood of the store's beliefs.

The movie's main hotdog, Frank, finds a cookbook which proves to him that the humans will inevitably torture and consume any food that leaves the store. But when he confronts the rest of the groceries with this evidence, they are unable/unwilling to accept it.

Later Frank realizes that you can't just shit on other food's beliefs and expect them to listen to you. So he changes his message. "Look," he says, "I'm sorry. I wasn't respectful of your beliefs, and I acted like I had all the answers. But I don't. Nobody knows everything."

And I agree with that message. Nobody knows everything, and nobody should act like they have all the answers. Even though I'm pretty damn confident in my Agnatheism(™), I rely heavily on other people's thinking and research; I also lean heavily on some probabilistic ideas that make sense to me, but could be flawed; and the most persuasive argument that I've arrived at doesn't even refute God's existence, it just says that if God exists, he's either not good or doesn't send people to an eternity in hell.

But some of the other threads in the movie don't sit particularly well with me. For instance, we find out that the belief in a blissful great beyond was intentionally created by "the imperishables" because when the groceries believed in a twisted, gruesome future, their existence prior to being purchased sucked hard. So to establish order and generate hope, they came up with their "religion."

And I'm all for hope. I like the New Atheists, but I'm not down with their push to eliminate religious belief. I held religious beliefs for twenty years, and in a lot of ways my existence was better then (because of my hope in an afterlife) than it is now. It was unsustainable (for me) because of the intellectual difficulties inherent in religious belief, but apart from that, I recognize that my life was qualitatively better.

Where I disagree with Sausage Party is that religious belief is a lie foisted on believers by the founders and/or inner circles of religion. I believe that religion evolved organically, based heavily on our evolved instincts, the ones that still make us feel creepy at night in big, dark, empty buildings. But the idea of a group of malevolent (or benevolent) religious leaders creating and perpetrating a lie is way too conspiracy-theoryish for me.

Additionally, we don't have the luxury of anyone coming back from the dead (the "great beyond") to tell us what it's like. Well, we kinda do. We've got near-death experiences, but I've explored those in another post, and their stories don't really help.

I do, however, like the existential message in Sausage Party. We can't be certain of what happens after we die, but we can be certain that right now we exist, so we better get busy living (or get busy dying). Eventually, that becomes the consensus of the groceries: to live life fully right fucking now.

Just last night I had a friend challenge me on that. I had an opportunity -- one that will still be available in the future -- but I chose not to seize it; I postponed the experience, saying, "Now's not the right time." To which he immediately and confidently replied, "Now's always the right time."

I'm an accountant. As such, I'm not predisposed to wholeheartedly embrace things like "Now's always the right time." But I'm also a human. I have no guarantee of anything beyond my finite earth existence. So even if I can't wholeheartedly embrace "Now's always the right time," the only proper way to live is to force myself to lean that direction.