Peter Rodger's film Oh My God is something of his own search for answers to questions about God. I had a chance to talk with him about his film and the journey that it represented for him.

DM: Can you tell me a bit about your religious journey before the film and what led you to ask questions about God and religion?

PR: You know, the thing that happened to me, I grew up Anglican, Church of England—was baptized, went through the whole thing, was actually confirmed, the whole nine yards. I really enjoyed the sense of community in a fantastic Norman church in Kent in England, in a village rather like what you could perceive the Shire to be in Lord of the Rings, apart from the fact that it doesn't have any hobbits. It was just a wonderful upbringing. So I was sort of religiously indoctrinated into Christianity that way.

When I grew older, I wanted to take a step back and look objectively at my relationship with this entity that goes by the name of God and didn't really continue my religious practices I had as a child. Later on, when I sort of hit forty, I wanted to reconnect myself to my own personal relationship with the world I live in and wanted therefore to look at this entity that goes by the name of God from an objective point of view rather than from any religious connotations so I could grasp some of the things that make us frustrated—and specifically me frustrated—because of the polarity that seemed to be happening in the world. I call it the My God Is Greater Than Your God Syndrome, where some groups of people and some religious leaders and some religions around the world sort of take God for their own more and look down on other people. So I wanted to go around the world and find out what it meant from an objective point of view to the man on the street, to humankind.

The frustration was born probably out of 9/11 because it seemed to polarize the world suddenly. So I wanted to get as far back from that as possible. The behavior that seemed to emanate from the first part of this century I found childish and I found rather like school children, you know, the way grown men would fly airplanes into buildings and shout "God is great!" Or where you have young women and young men who blow themselves up, and innocent other people, to buy themselves a place in heaven; where you have the leader of the free world who in 2003 said to the BBC that he invaded Iraq because God told him to; where you have a country [Iran] whose constitution considers its Supreme Leader to be God's representative on Earth.

And if everybody's right, then nobody's right. So I wanted to go around the world and find out what it meant to people. So my journey—religiously—was to search and to see what I could come up with in different cultures, different countries, and different religions.

DM: While making the film, what was the most illuminating thing you found?

PR: The unity that lies between human beings and binds people together and is so misconstrued to tear us apart. And I found it surprising that on the ground level people are very, very—there's a lot of godliness within them, if you can use that word, and you can use that word because "god" is a word that can describe an entity that does bind people together in the humanity of it all. I found so much similarity between religions and also indigenous belief systems and also philosophies, like Buddhism, and Zen, and Shinto, and polytheistic religions and the three monotheistic religions. And I found the prophets of all three monotheistic religions were really just wonderfully enlightened human beings who were saying probably the same thing and it became a code of practice for many, and a very good one. And I often say—well, I believe you can almost boil it down to understand the true essence of what these prophets say and do for their religions is the same thing that binds humanity together and should be the code of practice that we should all use, and that is the Ten Commandments for Judaism, the Five Pillars of Islam for Muslims and for me really, the Sermon on the Mount for Christianity. And these are codes of practice which are commonplace and actually exist anyway innately when we're born.

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