“Religulous,” Maher’s documentary film attacking religion, is not exactly breaking attendance records nationwide.  New as it is, it comes in close to last among the movies that are showing across the country.  When I saw it recently, there were about a dozen people in a theater that seats several hundred.  An occasional titter provided the only evidence that this was intended as a funny movie.  Sure, the movie does provide some laughs, but as you will see, they are easy laughs that score no real points against Maher’s intended target.

The film begins with Maher standing at Megiddo, which is allegedly the launching pad for Armageddon.  Here we get an unsubtle introduction to one of Maher’s central themes: people are going to blow up the world in the name of God.   Maher, however, cannot find anyone to actually say that.  The best he can do is go to tourist sites where harmless middle-aged people say they think we may be living in the last days.  Maher seeks to make the very strained point that these are Christian Bin Ladens who would stop at nothing to usher in the Second Coming of Christ.

Maher’s stance in the film alternates between feigned investigative neutrality and unconcealed anti-religious bigotry.  At times he says he is an agnostic, who simply holds the rational position that he doesn’t know what comes after death.   But if you don’t know whether there is an afterlife, even if you have no reason to believe in it, you can hardly attack it with the zeal that Maher brings to this project.  I don’t believe in unicorns, because there is no evidence for them, but I haven’t written any books called “The Unicorn Delusion” or “Unicorns are Not Great” or made any documentaries denouncing unicorns.  Maher’s agnosticism is clearly a pose.  Like Christopher Hitchens, he is an “anti-theist” who hates the Christian God.  And the main reason seems to be, as Maher himself says at one point, that this God has rules that interfere with Maher’s sex life.

Maher scores his best points when he is interviewing certified weirdos and borderline lunatics, like a South American fellow named Jesus who claims, perhaps partly on the basis of the shared name, that he is the second coming of Jesus Christ.  Maher does not have to work very hard to make us chuckle at this self-satisfied buffoon.  Maher is equally effective with the guy who thinks smoking pot leads to God, even if, as the man sheepishly admits, it also leads to memory loss and frankly fries your brain.  Maher does not have to look very far to find a couple of Muslim crackpots, one of whom—to Maher’s pretended outrage—refuses to condemn the fatwa on Salman Rushdie.  And then there is Maher’s encounter, which I need not go into, with a rabbi who denies the Holocaust and apparently holds the distinction of being Iranian prime minister Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s favorite Jew.  Finally there are the televangelists whose opulence, money-grubbing and highly-publicized scandals make for predictable and easy targets.

You get the picture: Maher is in search of weak opponents that he can embarrass.  Still, it’s remarkable how many of them get the better of him.  On one occasion Maher interviews a Jesus actor at a Holy Land Experience who seems like a carefully selected dummy.   But when Maher asks him to explain the Trinity, the actor says it can be understood in the same way that water appears in three quite different forms: in a solid form, as ice; in liquid form, as water; and in the gaseous form of water vapor.  Maher is completely stumped by this and rendered speechless.  In another segment, Maher talks to some blue collar guys worshipping at a Trucker’s Chapel in Raleigh, North Carolina.  They cannot answer all his questions, but one says that he used to be a drug addict and “I gave all that up when I got saved.”  At the end of the discussion the truckers hold hands and pray for Maher.  This is the sole moving moment in the film, and in a way that Maher doesn’t realize, it raises these simple people entirely above his snide sophistication.

The only intelligent believers who are interviewed are geneticist Francis Collins and Father George Coyne, former head of the Vatican Observatory.  Both of them are given only a few seconds, for fear that they might undermine Maher’s big theme that religious people are suffering from a kind of mental illness.  Actually Maher’s points—that there is no historical evidence for Jesus, that the main themes of Christianity are all derived from other ancient religions, that miracles are impossible, that religion is responsible for the mass murders of history—are all highly debatable. I would love to debate him on his show, and can easily show that Maher’s self-image as an intellectual is entirely bogus, but I doubt that Maher has the guts to take me up on this offer.  Ultimately he is an intellectual coward who relies on the argumentum ad ignorantium—the argument that relies on the ignorance of the audience.

So should you see “Religulous”?  Certainly, if you want to put a few dollars in Bill Maher’s pocket.  (Very few others are doing so.)  Besides, “Religulous” is good for some chuckles, even if some of the time you find yourself laughing not with Maher, but at him.

State Lawmakers Hear Prop. 8 Arguments

During a legislative hearing on Proposition 8 last week, Jennifer Roback Morse testified that the children of same-sex couples would be denied the fundamental right to have both a father and mother if the measure fails.
Morse testified that the opponents of Prop. 8, who argue the measure would deny same-sex couples the right to marry in California, have glossed over the impact same-sex marriage will have on children.

"The children of same-sex parents will be deprived of a relationship with at least one of their biological parents," Morse testified during an informational hearing before the Senate and Assembly Judiciary Committees at the Ronald Reagan Building in Los Angeles.

"Children are sometimes separated from one or both of their parents, but these situations are universally recognized as unavoidable tragedies. Deliberately depriving a child of his parents is grossly unjust and unspeakably cruel."

The hearing came several weeks before voters in California, Arizona and Florida will go the polls Nov. 4 to decide whether to approve constitutional amendments defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. A total of 27 other states have already passed similar measures.

California Senate Judiciary Committee Chair, Sen. Ellen Corbett, D-San Leandro, said the constitutionally required hearing is an important part of the public discussion that should precede the vote on any statewide initiative.

"While we are required to hold this informational hearing on Proposition 8, for years I have made it clear that our state Constitution should not tolerate unwarranted and unfair discrimination," said Assembly Judiciary Committee Chair Dave Jones, D-Sacramento. "Every adult Californian should be able to marry the person they love."

At the hearing, Morse testified Prop. 8 is a referendum on the meaning of marriage, a child-centered, gender-based institution that attaches fathers and mothers to each other and fathers and mothers to children.

Morse argued those who advocate for traditional marriage come from every ethnic group and religion in the world and share core beliefs that mothers and fathers are not interchangeable and that children are entitled to be born into a family with a mother and father.

"When we come to our senses 30 years from now and realize we have perpetrated an injustice against children, not a single child born fatherless or motherless in a same-sex marriage will get his missing parent back," Morse testified.

Troy Anderson

Maher's Disdain for Religion Is No Secret

Here’s a sampling of Bill Maher’s humor about religion, collected by the Catholic League on Religious and Civil Rights.

October 27, 2000 on “Politically Incorrect”: Christianity is grafted on paganism. And it’s all about a man in the sky who’s going to send you in a burning lake of fire if you screw up…What is scarier than drinking the man’s blood on Sunday? That’s not a spooky ritual? Like that’s not pagan? What can be more pagan than that?

February 15, 2005 on MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country”: We are a nation that is unenlightened because of religion. I do believe that. I think that religion stops people from thinking. I think it justifies crazies. I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative. I think religion is a neurological disorder…When you look at beliefs in such things as, do you go to heaven, or is there a devil, we have more in common with Turkey and Iran and Syria than we do with European nations and Canada and nations that, yes, I would consider more enlightened than us.

January 7, 2008, on the “Late Show with Conan O’Brien”: You can’t be a rational person six days of the week and put on a suit and make rational decisions and go to work and, on one day of the week, go to a building and think you’re drinking the blood of a 2,000 year old space god. That doesn’t make you a person of faith…That makes you a schizophrenic.

April 11, 2008 on “Real Time”: When the current Pope was in his previous Vatican job he wrote a letter instructing every Catholic bishop to keep the sex abuse of minors secret until the statute of limitations ran out. And that’s the church’s attitude, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”

Past Related Articles

Atheism, not Religion, is the Real Killer
http://www.tothesource.org/11_29_2006/11_29_2006.htm

Christopher Hitchens and the God Hypothesis
http://www.tothesource.org/5_1_2007/5_1_2007.htm

Professor Robionson Fires Back
http://www.tothesource.org/5_22_2007/5_22_2007.htm

Emotional Atheism
http://www.tothesource.org/6_19_2007/6_19_2007.htm

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