Religulous
I watched Bill Maher’s Religulous tonight. Thanks Jay. I’m not sure why. I figured it would be a steaming pile of narcissistic slop and it was, but it wasn’t quite as odoriferous as I expected and despite the way it may seem after reading these words I did enjoy it. I actually found myself chuckling here or there, even laughing out loud on the bits about Scientology, Mormons, and Islam. It is a strange fact though there does seem to be a direct proportion between the time spent lampooning a particular religion and the tendency of that religion to strike back either legally or physically. Basically Maher travels around the world speaking with a few experts and religious scholars, but mostly everyday men and women and a handful of crackpots. He shows himself to be a master at putting people at ease as he manages to poke fun of their most closely held beliefs. A technique he is especially skillful of is coaxing a deer in the headlight look from his subjects. He is honest, at least in the conduct of the interviews. He is straight up with everyone he encounters with just what he believes and doesn’t try any kind of trickery to elicit certain responses. At least from what we see in the doc. To be cynical though, and I can’t help it when Bill Maher is the subject, that is the magic of editing. We only see what he wants us to see and in the order that he wants us to see it. A short little aside about the editing, there is no real structure I could discern to the doc. It just seems to jump around from topic to topic. There was no thread linking it all together, just a beginning, bunch of facts, more facts, and an ending. He should have let my buddy Stephen Lackey edit it. He can find some kind of narrative in anything. Still though he was more fair than I expected him to be and he was always polite and courteous so I give him credit for that.
The biggest curse of the thing is that it’s just the same old arguments; it doesn’t add anything new to the dialog. He basically just goes out and finds some people that he knows will do or say something silly if they have a camera on them long enough and a handful of people that agree with him. He’s preaching to the choir, and while I’m sure the choir will find it amusing he’s getting no closer to the goal he professes in the wind up, which is to get people to drop religion as an old outdated institution that mankind can’t afford to waste effort on any more.
Maher comes across as a straight out atheist, nothing wrong with that, I’m an atheist. But at the same time he is always referencing his doubt as well. He talks about his doubt, but at the same time he is certain that religion is at best a silly eccentricity and more likely a crutch that believers cling to keep from seeing the world as it really is. He brings up the old shibboleth that more blood has been shed in the name of religion than any other influence. After the twentieth century I’m not sure that really hold up any more or not, but granting that it’s true it still missing the point. Religions are institutions of man, kind of an obvious point for an atheist I would think. Mankind has a pretty good track record for finding reasons to kill, maim and enslave with or without religion. For every war fought in the name of God, for every instance of a Catholic priest buggering alter boys you have to weigh the good that religion has brought to the world. It’s an inescapable fact that Western Civilization has been the most liberating force in history and along with some ideas that the Greeks came up with a long time ago the pillars of that civilization are the Judeo-Christian creed. Not to mention the fact that most people find some kind of religion comforting, something I don’t understand but can’t deny.
Just as obvious as it is to me that there is no God it is obvious to many more that God exists. People I respect, love and I know are a lot smarter than me believe in God. I don’t understand it, but I’m not ready to call them all fools. Maher is though. Maher seems to believe that getting rid of religion would rid the world of all of the corruption and evil that can be laid at its feet, but the corruption and evil doesn’t come from religion it comes from man. As an atheist where else could I believe it comes from? Without it man would find some other avenue to express it. He claims that doubt is the only hope for the world, he prescribes doubt for everyone else but he expresses none himself. His closing argument is that mankind’s thirst for religion will lead to our destruction. I guess I’m just not as pessimistic as Maher. I admit I find myself extremely pessimistic about the coming years, but if you plot the welfare of man across our history the trend-line is unmistakably on an upward trend, there are bumps and dips but over the millennia it is up, up and up to such and extent that if the rest of our lives and our children’s lives were spent in pure misery they would still only represent a small dip in the total history of man.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
2 Responses to “Religulous”
Comments are closed.
Well, I watched it too, and I was not as impressed as I would have hoped. I agree with your take on his actual choice of topics. I also feel like he was too soft on most of the folks he interviewed. I am afraid i dont agree with your take on his doubt. I liked that fact that he wants people to stop blindly believing because its been taught and passed down through generations, but that people should learn to think for themselves and in so doing come to logical conclusions. If there is a god then I dont know him, and as Maher says in a very pointed statement, I dont believe in god because logically my mind tells me it is impossible and those people that do believe do not posses some power or faculty that i do not.
Your right about doubt, and I guess I have to admit that he is right about it as well, it just ind of stuck in my craw that he would ask everyone else to be doubtful but he wasn’t going to express any himself.