Religulous

A few nights ago I watched the Bill Maher movie "Religulous", his effort to sell the idea of doubt in established Christian religions.

I actually watched it twice; I didn't think my wife, a Christian, would want to watch a movie whose basic premise is that Christianity is based on fairy tales. After she got home I mentioned that I watched it so she wouldn't need to see it and she told me she wanted to see it. Surprise!

So I re-watched it since it was still in the DVD player.

The movie is basically a series of encounters with various religious settings in which Maher would ask reasonable (and inflammatory) questions of the faithful. These encounters include a "truck stop chapel", a Jesusland amusement park, the "creationist museum", and a jewish institute of science and some Hebrew word I can't recall, among others. Surprisingly the only places that apparently kicked him out were the property in front of a Mormon temple and the Vatican.

Maher made great pains to point out what he finds to be the absurd elements of the Christian religion. He found people who thought the Scientologists and their billion-year-old Thetan boogymen to be crazy while the same people thought talking snakes were fine. He highlighted tools that observing Jews use to jump through loopholes in their laws over the sabbath (self dialing telephones? Air powered wheelchairs?) because, according to them, if the lawgiver is infallible and there are loopholes, then He put them in there for a reason, such as letting them find ways around the laws.

Bill would point out fallacies of reasoning and bring up points such as how oddly similar the story of Jesus is to various deities that predate Jesus, such as the Egyptian Horus and the god Mithras. Every interview seemed to end up with an uneasy silence or two before a (usually) amicable parting; he even got a hug from a minister of a church for "ex-homosexuals" (the minister himself was a reformed homosexual married to a reformed lesbian).

The subjects in the movie never moved from their previous stance on religion, but this film did end up acting as a vehicle for voicing Bill Maher's idea that he doesn't have the answers but the people peddling religion will tell you they do have the answers, and they don't. This isn't a movie that will sway anyone away from their beliefs because faith inherently is unreasonable; as Bill pointed out, there's a cognitive dissonance where other people's ideas make them crazy (Thetans!) while the Christian belief in talking snakes and Great Flood waters and talking bushes on fire are perfectly reasonable, as is buying various inventions meant to keep you from breaking Jewish laws such as the phone that is perpectually dialing all the numbers and you stick a pencil into a hole to prevent it from dialing a button thus circumventing some rule about doing work that would prevent you from dialing a button.

If you're not religious this movie is a great high-altitude overview of some of the more insane ideas that people accept as truth despite being insane ideas. If you are religious, you will probably find elements that are amusing about other religions, but may get offended when your own personal faith is criticized in Maher's tornado-like swath of critiques. He doesn't perform his trademark humor; he simply asks questions worded in a way that almost dares the people he's talking to to not see what he sees as the silliness in their beliefs.

Religulous is entertaining for non-religious people and may be slightly amusing for people who do subscribe to a particular sect. I enjoyed it. My wife didn't protest too loudly. I can't wait to see another of Maher's documentaries.