Posted on 10/03/2008 1:28:38 PM PDT by nickcarraway
She laughed.
I had invited Cheryl Hall to the screening of “Religulous” to get a faith-based reaction to comedian Bill Maher's diatribe on the divine. Hall's credentials: longtime member of the United Methodist Women and faithful San Diego churchgoer whose husband teaches a weekly Bible study class.
Surely, she would be offended at roasting religion as if it were a Hollywood has-been.
But she laughed. Several times.
Her defense: “I think God has a sense of humor.” And then she added: “If his point was to make religion look ridiculous, then he did a very good job.”
It did not, however, make her lose her religion. Nor did it leave her feeling educated, which isn't exactly high praise for a documentary.
Maher's “Religulous” isn't really a documentary so much as it's propaganda. Funny at times. Mocking often. Certainly clever. But in the end, his fervor unravels into a fire-and-brimstone conversion message for the other team.
“The plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live,” Maher says in a melodramatic finish that is as smarmy as any late-night cable TV evangelist.
Anyone familiar with Maher's take-no-prisoners style – his stand-up work, the defunct “Politically Incorrect” TV show and currently HBO's “Real Time with Bill Maher” – knows what to expect. It's comedy by cannibalism: He eats their lunch while the hapless victims struggle for a comeback.
Maher tells us in “Religulous” that he was a church dropout as a young teenager, drifting from doubt to dismissal. But there's a zeal in this movie that goes beyond his deadpan style. It's as if this film is his personal crusade to out religion as, in his words, “detrimental to the progress of humanity.”
With the help of “Borat” director Larry Charles, Maher seeks out the least among them, coming up mostly with caricatures of religion – like the Bible theme park in Florida or the television preacher who wears lizard-skin shoes and gold bling. Then the comic lampoons, guts and serves his prey up for the world's snickers.
“The people want you to look well,” says the preacher in the pin-striped finery.
“That's what pimps say about their women,” says Maher.
The preacher tells of counseling a love-struck man to channel that passion toward religion. “ 'Turn that to God and see what happens,' ” he says he told the man.
Maher follows up with footage of a suicide bomber ramming another vehicle and blowing them both up in a fiery ball.
When the head of a ministry that tries to change homosexuals tells him that nobody is born gay, Maher retorts: “Have you met Little Richard?”
He pushes and pushes. How can anyone possibly believe the Bible? A talking snake? A man swallowed by a big fish? “Complete bull----,” he says.
Absent from “Religulous” are the charities, hospitals, soup kitchens and shelters spawned by faith. Absent, too, for the most part, are the best and the brightest of the standard bearers. They wouldn't suit his purposes.
In the final minutes of the film, when he launches into his sermon on the mound of dirt in Israel, the manipulation is blatant. “Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking,” he rants. It is a call to arms for anti-religion forces to “come out of the closet and assert themselves.”
Suddenly, whatever meaningful points he made – from the divisions created by fundamentalism to the shocking violence of extremism – are overtaken by the realization that Maher has an agenda beyond entertainment.
“That's it,” Maher tells us. “Grow up or die.”
God, apparently, doesn't have a lock on fanatics.
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Obama Says A Baby Is A Punishment
Obama: “If they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”
Talking snakes and man-swallowing fish are more believable than large portions of the liberal canon, including anthropogenic Global Warming and embryonic stem cells holding "great promise."
I’m looking forward to box office receipt numbers.
Bill Maher: Sad and Bitter Old Man Syndrome
Nuff said!
Calling him a waste of humanity is an insult to waste....
indeed...
I saw a trailer...The Jesus figure asks Bill: What if you’re wrong? Bill’s answer: “What if YOU’RE wrong...??”
Well ummm Bill, no harm no foul, but again back to the original question: What if YOU’RE wrong Bill?
It’s for eternity Bill.
I met Maher over the course of a weekend at a wedding 20 or so years ago. He was an unpleasant individual to be around, constantly making jokes at other peoples’ expense and quite taken with himself and his burgeoning celebrity status. I recall him as cruelly intelligent and sarcastic and last saw him with his face in a frisbee sized pile of cocaine.
Darwinian evolution works for me. And it's fine with me that Darwin himself had limitations on what he could understand, other scientists have come forward to advance the theories beyond what he could know or imagine. I don't hold Darwin up to the test that religious people hold their prophets, that either someone is 100% right, or 100% wrong. People know what they are capable of knowing, and others come along and expand on that.
And you know that, how?
I guess I'm presuming. Perhaps you have some evidence that apes, dogs, or even bacteria (or anything in between) have a sense that their consciousness is important enough to last beyond physical death of their bodies?
No more than you do.
Then, can you join me in the presumption that animals have no ‘souls’? Or any sense that their sentience is as important to their species as ours seems to be to us?
How the heck did they those animal interviews and why is this not in National Geographic?
I honestly do not know one way or the other. That’s why I wouldn’t presume to know one way or the other.
LOL! Care to try again? ;^)
Thanks for your reply.
I wish you felt differently because it seems life would have no real purpose and you miss out on oh so much more not knowing God. And so very depressing never having that God and Jesus to go through the bad times with you.
“What a friend we have in Jesus” is more true than an unbeliever could ever understand since that resource is not available to those unbelievers. There has to be belief and the seeking of help from above before God enters a person’s life. So, therefore, an unbeliever of course would have no physical or spiritual proof of a God.
Here is a website you could visit that you might find very interesting - www.doesgodexist.org
John Clayton was also an atheist and set about to prove the Bible wrong through his knowledge of science. The site has all kind of scientific data, articles and his personal story of what he found. I attended a seminar he gave and I have never heard more interesting explanations of the proofs of creation by science. Especially interesting to me were the odds of our world being created by the “Big Bang” theory.
How the heck did they those animal interviews and why is this not in National Geographic?
Name ANYTHING that any animal species does that indicates that it has even the slightest concept of an afterlife. Even the very earliest humans didn't leave such evidence. It was only way after people started to develop agriculture that they would bury the dead with objects. It was agriculture that let them invent religion.
And I don't presume to know one way or the other. I have the same evidence that everyone else has available, which is nothing. For people who have chosen a religion, it's all about what set of guesses that someone else has written that they choose to have faith in, because none of it is objectively verifiable. I simple choose to not go with any of them.
Interesting. I was an infant adoptee, and I wish I had a nickel for every liberal who would have aborted me, because they would have presumed my life to have no useful purpose. There are a lot of people out there who have made value judgements about the lives of others just because those lives are different from theirs.
As far as Mr. Clayton is concerned, there is nobody more honored in religion than a convert. I guess I'm a convert from being a religious person, having grown up Catholic, and spent some time in a Buddhist tradition, the Episcopal church, and finally, the Bahai faith. It's all just sets of rituals to make people feel comfortable about life's uncertainties.
Anyway, I plan to see the film to evaluate whether it's mostly Christian bashing, or to see if it treats other Western faith traditions in the same manner. I understand that this film does not take on Eastern religious traditions, but since the average American is not familiar with most of the practices of those faiths, it would not be meaningful to the target audience. I've seen a lot of well-deserved derision of Muslim practices here on FR, look up the threads on the 2012 London Olympics toilets not facing Mecca, for instance. But I find certain Orthodox Jewish practices to be equally strange, and there are Christian traditions that seem to have nothing to do with helping an omnipotent being run a universe.
I think each of us can look at any religion that is not our own, and often find great weirdness in it. The essense of comedy is to take things that happen in everyday life, point out the inherent absurdities in the situation, and let people laugh at it. I'm hoping that this is what the movie is about, and I'll be glad to come back here to give some thoughts on it.
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