Anti-religion fervor in 'Religulous' is over the top

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.

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.

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.

This is getting long, I'm going to have to add a bit of bold for clarity :)

"HOWEVER, all pagan religions, at some way or another, tend to point in the direction of a similar notion of the Godhead... Even if the above was not true, 5000 years of Judao-Christian religion, and the global reach of the "Big Three" ... demand a reasonable reply greater than an appeal to ignorance."

The figure of godhead is generally lacking in animist religions and various superstitious beliefs; and in pantheistic religions it is so dramatically different and more limited then the omnipotent / omniscient god of Abraham as to be a functionally different concept altogether.

Although we disagree on the exact nature of the universal supernatural beliefs, we do agree that there is in fact a universal (or nearly so) tendency in humanity to believe in the supernatural. That most of humanity would have an inborn tendency to believe in something, especially something that I would propose is nonexistent does indeed demand a reply.

I would propose that the universal thread among them, from complex structured religions all the way down to simple superstitious beliefs such as ghosts and fairies, is the belief in of the existence of "mysterious" intelligent agents as being the cause of what we generally now know to be natural, describable and even predictable phenomenon.

You can see this built in assumption of an intelligent agent as the cause of what are generally inanimate phenomenon by taking a greenhorn out camping. When the twigs start snapping due to the wind, what is their first reaction? That it was caused by the wind or that it was caused by "lions, tigers and bears"? Almost unfailingly, when an unknown phenomenon is encountered mans initial reaction is to assume intelligence as it's cause.

The tendency to assume an intelligent cause to a mysterious event, although more often wrong then right, has great survival value. You can jump and run from a wind snapped twig 1000 times with little ill effect. If however it really was a lion, tiger or bear, sticking around to find out could be disastrous.

Add to that the ability of religion to create strong social bonds which provide a powerful support structure for it's adherents and you have a strong formula for the propagation of a set of beliefs regardless of thier underlying Truth. They persist because they are useful, that is they can provide a survival advantage to those who hold them in some situations. In other situations, say being a Christian in Pagan Rome they can be extremely deleterious.

"Yes, if the notion of God were the equivalent of Smurfs, vampires, Frankenstein, and other such products of the imgination, then my argument would not have a leg to stand on."

And I hold that they are indeed equivalent. Just because ones imagination runs a bit farther then another's does not make the product of that imagination any more real. Your argument based on the stated nature of the J.C. God being evidence for it's existence only carries water if you accept that it exists in the first place.

"Sorry that I keep promising the argument but not yet delivering, .... Apologies in advance. I haven't yet tried to do this on something like an online forum."

None needed, you are doing an excellent job of laying the necessary foundations of why you think what you do and I only hope I can be as clear.

"...I am here to tell you, the notion of God is in a different category than Smurfs and flying spaghetti monsters. Those things are finite, God is infinite. Smurfs exist within creation, God exists outside of and is the origin of creation."

Not that I would argue for pantheism which I also reject, but it is logically impossible for God to be infinite without the creation also being part of God. If there is something that he is not, then that is a definalble limit and the very definition of finite. I don't see how you can have it any other way without rewriting the dictionary. The Judeo-Christian God is, as generally accepted by his followers, anything but infinite.

"But I believe that qualities attributed to God within the Judao-Christian tradition (but not limited to that tradition) are necessarily a priori grounds for the belief in an intelligible universe."

Safe to say I disagree.

"... I think if one does assume existence is intelligible, at the same time as they assert an atheist doctrine of non-belief in God, then they are living a contradictory set of beliefs. I say this because I am led to believe that God is the ontological precondition for intelligibility, the Logos so to speak of Being. Without that promise, there is really no point in going about doing natural science, because naturalism assumes that the end of science is to arrive at Truth. "

Science assumes no such thing. Science strives only to provide a best explanation for the current evidence.

"Hm, not sure what you mean. Please elaborate. "

First allow me repeat your original statement for clarity.

"The case here is that God must be presumed in order for existence to have intelligibility in the first place and, therefore, God is (or more exactly, the qualities of the Judao-Christian God are) implicitly endorsed and presumed by any scientific investigation, if it is to be meaningful and intelligible"

I know of no currently accepted scientific theory or law that endorses or presumes the existence of any god, much less a specific one, implicitly or explicitly; nor am I aware of any scientific theory or law which is unintelligible or lacking in meaning. Any scientist that tried to publish an unintelligible and or meaningless paper would quickly find the peer review process impenetrable. Except possibly for Jeremy Stribling, Daniel Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn.

"I am suggesting, on the contrary, that ANY scientific investigation presupposes as its ontological ground of Being the existence of God, the Logos that is the ground of Being."

I can't see how this is anything more than an arbitrary claim with no supporting evidence.

"I know this statement in itself will probably not be very convincing to you."

Correct.

"But for now suffice it for me to say that this is basically the story physics will tell. The facts will repeat empirically what I have stated above ontologically. Enough so that it becomes (arguably) more credible to believe in God than to reject God."

I am more then passingly familiar with the physical sciences and your claim is without merit. Unless you care to support it with at least one fact then it is little more then a verbose version of "because I said so" which does not make for a powerful argument.

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