Bill Maher really outdoes himself in Religulous, where he roams around the world asking the experts questions about religion. He focuses mostly on religions of the book (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) but hits some of the nuttier off-shoots as well including Mormonism, a Latin fellow named Jesus who claims to be the second coming, and of course, Scientology. Watch out for those Thetans!
While Maher’s viewpoint is clear throughout the work, he manages to ride the line of not being outright offensive to those he interacts with while communicating the point. There is so much content in the work it’s hard to pick a favorite moment, but the Scientology sequence has to be up there. Then again, the interview with the nutty Jew who wants to get rid of Israel is good too, as is the sequence in the roadside chapel for truckers. The interchange with the ex-gay preacher, the Mormons, and the Muslims are enlightening as they are frightening. As one would expect with Maher, there were a number of highly humorous moments. But overall, the piece is serious and without the humor would likely be too depressing to have any appeal at all.
The trip to the Creation Museum is just sad. I commented about this some time ago.
If, as Maher claims, 16% of Americans are non-religious, it is time for a movement to come together, get organized, and start converting the flock to rationalist positions from their parent-facilitated brainwashing of religion. It’s our only hope for long-term survival of the species. I’m beginning to get downright intolerant of the faithful and I certainly resent greatly their intrusion into my life with their translation of their specific mythology.
Arise ye thinking people and take back our country from the delusional fringe!
Over 75% of Chinese are atheists.
Is there a conclusion we should draw from that fact Sin-Yaw?
Richard Dawkins and a few other luminaries founded The Brights movement (http://www.the-brights.net/) which seek to do exactly what you have said.
Guess I need to get plugged in, thanks Steve.
Sounds like a plan. However I don’t think pointing out the benefits of rationalism is practical enough to succeed.
There are quite a few cases where religion gives people something they need; hope, community, support etc. (I know there are many examples of it doing the opposite). But to replace religion something needs to fill that void and if rationalism doesn’t have a community/structure to do that I’m not sure how it will succeed at it over a sustained period of time.
Religions are well evolved replicating societal memes so anything that tries to usurp that would need to be equally ‘fit’ and I’m not sure something looking like that exists yet..
As an active participant in religious life who holds Bill Maher in great esteem, I am very much looking forward to this movie.
I am of course open to the fact that a preoccupation with imaginary friends/higher beings and their teachings is an intellectually risky course.
Considering how fragile most people’s grip on reality is (look who’s running for Vice President!), they are easily undone by the contradiction that (from Martha Nussbaum of The New Republic) (http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=511ec724-6299-4bf4-adf7-38059cff16ae&k=76271):
“the fact that some of my neighbors pursue salvation
in a way that differs from my own is hard to contemplate without
anxiety. Could it be that they are right and I am wrong?”
The article, a review of a new book collection of the works of Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, is a great survey of the fundamental tolerance required for healthy conscience. My favorite line: “To impose orthodoxy upon the striving conscience is nothing less than what Williams, in a memorable and repeated image, calls ‘Soule rape.’ ”
Williams’ analogy, one that would likely appeal to Maher whether he uses it or not, is that rape is to sex what religious extremism is to faith. Back in the day, Williams was persecuted for critiquing the nominal advocates of religious liberty among the Puritans, on restricting their largesse to white Christians like themselves. Maher’s a tighter writer, but the impulse is still right ~400 years later.
I look forward to Maher’s help in scrubbing the world of those idiots who can’t live with difference, in the words of Roger Williams, between Peace and Truth. I expect it to be a religious experience 🙂