I recently saw Bill Maher's Religulous which was directed by Larry Charles who also directed Borat: Cultural Learnings of America to Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan and seems to enjoy mocking the masses of America, which is all right with me. While many people saw Borat and thought about what the sad state our country is in culturally, I saw it, laughed at the jokes about our society and appreciated that someone else was there to point out how absurdly hilarous and unintelligent a large portion of Americans are. Religulous has a similar mocking tone to it, as Bill Maher questions organized religion, namely the three major Western religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and their devout, passionate followers but he isn't quite as degrading as Sasha Baron Cohen pretended to be as Borat.
Maher begins his documentry at Megiddo, Israel, the town below Armageddon, where Christians believe that Jesus Christ will come down from Heaven and save the Believers at the end of the world as Maher makes a statement regarding his distaste for prophecy only second to his distate for self-fulfilling prophecy because when that prophecy was made, only God could end the world, but man was able to figure out nuclear weapons before he was able to figure out world peace and acceptance. Clearly, Maher had a very specific audience in mind when he went about creating this film. It certainly wasn't anyone who believes the Bible as a non-fiction work, anyone who attends Church, or Temple or Mosque services, it is instead the 16% of Americans who consider themselves unaffiliated with any religion, and are more than content to keep it that way. He shows, via a very technically impressive bar graph that the 16% of Americans in that category make up a larger percentage of the population than Jewish people, Black people, homosexuals or members of the NRA and it's at this point that his purpose of the film becomes clear. He's not creating the film just to mock, berate and belittle those who have faith in Faith, but instead as a call to arms for those of us who don't. Maher wants us to "grow up or die" in that we shouldn't believe in Santa, or talking snakes, or a man living for three days inside a large tuna and reminds us that the majority of the people leading our country do believe (except in Santa, because that's just ridiculous)...and those are just the Christians.
One of the questions Maher asks which really resonated with me, put into words how I feel regarding religion, was at a truck stop church in North Carolina when he asked the very helpful men there "Why is Faith a good thing? Why is believing something without any evidence a good thing?" in an attempt to apply reason to religion and while he comes off as ever so condescending he's really just trying to challenge something that so many people accept without hesitation. And to me while its disturbing that people believe in a supernatural man who can hear all their thoughts, it's far more disturbing that people believe in believing in God - as in, without question, hesitation or thought, people believe in their religion because that's what they're supposed to do.
He discusses the fact that America has become synonymous with Christianity as "good Christians" believe in America and those of us who aren't good Christians have no patriotism. John McCain (you may remember him as throwing the Republican ticket out the window in the past election) said "The Constitution established America as a Christian nation" which Maher refutes with a series of quotes from founding fathers Ben Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson who all felt that this country would be better off without Christianity influencing it's decisions. Thomas Jefferson actually went so far as to take the New Testament of the bible, seperate out the dogma and produce the Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth which according to Jefferson is "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man." And while I haven't read Jefferson's version of how man should act, I do believe it's evidence enough that the seperation of church and state should be upheld far more voraciously than it is.
I'm not going to disect the movie scene by scene for you, but it is clearly edited for amusement purposes, adding appropriately placed clips of Charleton Heston as Moses, sardonic voiceovers and subtitles. Maher tries to make it obvious that religion and intelligence are mutually exclusive and while he makes a fair argument for those of us who already are leaning in that direction, he closes the movie with an uber serious address to the 16% of the population he's targeting with a bit too much alarmist hysteria for my liking. He seems to desire us anti-religious folk to try and shut down the major religions of the world because otherwise those who do believe will lead us directly to Armageddon. He may have forgotten that we do only make up 16% of the US Population and only 14% of the population worldwide and the chances that in our sarcastic, patronizing, sneeringly outsider way we're going to convince the rest of the world that their faith in faith is what's driving the world to its end are essentially non-existant. Besides, my lack of faith makes it easier for me to accept the end of the world whenever it may come, my lack of ability to change it, and my ability to sit back and enjoy the ride because I won't double down on religion just to save my ass when the end is upon us.
