Very few sacred cows remain untipped in contemporary western culture. Music, television, video games, books, cartoons and the internet have made just about every formerly sacrosanct topic fair game for criticism and even ridicule. Religion, however, remains a dangerous no-fly zone. Sure, some people have had a go at religion, most notably the recently deceased George Carlin, who made a habit of exposing our observance of taboos as childish and unnecessary, but those salvos have typically been delivered by individuals of a certain faith against that same faith, and if they weren't (e.g. the Dutch Allah cartoon debacle), they have been frequently disastrous.
In the fine tradition of Carlin's acerbic humor comes Religulous, a new documentary starring comedian and political commentator Bill Maher. Religulous (which is apparently a faux-Bushism, and a very good one at that) is Maher's box-office attempt to inspire greater skepticism of organized religion and even faith itself. The film's incendiary concept is that we'll follow a provocative atheist–i.e. Mr. Maher–as he travels the western world to try to understand, by way of direct confrontation, why rational, intelligent people believe what he perceives as irrational, childish and downright dangerous stuff.
Whether you will find Religulous entertaining and amusing depends largely on your religious/spiritual affiliation as well as the intensity of your belief. If you're an atheist or agnostic, you'll probably have a very good time: if you're an avowed Christian, Muslim, Mormon, Scientologist or Jew, or if a "higher power" is the gravitational center of your life, smart bets are on your getting significantly warm under the collar.
Maher makes his agenda and his opinions clear from the get-go, which is probably a good idea for such a confrontational movie. In a nutshell, he was raised Catholic, never bought the party line, finds the idea of an omnipotent being absurd, and is convinced that organized religion is detrimental to society and the planet and basically exploits people and gives them false hope. So he heads to a trucker's chapel, a Biblical amusement park, a creationism museum, speaks with an ex-Jew for Jesus, a goofy Vatican high priest, the self-proclaimed second-coming of Jesus Christ, a Holocaust-denying Jew, an evangelical senator from Arkansas, and many others.
Aside from the truckers and some visitors at the Holy Land Experience, he doesn't talk with very many "regular" people about their beliefs. Instead he has assembled a cast of sectarians on the religious fringe whose beliefs serve, for the film's purposes, as a decoction of the beliefs of their representative religions. The idea seems to be to find ladies and gentlemen whose zealotry and faith can be exploited as ignorance.
Maher, standing at the pulpit inside the tiny trucker's chapel, states that he preaches "the gospel of uncertainty," and his mission in the film is to sew some doubt in people's minds about their beliefs. How, he wonders, can someone adamantly believe that Lot lived in the belly of a giant fish for three days? Why isn't Moses, who thought he heard the voice of God from a burning bush, considered a prophet instead of a crazy guy, which he most certainly would be today? Why is the Christian God both loving and vengeful, and isn't the capriciousness of his emotions kind of childish for an omnipotent being? Basically, he thinks religion doesn't have the answers, and the fact that it makes people think it does says scary things about how easily we can be manipulated. If we can be convinced to believe in a man in the clouds who hears all of us murmur to him at the same time, is it really that hard to believe that G. W. Bush was able to convince us to invade Iraq with similarly fictitious information?
Much of Religulous's humor comes from Maher's exasperation as he tries to wrap his mind around people's beliefs, which is a sophisticated way of actually getting people to laugh at the beliefs themselves. Christianity receives the most sustained roasting, if only because it's the one Maher's most familiar with, and while he does address a number of other western religions–he ignores all the eastern ones–he steers away from any direct condemnation of other religions' gods, most notably Allah, perhaps at the earnest behest of the pack of lawyers that must have been consulted in making the film.
Religulous was directed by Larry Charles, the same guy who did Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The format, content and humor of Maher's movie is similar to though not as grotesque as Sasha Baron Cohen's ground-breaking film, and it borders just as precipitously on the cliff of being cynical and offensive as does Borat. However, if you're willing and able to approach religion and belief with a healthy dose of skepticism, or if you once lived in the countryside and reveled in cow-tipping, Religulous will preach to you, a member of the choir.
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