Making Us All Look Religulous

 

Monkey see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. Wish the same could be said for many religious leaders.

Bill Maher‘s 2008 documentary Religulous has left me (along with his interviewees) grasping desperately for answers that I do not seem to have. The systematic way in which he takes religion apart in this documentary will offend many, but it raises such pertinent questions that I wish that some people would actually sit and listen to him.

This is not really a review so much as a discussion of what this documentary exposes. I can’t really review it, firstly because I am no expert on documentaries, and secondly because the content is not really review material.

The film is pretty much a series of interviews between Maher and a number of representatives of different religions from around the world. Maher asks them all questions that revolve around one central theme: How can you believe in something that sounds like it was taken from a collection of Fairy Tales?

Here’s the part that floored me. I’m willing to bet any money that there are many who, if you read this, will have prepared a set of answers for Mr Maher. I can promise you that, bar a few, those answers were given to him, and he took each of them to pieces so quickly that I found myself literally staring at the screen with my jaw wide open.  I couldn’t believe the unraveling taking place before my eyes. It was too easy. But why was it?

Was it that Maher picked the wrong people to interview? Did he pick morons to purposefully ridicule religion? I don’t think that he did. Granted, there was a sizeable gaggle of morons featured, but he also managed to find a scientist from the human genome project, and even a Vatican Priest of sorts. No, I think that it was simply because the institutions of religion have not bothered to address the issues that he brings up, and they have been tripped up by by not doing so.

The fact is that when religion is subjected to any amount of logic, it doesn’t seem to hold up. Is that the point? I’m not sure. The one response to the use of logic to analyse religion has been that God operates outside of human understanding, and therefore we aren’t meant to understand how he works. As I said, someone did give Maher this response, but to someone who does not believe in God, it just sounds like a cop-out. We need better answers than that.

Now, I don’t really care whether Maher believes in God or not, but i do care when people try to give him half-assed answers about linking Star Wars together with Christianity (no, your eyes do not deceive you, and yes, this actually happened) on camera, for the rest of the world to watch. That kind of stuff is not just idiocy. It is some new level of ignorance and dim-wittedness that I don’t actually have a word for.

Maher brings up some even touchier subjects. He discusses how there are alarming parallels between the story of Jesus and the stories

In this scene, a man who plays Jesus in re-enactments of the New Testament has a discussion with Bill Maher about the Son himself, although he is far less eloquent than his aforementioned likeness.

of other religious figures like Krishna from Hinduism and Horus from Egyptian mythology, (things like the dates of birth of the characters involved and the circumstances thereof are alarmingly similar.) and even subtly points out how bad the rampant commercialism of televangelism has become. In one clip which I particularly love, an evangelist proclaims loudly to his large following in an equally large and opulent church building that “What I am about to say… is revelation!” before raising a DVD and adding, “And you need to own it!” Forgive me for being a tad cynical here, but this sight has become so common on Christian TV that I don’t ever watch it anymore. Making faith into a business is bad enough, but when juxtaposed with the probing interview footage, it just makes it seem like people are being duped into buying unnecessary hogwash that is going to enrich Pastor Billy’s pocket more than their lives.

The disturbing thing is that so many religious people, from Muslims to Scientologists, when pressed with really controversial questions, have not the slightest idea how to reply outside of the rehearsed answers that we’ve all heard before. It leaves everyone flat-footed, and I wonder why it seems that it has to be this way. There have been no real answers to questions like, “If God is so powerful and can do anything, why does he not just destroy the devil?”  There is a response in the documentary that he will, but the swift counter to that was, “So why the wait? Why not just do it now?” The person answering ended up speechless.

Until we as believers can come up with solutions to these questions, we cannot move forward in the modern age. The point is made in the documentary that we rely upon a book that was written in the Bronze Age to tell us how to live in the Modern Age, and that is startlingly true. The cultural circumstances under which the Bible was initially written are literally archaic now, so is it still a good idea to trust it? I suppose that I’m asking the wrong questions, but it’s becoming difficult to know what to trust these days, especially when one man can make us all look so religulous.