Bill Maher’s Religulous: The Gospel of “I don’t know”
Topic Agnostic attends Religulous prescreening.
“I’m on the corner with doubt.” preaches Bill Maher in Religulous, a documentary that stares with baleful agnostic eyes into the heart of global religiosity. Indeed, Bill all but wears a sandwich board proclaiming his disdain and ill wishes for the spiritual snake-oil-and-war machine.
Let’s let Larry Charles, director [of Borat fame] synopsize:
“We…talk to clergy, extremists, scholars, politicians, ex-cons, the man on the street and even the man upstairs (that’s right, we interview God.)
The funny (is) scary, the scary wildly funny. The crazy…seem(s) sane and the sane absolutely and undeniably crazy. “
Bill and Larry’s excellent adventure includes
- a trucker chapel (inside a truck, obviously) with a reading material such as the pamphlet God’s Last Name…it’s not damn;
- Bill doing Xenu’s work in London to the strains of Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy;
- conversations with theme park Jesus, replete with tourists applauding every time the cruel Romans smack up the bloody Lord;
- an enlightening list of famous people the Mormons baptised after their deaths such as the Buddha.
I assure you the Buddha will be mighty pissed if he’s rudely yanked out of nirvana to join Jesus in one of the 3 Mormon heavens.
Bill gets frustrated with nonsense more than you’d expect for a man travelling the world to interview nutbars. The film crew get tossed out of the Vatican and the Mormon Temple. Larry Charles keeps up the lulz, though, with cheesy vintage Lord Privy Seal cuts Expelled can only wet dream about.
Bill is pissed because he doesn’t know, and these guys don’t either. Only he has the humility (I know, when do you see Bill Maher and humility referenced in the same sentence, but stay with me) to admit it. That’s agnosticism. Acknowledging man’s inability to know, without “the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion”.
Religulous highlights the funny/sick/disturbing/sad/easy industry of separating fools from their money, but it ends on a very serious A-bomb spangled crescendo. It’s here that Bill presents his simple thesis: “Religion must die so that man can live”. Sound harsh? Man is dying all the time (like today) to keep religion alive.
The revolution started by the atheist authors a few years ago needs the public support of those who would see it succeed. Religulous stands up to be counted, edging that 16% ever upwards. Social change can happen in a mere few decades; as racism became publicly unacceptable in the 80s and 90s, and the climate was made largely safe and welcoming for homosexuals in the 90s and 00s, so let’s expect and help the next few decades to accept atheism and reason and recategorize religion as embarassing and childish.
Here’s hoping we laugh about it.
Religulous opens nations-wide this Friday.
Ebert’s incredibly nonpartisan review: 3.5 / 5.
Posted by Reason on October 3rd, 2008 8:48 pm