Bill Maher's "Religulous"

I think Bill Maher probably owes a debt of gratitude to Michael Moore for devising the concept of the auteur-political documentary, distinguished by the direct involvement of the filmmaker in the Q&A sessions making up the bulk of the movie.  Maher's "Religulous" is better than Moore's agitprop movies because Maher has a sharper focus and a keener wit than Moore, and does not engage in the kind of emotional bathos Moore typically uses to win over his audience.  Bill Maher doesn't really use emotional content at all; his movie about religion, and about its clear and present danger to human survival, is aimed "more at the head than the heart," as Boris reviews the short drama about VD during the Napeolonic wars in "Love & Death." (Obscure reference for the cognoscenti only.)  While the professional reviewers attack Maher for his insensitive badgering of the pious, Bill is obviously angry at the overwhelming of political life in America and elsewhere by religious doctrine and he lets fly. To hilarious effect.

And so he travels the world insulting people of all faiths and creeds.  It's very, very funny, but the "cruelty" arises not from Bill's lack of piety but from his willingness to say exactly what you're thinking when he says it, no matter where he is.  He can be in a makeshift chapel at a truck stop in the Deep South and challenge burly truckers to debate the claims of inerrancy in the Bible, never mincing his words and never pandering.  In a conversation with a Muslim in Amsterdam, he can take on the claim that the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing "The Satanic Verses" did not chill free speech by telling the oh-so-gentle Muslim, "What you're really saying is, write something we don't like and we'll kill you," and then daring his interlocutor to prove otherwise.  In Florida he talks to a religious zealot, a "converted gay," who works to convert other gays to heterosexuality on the theory that homosexuality is (a) sinful and (b) subject to choice, since it's not genetic.  The preacher enthusiastically talks about a gay man and lesbian whom he converted so successfully they married and had children.  Bill then says they must have had a typically heterosexual marriage, with no sex.  Then Maher points out that if he saw this obviously gay "gay reformer" in a bar, he would instantly know he was gay, and the guy just smiles, knowing he was nailed.  They hug as they part ways and Bill asks him if he got an erection.

On and on, in a  bravura performance.  If you're religious, don't bother to see it since you'll dislike the tone and content intensely.  If you're "agnostic," like Bill, you won't learn anything new but you might be entertained.  Bill ends his movie with an apocaplyptic scenario, as he stands on the hill in Megiddo in Israel, where Armageddon is prophesied to occur.  He appeals to our rationality to overcome the dark forces of organized religion.

He's wasting his breath and he knows it.  But it makes for an interesting documentary and an opportunity to travel with him to England, Denmark, the Vatican, Israel, and all through the Deep South.  Maher notes that 16% of the American populace is agnostic and atheistic and wonders why they're not a more powerful interest group.  Among 24 nations of modern culture and civilization, the United States ranks 23rd in secularism, just ahead of Turkey.  I don't know what criteria are used to determine whether a nation is god-besotted, but that sounds about right.  It's nuts here, that's for sure.

Lots of people that Bill interviews around the world think we're near the End of Days.  Maher sees it as a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the inclination to think it's almost over tends to lead to indifference to things we might do to ameliorate the crisis.  I look on things somewhat differently from Bill, lacking his belief in the primacy of the intellect or rationality in such matters.  I think things look like End Times because human consciousness is formed most conclusively by the environment we live in: overpopulation, pollution, degradation, desertification of land and oceans, global warming.  These things work on us, dismay us, make us crazy.  Things look apocaplyptic because we're destroying the very planet on which we live and making it uncomfortable and aesthetically ruined as we go about it.  And in the vast thronging multitude, the Earth's six billion people, we find many, many religious people, perhaps always in about the same historical proportion, but the conditions of life and their sheer numbers (and the destructive technology they can access) exacerbate the peril, maybe past the breaking point.

Maher notes that 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences are either atheistic or agnostic (I don't know why Bill persists in that dichotomy; as Richard Feynman demonstrated beyond all doubt in a brilliant essay, there's no real difference.  An agnostic is an atheist who's having trouble coming to terms with the finality).  That makes sense.  Just as it takes a leap of faith to believe, it takes a leap of imagination not to believe.  Bertrand Russell in his 1927 essay, "Why I Am Not A Christian," (Google and enjoy - breathtaking) laid out the basic atheist arguments, the answers to the "proof" of a god.  For example: as to the "First Cause" argument, that if there is a world, then something or someone made it, since everything has a cause.  Thus, argues Bertrand, something had to have made God.  If the answer is that God always "just was," then Russell answers that the same argument can be made for the world: it always "just was" too, and it's no more unlikely than the Creationist story.  

There's no comeback to that.  God is the result of human psychological projection: since when we see something like a chair or house, we know that someone made it, our tendency toward the concrete (something like the use of "manipulables" in Montessori schooling) sets the limit of our ability to think about things.  We assume that a world in which humans live was made by a human-like intelligence.  What a coincidence!  Or - could it be we're looking through the wrong end of the telescope?

A certain kind of mind (I won't say "more intelligent") grasps what Russell is driving at.  And some people have minds, or personalities, which manage to live without hope, and are content with the basic absurdity of human existence.  It's the only thing we can really know, the essential meaninglessness of life, and we want to live according to what we really know because it feels better.  And we feel safer in a world of rationality than we do in one where religious irrationality rules mankind.  None of that is going to help convert anyone from one way of thinking to another, but a movie as grim and hopeless as Maher's (whether he realizes it's that way or not) needs to end with some hortatory uplift, so he gave it a shot.  Not in this world, Bill, but it's nice to have a spokesman.