Religulous review: Bill Maher’s brutal and intelligent take on religion
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By Andy Kaiser
Article ID: 1252
Before we get to the good stuff, you should know that this review of Religulous contains spoilers. The spoilers give away the main topics addressed by Bill Maher. If you don’t want to know them yet, go see the movie first. If you’re considering seeing the movie and want more information, or you want someone else’s take on it, keep reading.
Special thanks goes to the Center for Inquiry’s Michigan chapter, who brought Religulous to West Michigan. Without their efforts, I may not have seen this movie.
Religulous begins with Bill Maher talking about the Bible’s Book of Revelations, a terrifying, end-of-the-world scenario preached by Biblical literalists.
We get a lot of humor, and Religulous stays funny throughout much of its running time. Maher intersperses witty remarks with political and religious commentary, much like his stand-up act. But here you realize he’s making a very directed, laser-focused point: religion is bad. Some quotes from him include:
“[Religion is] selling an invisible product.”
“It’s just so shamelessly invented.”
After his entertaining intro, we get to the main focus of the movie. Here, Bill takes on various aspects of religion, with both interviews and informal talks directly to the camera. While I don’t have all the topics listed here, these are the majority, and are what Religulous spends the most time discussing:
Pascal’s Wager
This concept says, “You should worship God, because what if you’re wrong. If God exists, and you worship him, then you’re safe. If He exists and you don’t worship him, you’ve just written a one-way ticket to an everlasting pitchfork-infested sauna.”
There are many problems with Pascal’s Wager. How do you know which God is the right one? So many religions have so many conflicting tenants, you can’t know which one is true. What if God doesn’t exist, and you waste your whole life worshipping a nonexistent being? Or worse, what if you’ve spent your life subjugating and abusing others based on religious-driven morals? Pascal’s Wager is one of those questions that at first sounds witty and interesting, until you examine it logically and realize it’s flawed logic.
Biblical Inaccuracies
The Catholic Bible is huge. From Old Testament to New, it’s jammed packed with stories, morals, punishments and contradictions. Religulous spends time addressing many of these. Instead of listing them here (as even the Internet has a limited amount of space), I’ll instead recommend a book: A great source of Biblical inaccuracies, problems, contradictions and abuses can be found in the book, Ken’s Guide to the Bible. It’s best to read Ken’s Guide with an actual Bible nearby. Otherwise, you may not believe some of what you read – there are a lot of horrible things in the Bible that rarely get mentioned in Sunday’s sermon.
TV Preachers
TV preachers bring in massive amounts of money. It’s easy – they ask their viewers for contributions, and the checks and credit card numbers come pouring in. This seems like a violation of Jesus’ teachings, who seemingly was a man teaching simple living and criticizing the rich. How can a television preacher reconcile his incredible material wealth while still claiming to live by Jesus’ example?
The Church and Homosexuality
You might not know the Westboro Baptist Church by name, but you’ve probably heard about them. These are the people who loudly protest funerals of soldiers and other high-profile deaths. They’re known for their motto, “God hates fags”. Religulous uses them and others to expose the beliefs and teachings of the Catholic Church on how homosexuality is a conscious choice and a sin. Particularly interesting is a conversation Bill has with the head of Exchange Ministries, a religious non-profit specializing in converting gays away from homosexuality.
Miracles
Bill addresses the stupidity of various kinds of miracles. There are the obvious, in your face miracles, like the Biblical tale of Jonah being swallowed by a whale. And there are the lower-proof, more palatable miracles. One example from the movie is when a person claimed to have prayed for rain, and seconds later – guess what happened! There is such a thing as coincidence. There is such a thing as selection bias – where we remember the times when we prayed for a miracle and it happened, but forget the times when prayer let us down.
“God and Country”
“God and Country” is the rallying call of many a politician. But this isn’t Jesus’ message, and never was. Jesus was anti-government, and supported the poor, not the wealthy, not the politicians and government. We are not, as many politicos claim, “a Christian nation”.
Faith
Faith is not logical. Its very definition is belief in something in which there is no proof.
“You can’t change my mind. Nobody can change my mind.” This was said by a fervent believer of some religion or another. I wrote down this quote because it’s a perfect example of a faith-based mindset. Someone please explain to me how a person with this “faith” differs from someone with psychosis or dementia. “Nobody” can change your mind? So you’re not willing or able to make a judgment based on available evidence. This is one of the dangers of religion – where one is so convinced of their righteousness, they ignore all evidence to the contrary and do bad things. Imagine if you had control of a group of people – let’s call them a “congregation” – and they all believed what you said was correct, and nobody could change their minds. What a perfect setup for an abuse of power. Good thing this is just a made-up example.
The Ten Commandments
Is The Ten Commandments really the best grouping of laws God and Moses could create? There aren’t any rules against torture, rape and other horrible things. Why leave out rules for the really bad stuff, and include commandments prohibiting comparatively lesser infractions?
Morality does not require religion
A common criticism of the anti-religious is, “how can you have any moral direction without religion? There’s nothing preventing you from killing, stealing and living 100% selfishly.” The answer to this question is outside the bounds of this review, so I’ll save the long answer for another article. The short answer is that humans have a social contract. We don’t kill each other because we have evolved not to. Respecting others leads to a more stable tribe, enabling growth into a village, a city, and a society.
Creation Museum and Ken Ham
Here we get a good look at creationists and Biblical literalists, those who believe every word of the Bible is true. Featured here is the Creation Museum, a creationist propaganda tool defended by Ken Ham. Ken Ham himself inadvertently gives the best reason why literalists are wrong: if a literalist thinks that one part of the Bible is false (for example, the talking snake in the Garden of Eden), then other parts of the Bible may also be false. When Bill calls out Ken Ham on this point, Ham essentially says, “This is God’s plan. How can you second-guess God? Are you as smart as God?” At this point, Bill gives a fake-sincere reaction of “touché, Mr. Ham”, indicating (at least for the camera) how he’d really like to answer.
The Holy Land Experience
At this point in my notes, I scrawled the following two words, “getting depressed”.
I recommend you go the The Holy Land Experience website and watch their video preview of what they do. It’s so absurd, I could easily see The Holy Land Experience as a plotline in an episode of Simpsons or South Park. The Experience is a recreation of Jesus’ life two thousand years ago, from what it was like to live back then, to a re-enactment of his crucifixion and death.
I wrote the words, “getting depressed” at the crucifixion scene. This was realistic, where an actor looking like the stereotypical Jesus was stumbling, covered in blood, being punched and abused by actors dressed as Roman soldiers. Religious stopped being funny for me at that moment, and turned serious, because I noticed in the crowd of tourists, there was a little girl. She was watching the whole scene unblinkingly, looking at the blood, gore and physical violence. I can’t help but wonder what her parents wanted her to learn from this. I noticed the little girl for just a few seconds, before the action moved on to fake nails being pounded through shaking hands caked with fake blood.
On one hand, I’m happy to see this aspect being re-enacted, because it’s a nice demonstration of the twisted mindset of religion. On the other hand, this is glorifying violence and putting an emotional trigger into the minds of the watchers: “Jesus died for you and because of you. You might even infer that this suffering is your fault. You owe Jesus big time.”
And yes, to me that’s pretty depressing.
God’s Omnipitence (or the lack thereof)
If God is all-powerful, why are there so many indications that an all-powerful god doesn’t exist? There are a lot of points to be made here, but we’ll keep it simple. Here’s a pointed question from “Bill Maher’s Questions to Ponder”: “Why is suffering so random? One guy living on a landfill, and then there’s Rod Stewart.”
The rest of Bill Maher’s Questions to Ponder can be viewed by clicking the image below:
Jesus wasn’t the first
Jesus seems more of a re-writing of even older religious myths. There were gods and powerful beings described thousands of years before Jesus, like a little-known god named Mithras, the Egyptian god Horus and others. The Christ story mimics these very closely, from a holy life, baptism, death and a three-day resurrection. Some of these old, original stories include additional details like a missing body in a tomb found by two women, or a person who baptizes the hero, and the baptizer is later beheaded. This should sound very familiar to anyone who knows the basic story of Jesus’ death and resurrection.
Put simply: How can someone say the Jesus story is original, when there is plenty of evidence it is not?
Major world religions
Religulous then addresses specific religions and goofy, strange or frightening beliefs from all of them. The religions include Scientology, Catholicism, Mormonism, and Judaism. The Muslim religion Islam isn’t yet mentioned. There’s a longer, more serious segment later.
Worth mentioning is a very funny scene when Bill disguises himself and begins preaching the gospel of Scientology, complete with the magical space-god “Xenu” and other ramblings. It puts the Scientology belief system into its proper religious context, but also demonstrates that claims from other religions are just as ridiculous.
Prophecies and prophets
Did you know that the Second Coming of Christ has already happened? Jesus is alive and well, has a lot of followers, and is making a lot of money. Bill interviews him. The modern-day Jesus is not what you might expect, though. For more details, visit the supposed “Government of God on Earth“.
There’s a brief mention of one of the sillier “super powers” of prophets, that of speaking in tongues. I’d heard of this, but never seen it done before. And yes, it is very difficult to believe people watch that and take it seriously. Or perhaps I should say, “akamashambomatokolobozo“.
Islam
Where the other religions are attacked more for inconsistencies and abuse, the Islam focus is on the terrible amount of violence this religion brings to the world. Religulous certainly had an agenda here, and it states its case clearly with a lot of evidence. We see the more popular examples of Islamic violence, like Salman Rushdie, the murder of Theo van Gogh, and the Muslim-caused violence and deaths after publication of a cartoon of the prophet Muhammed.
There are plenty of examples of the dangers of religion, though Islam seems to give more examples than most.
Apologists say Islamic violence is “more politics than the religion”. Any violence is apparently not the Muslims’ fault, even though there are plenty of clips of religious leaders quoting the Koran calling for genocide and destruction of various infidels. This doesn’t even address the Islamic justification for the Muslims’ sexual discrimination against women.
The End Times / The Rapture / Armageddon
We could also call this: “The conclusion” for both Religulous and this review.
I want to mention something that interested me: during the whole movie, Bill never said the ‘a’ word. Atheist. I think there are a few reasons for this. Bill claims he’s agnostic. He doesn’t know if there’s a god, and that’s his stance. Also, Religulous is above the concept of atheism. Atheism is only a subset of what the movie addresses. The whole is more encompassing, and perhaps saying “atheist” at any point would have pigeonholed the movie into an unwanted category.
Still, even without mention of atheism, the movie is clearly anti-religion. I think Bill was trying more for an appeal to reason, and the a-word brings out negative emotion. There was a blatant call for non-believers to come out of the closet. There are plenty out there, Bill says, but hiding and cowering brings problems to a world that should know better.
My first impression from Religulous was that the movie was excellent, but it was preaching to the choir. I thought that Religulous would be too controversial, too extreme and too insulting to religious believers and because of that wouldn’t change anyone’s mind. I was wrong. One of the people I watched the movie with was a Christian. Let’s call him “Chris”. Chris is what I’d call a “cherry-picking Catholic”, one who believes the good stuff about Catholicism while privately disagreeing with other tenants (like gay marriage, the concept of Hell and miracles). Chris told me that the movie didn’t change his mind about what he believed, but it did cause him to doubt. This was exactly Bill Maher’s point – he noticeably never said the word “atheist” at any point in the movie. He doesn’t want to position himself as a proponent of atheism, presenting an either/or proposition. Instead, he simply brings up many problems with religion, and allows the viewer to think and doubt and make his own conclusion.
Chris has since told me that he needs to really look at why he believes what he believes. Maher specifically mentions this in Religulous – those who passively belong to a religion are passively endorsing the religion itself, along with its flaws and abuses. If you can honestly justify that, at least you’ve put the thought into doing so, and given purpose and direction to your beliefs. If you can’t reconcile this relationship, then you need to make a difficult decision. But decide you must, because, as Religulous shows so effectively, it does make a difference. My choice, Chris’ choice, your choice – what we believe affects others, whether we like it or not, whether we realize it or not.
“Religion must die for mankind to live.” – Bill Maher in Religulous
In the beginning of Religulous, Bill Maher spoke of The End Times. Revelation. The movie ends by coming full circle, right back to The End Times. Only these “end times” are video clips of the many religious flaws of persecution, abuse, violence and death. This was an amazingly powerful part of the movie. I’m like anyone else – certain movies done right will affect me emotionally. But that’s done by the easy manipulators: themes of unrequited love, a lost puppy, a reunion with a loved one. Religulous moved me in a different way. Bill Maher made his point clearly and powerfully. The world we are living in is terribly complex, and we allow people to change our world based on their belief in nonsense. This is wrong. As thinking, rational, intelligent humans, we need to “grow up, or die”.
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