Brothers and sisters please gather around and hear the prophetic words of Bill Maher and his holy work Religulous, the top sacrilegious comedy in America.
Traveling around the world, comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher takes on the big three, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, by using a documentary style somewhere between Farenheit 9/11 and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The defining question he asks: Why do we continue to choose religion when every other idea from the eras that produced the world’s dominant religions have been discarded or improved?
Religulous is Maher at his best: passionate, intelligent, quick thinking and, more times than not, hilarious. Unfortunately, he’s also at his worst: smug, condescending and easy to dislike. As religulous as some of his subjects are, at times you want to side with them because Maher is such a dick. While successful in his past ventures, Maher the documentary film maker could do himself a favor and study Jon Stewart.
Documentaries like these are often criticized for using the most extreme examples to represent everyone, and Maher does interview some real wingnuts (like the Creationist Museum Director, the Trucker’s Chapel and a Jew for Jesus, but he did forget the guy who built Slab City), but Maher also features some respectable believers (head scientist on the human genome project and a science director for the Vatican). One source that gets glossed over is neurotheology scientist Dr. Andrew Newberg who explains from a biological perspective why humans choose religion. This guy really should have been the co-star.
Where Religulous really stands out, however, is its variety. Sure it’s a little heavy on the Christianity side (though much of his target audience will be Christian), but all three Abrahamic religions are burned at the stake with not only interviews from their members and detractors, but first-rate retro film clips.
Like his previous work, Maher preaches to the choir. Atheists will not only continue to love him, but uh… worship him. The religious could care less. Where Maher makes the leap towards genius, however, is that he is not a naïve filmmaker who believes his film will influence a mass of new cohorts to their rank. No, he’s not interested in conducting outreach or making a feel-good movie for atheists. Instead Maher initiates a call to action: Atheists are a large minority, 16 percent of the United States population, and they should have more power for a group their size … God willing, of course.
