ill Maher’s new documentary Religulous (directed by Larry Charles of “Curb your Enthusiasm” and Borat fame), stars Maher as narrator, interviewer, and comic relief. In the course of a little over two and a half hours, Maher takes on five thousand years of what he calls humanity’s “bondage of fantasy”: religion. Maher, son of a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, is, not surprisingly, an atheist. As viewers of his HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher” can attest to, although Maher is funny, he is also a no-nonsense guy when it comes to Sarah Palin-esque answers which attempt to skirt the issues. It is in this vein that Maher approaches piety and faith. At its core, the movie seeks to portray religion as the antithesis of rational and constructive thought.
To accomplish this, Maher travels to holy sites across the country and around the world to investigate and question the major religions of the world. In the comedic tradition of the late George Carlin who once said “When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims: religion,” Maher talks about prophecies predicting the end of the world and how they were written before man had the power to do it. In his words, “If there’s one thing I hate more than prophecy, it’s self-fulfilling prophecy.” It’s this thought that allows Maher to see religion as a way to assuage our guilt over destroying the world by promising a paradise for believers.
His aim is utilitarian. He believes that modern religion does more harm than good, and that its hypocrisy is virtually unmatched. Being a devout proponent of evolution and science, Maher makes the criticism that religion simply does not coincide with scientific evidence. For instance, the case of the Black Rock of Islam: he retorts that it is a meteor, explaining that in the formative times of these religions, mankind could not explain the arrival of a mysterious black rock from the skies.
Were religion simply a benign superstition, like knocking on wood or throwing salt over your shoulder, Maher would not be so troubled. But he argues that, in an age when nuclear weapons mean the end of the world is only a few button pushes away at any given time, religion is a threat to the survival of humanity. He regards Muslim extremists’ willingness to die for their religion as mere stupidity, and the hatred and fear of homosexuality espoused by many religions including Christianity and Islam as closed-minded bigotry and intolerance that can do nothing but create conflict.
In the end of the film, after having “debunked” a multitude of religions, Maher ends by saying that religion is a copout of historic proportions. It is just too easy, he argues, to have blind faith. The only acceptable response to religion, according to Maher, is doubt. “Doubt is humble,” he says. He proposes that a member of a religion who never questions that religion is a simpleton. If it doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of believers, he argues, then a religion can’t be good for society. In the end, one thing is clear: for Bill Maher, the leap of faith isn’t the way to go.
While Maher makes some persuasive arguments, his documentary simultaneously glosses over the fundamental and inalterable basics of faith and religion. The very point of religion is that it is not clear-cut and simple. Doubt is there, because if there were proof, then religion would be science. While Religulous was funny, it isn’t going to proselytize the masses in the name of disbelief any more than Maher himself was able to convince the interviewees in his movie that their religion was malarkey.
