Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
O
Ye of Little Faith
(Religulous, 10/13/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
The
title of Bill Maher's new documentary is supposed to be a neologism
formed by the combination of "religion" and "ridiculous."
It might as well be a combination of "religion" and "credulous,"
though, because Maher's targets are not just the ideas underlying many
religions, but (to put it more tactfully than he would) the cognitive
maturity of those who insist on accepting them. That includes the
92% of Americans who believe in the existence of God, according to a
recent Harris poll—not to mention the 80% who insist that Jesus'
face can spontaneously appear on a piece of toast, and the more than
50% who dismiss evolution. Good or not, any documentary that starts
from a premise that most of its potential audience suffers from a neurological
disorder deserves some kind of award of chutzpah.
But Religulous is good, thank
God. As many may already know, Maher (a 1978 Cornell alumnus) is an
outspoken political comic who hosts the weekly talk show Real Time
on HBO. Before that, he had a similar program on ABC, but was fired
in 2002 after making what were, in retrospect, quite defensible comments
comparing the moral courage of the 9/11 hijackers to Americans who prefer
to wreak their "collateral damage" from a safe distance, with
missiles. Along with ethical treatment of animals, bashing the health
care industry, and (lately) calling Sarah Palin a "Category 5 moron,"
organized religion has been Maher's bête noir for many years.
Here he travels the globe encountering
an ecumenical assortment of nutcases, evangelicals to Catholics to Jews
to Scientologists to Muslims (strangely, Hindus and Buddhists get a
pass). In a typical scene, he ventures into a truck-stop chapel and
confronts the jerky-chewing worshippers with what he calls innocent
questions, such as why God permits evil in the world, why a rational
person would believe in virgin birth, and how God is supposed to individually
respond to the muttered prayers of six billion people who never agree
with each other. Later, he gets himself kicked off the grounds of Temple
Square in Salt Lake City, and barred from St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
All this is because Maher hasn't given up the kinds of questions many
bright kids ask when they're forced into religion, but stop asking when
the ensuing answers seem so awfully lame. He's like Diogenes walking
the streets with a lantern in broad daylight, looking for a person of
faith who's not a Category 5 moron.
Admittedly, none of this is fair.
By highlighting the extremists, Maher necessarily paints with a broad
brush, making anybody who continues to believe in Xenu or the Golden
Tablets or talking snakes as either mentally ill or willfully dishonest.
While most of the time his rants are very funny, Maher's in-your-face
agnosticism can be so strident it can rub even those who agree with
him the wrong way. For this reason, some have taken to calling him "bigoted"
against religion. Others have called him a secular "fundamentalist."
But it is nonsense to call an agnostic
like Maher a fundamentalist in any way that doesn't do violence
to the meaning of either word. Nor does "bigoted" seem like
the right word to describe vehement disagreement with a set of ideas,
not a prejudice against any race or ethnic group. No doubt Maher is
biased against religious faith. In this, he's arguably doing a public
service, given that more Americans say they'd sooner vote for virtually
anybody for President—black, female, gay, Mormon, whatever—over
a candidate who doesn't believe in God. In a country where religious
freedom is guaranteed in the Constitution, the freedom not to be religious
is hardly assured.
For Maher, as for many other people
who won't get elected President, the root problem with faith is not
that it's "religulous," but that it's dangerous. In a shrinking
world replete with bioweapons and suitcase nukes, doctrines that are
irrefutable using any kind of objective evidence, and that insist that
every other guy's irrefutable doctrine is wrong or worse, are the cognitive
equivalents of flatulence in an elevator. They're bits of adolescent
thinking we can't afford anymore.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
back to Culture Blog