It’s not often that, in one week as a campus club leader, you author an editorial slamming your schools religious convocation, host a pastafarian themed Talk-Like-A-Pirate-Day party, attend a rally for a Canadian opposition party leader, see your club’s banner get vandalized (I will write an Edger feature on this soon), get on local TV news covering the story and then get to see Religulous. All-in-all it’s been quite a busy week (I should add that I’ve also been campaigning for a local candidate in the upcoming Canadian federal election).
And yes you read it right, I have seen Religulous, and now I’m going to tell you what I think about it (I may have some spoilers, but it is a mockumentary).
Want the short version with no spoilers? It’s the comedy version of Richard Dawkins’ “Root of All Evil” (or The God Delusion’s video companion). It has roughly the same arguments against religion, uses many of the same locations, and ends with the same conclusion. In short: if you can laugh about religion, you will love this movie.
We already know the premise behind Bill Maher’s new documentary. Basically, he sets out to expose extremist religion in humorous fashion. But what I hadn’t realized is that he pushes a message to all extremist religious people:
Grow up, or die
Now, Bill isn’t threatening that atheists (he never calls himself an atheist in the movie) will kill religious people – his argument is that unless people start injecting doubt and thought into their ideologies, that these people are going to end up killing each other, and potentially the entire world.
But the entire movie isn’t all doom-and-gloom.
We see Bill meet the founder of the Church of Kantheism in Amsterdam. This church doesn’t have much dogma, but knows it can reach the divine through marijuana. After a few tokes, Bill tells the pothead priest that his hair’s on fire (it’s not) and the priest freaks out for a bit.
Bill interviews Dr. Francis Collins (director of the Human Genome Project) and exposes a double standard in Dr. Collins beliefs about evidence in that the same level of evidence isn’t necessary for Jesus and the resurrection. Dr. Collins even goes as far to defend his faith through the New Testament as “first hand accountants” to which Bill decries that they are at least several decades detached.
Bill gets kicked out of the Vatican (he wanted to interview the Pope), off of a Mormon churchyard in Utah, out of the biblical theme park in Florida, and a number of people end the interview abruptly when they figure out what’s going on. Where Mathis and Expelled held interviews that didn’t seem out of line (and were under false pretences), it became quickly obvious what Maher’s intentions were as soon as he opened his mouth.
The cutting of many interviews was quite obvious, and you could tell Maher wanted to push comedy over allowing his interview subjects the chance to fully speak their mind.
Finally, I have to say, I really liked Bill’s approach. He never claimed to have the answers. He often said “I don’t know”, and even shows an interview between him and his mother – who also doesn’t know what they believe anymore. Bill preaches the word of doubt and rational thought.
Overall, the movie was awesome. I can tell a lot of people won’t like Religulous, but if you’re reading articles on Edger, this movie is probably perfectly suited for you.
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[...] going to rub it in, I have seen Religulous, and if you want to know what I think, check out my review on Edger. « Graphs are fun [...]
Minor nitpick: Francis Collins isn’t one of the discoverers of DNA. You’re thinking of the late Francis Crick, who discovered DNA structure with James D. Watson roughly 50 years ago. Collins was one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project, an entirely different endeavor (although Watson had a hand in setting it up), during the span when the genome was fully sequenced. Bill wouldn’t have found much material with DNA’s discoverers: Watson is an atheist (by some accounts; he’s not very vocal on such issues) while Crick is identified as agnostic “with a strong inclination toward atheism” (and he’s also significantly more interesting in this front; check his Wiki page.).
That said, your review has me excited for when the film hits theaters (and weeping that it probably won’t show here…). Although I’m still concerned about the interview editing insofar as it compares to Expelled’s underhanded tactics, I’m willing to give Maher a waive on most of this since he’s highlighting absurdity (and, as you say, preaching doubt (and thus investigation) rather than answers). Releasing the unedited interviews would go a long way, methinks.
Thanks! I fixed it.
While I’m really looking forward to seeing this film, I don’t really know how to feel about how Maher et al. approached the interviews. I can forgive the editing and cutting – as you said, Maher wanted to push the comedy – but if we’re going to look down upon Mathis and the Expelled crew for their underhanded false pretences (which we definitely should), then we should do the same for Maher. He has openly admitted in an interview (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/2008/08/bill-maher-hate.html) that the interviews in the film were set up under false pretences: “We never, ever, used my name. We never told anybody it was me who was going to do the interviews. We even had a fake title for the film. We called it ‘A Spiritual Journey.’” Seems a bit hypocritical to ignore it just because he’s “on our side”.
I would also like to point out that Maher does “preach the word of doubt and rational thought”, but only in the context of religious matters. The man is a proponent of “non-traditional medicine”, a known anti-vaxxer, and a staunch supporter of PETA. His rationality only goes so far.
Nevertheless, I’m still looking forward to seeing this movie for what it is. I think of it as exposing the religious community in much the same way as Borat exposed Western society. I’ll watch it with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
Somehow finding my way through links (thanks Digg), and being, it would seem “not on your side”, I’m glad to see that there’s reasonable people treating this mocumentary the same way the non-crazy religious folk viewed Expelled.
While the anti-religion-in-any-sense folk were all up in arms about Expelled, the same will happen with this new flick with the religion-or-burn crowd. Truth be told, experts on either side of the debate are not truly experts because the only way we’re going to know for sure is when we take our last breath. Either the blackness of nothing or the light of an afterlife, who knows?