Religulous

I watched Bill Maher's Religulous last night. In it, comedian Bill Maher takes issue with religion.

It had a lot of funny scenes. There was the ex-Jew for Jesus, who owned a Christian store, and he said that he saw miracles when he was in college. When Bill Maher asked him to talk about one of them, the man replied that a Jew for Jesus asked him to put his cup outside and ask for rain. The man did so, and it started to rain ten seconds later. Bill Maher said that was pretty lame, and that the man's bar for miracles was rather low.

In a deleted scene, Benjamin Creme (who also appears in the documentary Oh My God, which I saw a few days ago) channels Mayetera, as Bill has an irreverant look on his face.

Then there's the Jew who doesn't believe in the state of Israel, who actually hugged the President of Iran. When Bill told the Jew that the President of Iran wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, the Jew replied that the President said nothing of the sort; rather, the President of Iran said that Israel would disappear. I got a big laugh out of Bill's response. "Disappear? Who are you? David Copperfield?"

Then there's a guy in a deleted scene who believes that the world is ruled by lizards, and who notes that some have actually seen Bush, Sr. shape-shift. Sounds like V!

I was intrigued by the scene in which Bill Maher was interviewing an orthodox Jew, who devised contraptions that allowed him to get by without using elecriticity on the Sabbath. They're pretty ingenious! But Bill Maher asked him if he was trying to outsmart God.

The closing scene was rather intense, as Bill juxtaposed Bible passages about the end of the world with similar passages in the Koran. (Bill actually took an anti-Islamic approach in this documentary. One person Bill interviewed said that the moderate Muslims were lying to Bill when they tried to defend their religion to him. This guy wasn't a conservative tossing out the word "taqiyya"; rather, he disliked the Old Testament as well. I wonder how Bill feels about the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque.") Bill asked an evangelical Senator why we should bother helping the world, when it will soon come to an end. And there were Christians who didn't seem to care if the world came to an end, just so long as God protected them. "I'll be raptured, and I'll return on a white horse!", one woman jubilantly exclaimed. "Even if the world ends with a nuclear blast, God will protect me," the ex-Jew for Jesus said.

Within and outside of a formal educational context, I have heard, watched, and read plenty of critiques of religion. But this documentary made me wonder if I was harming others by having a sort of faith---in something that cannot be proven. Bill said that those who look to religion for comfort are doing so at a heavy price, for, when we accept the unproven, we open the door for others to accept the unproven---and people can do so in fanatical ways (e.g., jihad), or in ways that aren't helpful to humanity (e.g., Bush praying about Iraq rather than learning about it). For Bill, the best posture we can take is doubt, which is humbler than dogmatism.

I can think of conventional responses to Bill's statement. I can say that religion has done a lot of good in the world. I can ask if atheism provides a solid foundation for morality. I can point out the Communist dictators who were atheistic and bloodthirsty. I can say that we all accept certain principles without solid evidence, for it's impossible for anyone to run his or her life completely on empiricism. I can remind myself of people who have experienced a higher power.

These responses are good, or, at least, not all of them are bad. But they don't satisfy me, at least not right now. There's a nagging feeling within me that, even if religion has done good, its acceptance of the unproven sets a bad precedent. Why should Christians accept the Bible without proof, while looking down on those who do the same with Shintoism, or radical Islam? Bill had some pretty bizarre people on his documentary, one of whom claimed to be Jesus Christ. This guy said that he paid for humanity's sins in a previous incarnation, and so there is now no such thing as sin. How can I say this guy is wrong, if I myself believe in a system of thought without solid proof? Does acceptance of blind faith open the flood-gates for people to believe anything and everything?

I feel that societies have largely accepted certain principles of ethics---which extend from "love your neighbor as yourself"---because they work. They promote a stable society, in which everyone is safe. Maybe I can accept these principles at the outset, and I can evaluate religions according to the extent to which they promote or abide by these principles. If a belief in God leads me to abide by these principles, then that's a good belief in God. But not anything and everything goes. We have some foundation, or criterion, for the evaluation of faith: ethics.

Bill Maher himself is not totally anti-religion in his documentary. He castigates churches for not following the example of Jesus, who championed the poor. He talks about his own religious experiences in the past, such as the "deals" he made with God. He talks with his Mom and his sister about his family's religion, and, after we see his Mom say that she'll be "somewhere" after she dies, there is a caption dedicating the documentary to her memory. Even Bill Maher sees some value in Jesus. Paradoxically, his experimentation with religion encourages me to call out to God when I need help. And he doesn't dogmatically proclaim that this life is all that there is. Rather, he calls for a humble doubt (which probably won't assure a lot of people).

Bill Maher also argues that the Jesus story was copy-catted from other tales---such as that of Horus and Osiris. In a poignant scene, captions refer to certain features of those tales that overlap with the Gospel, as we see images from the movie, King of Kings, as well as other Jesus movies. Personally, I don't know enough about this issue to evaluate Maher's claims. I've read conservative Christians who claim that the Gospel story is different from its alleged parallels in earlier cultures. C.S. Lewis, however, said that the Osiris story foreshadowed the coming of Christ. I'd also like to see primary-evidence for the parallels. The problem I had with Tom Harpur's book, Pagan Christ, was that it did not refer to primary sources (as far as I could tell). Maybe there are other books that actually do so.

I enjoyed this documentary, and I got a good laugh from it. I think my neighbors could hear me cackling!

A final thought: I'll continue to believe in God, for I am cognizant of my own weaknesses.