Did anyone see this movie? The first thing that I should note before I jump into the thick of it is that the movie is funny. I laughed the entire way through. The second part that should be noted is that it is not fair. The movie sets itself up as something that should be taken seriously alongside the humor. Bill Maher tries to convince us that he is not only a comedian but also an able documentarian and critic. He isn't. The movie ends with serious conclusive words from Maher that should anger all who watch it. He says Religion should be abolished entirely in order to achieve a global unity.
The movie works by showing us examples of what we know. Maher gets easy laughs by going to the places we expect him to. He goes to Jesusland themepark and the Creationist Museum in Kentucky. He exposes his audience to the ignorance that we already know about, to the televangelists and Jesus camp coalitions. He hardly has to do any real work to get us to laugh, it's enough to just put these people on the screen, give them long enough (no more than a minute) and they will surely say something to make us chuckle over. It is a very elitist model for comedy that only serves to separate us further from people we share the world with. In Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen has us laugh at people's hypocrisy, in Religulous Maher has us laughing at intellectual inferiority.
Maher takes the easy way out. It's an easy call to say all religion is bad. He neglects the millions of religious people in the world who are the leading proponents of peace. One of his biggest issues Maher thinks of religion today is the chasm it has inserted between doctrine and science. In probably what could have been the best and most illuminating interview of the movie Maher talks with a Vatican astronomer. Maher annoyingly uses the astronomer's words against him. He gets the scientist who is obviously the smartest person we meet in the movie to discuss openly how oxymoronically his science is with his faith. What he doesn't get at in the interview is that the trained astronomer is still ordained in the Vatican. There is something to this man's life which bridges the apparent gap between science and faith. Had Maher gone into the interview with an open mind he may have probed a little deeper and gotten this. Instead he is happy to have his position vindicated by someone on the other side.
Though this movie made me laugh I think it is actually taking us further from the peace that Maher speaks of so passionately at the end. What he is doing in the movie is justifying his own moral and intellectual superiority over the billions of religious people in the world. He is advocating that superiority to his audience and building further walls to separate the already fragmented groups in the world. All in all it is a pitying work on a subject which in better hands could have been done so splendidly.
