Religulous

Bill Maher has made a less than flattering documentary about religion which he has cleverly titled Religulous. Maher admits in his documentary that his mother was Jewish, his father was Catholic. His family chose his father’s religion and he was raised Catholic, but he was only really Catholic when he wanted something from God. He asked his mother why they went to church while he was growing up and his mother responded with “that’s just what you did back then.” So according to his own confession, Maher is not religious. However, he understands the basic doctrines of Christianity and often quotes the Bible in his documentary, but he is to be taken less seriously than one who has truly investigated the claims of Christianity and chosen not to believe (like Bart Ehrman). While he harpoons all three monotheisms, he focuses most of his documentary on Christianity.
Maher believes that all religion is bad and needs to be eliminated before mankind can progress to our next intellectual stage. He gives some thought provoking reasons for this belief: religious fundamentalism results in war, religion leads to racism and a new type of class warfare in which classes are divided by belief instead of wealth, and religious creeds are crazy. He asks how anyone can believe that a second millennium b.c. religious mystic talked to God through a burning bush that wasn’t really burning, or that God impregnated a first century AD virgin teenager to give birth to His son who is also God, or that the Trinity is monotheistic. Maher, like most other modern critics of Christianity, falls victim to the logical fallacy of reductio ad absurdum in which he reduces the doctrines of Christianity to their simplest form and criticizes them as absurd. The same method can be used to make evolutionists look crazy. “Do you actually believe that the tree in your backyard, or your dog, or your body and your mind all came out of a bunch of rocks?” Of course evolutionary theory is more complex than that! An evolutionist has a right to get offended if I say that they are naïve, crazy, or just plain stupid to believe in something so preposterous. Christianity is the same way. If you reduce Christianity’s beliefs into their simplest form and then criticize Christians as stupid for believing them, then you commit the same offense as I just mentioned. And this is what Bill Maher does in Religulous. Most of Maher’s claims about Christianity can be refuted with a little common sense and independent thought.
Bill Maher is no better than Michael Moore. Both make pseudo-documentaries that support a conclusion which they’ve determined before they started. Both edit their documentaries to portray people on the fringe who make themselves and their organizations (in the case of Religulous, Christianity) look crazy and make the narrator/interviewer look intelligent. Both use hot-button issues in a spectacle of disingenuousness that becomes mere entertainment with no intellectual value. But don’t get me wrong; it is entertaining. Its entertaining like Favre’s retirement announcements and Kanye’s apologies: they’re fun to watch, but you just don’t take them very seriously. I enjoyed Religulous not as a documentarian look at religion, but as a representation of how some non-Christians view Christianity.