Religulous

The critics who dismissed this movie as an unfair ad hominem attack against religion were trying too hard to make the point that they see nuances in religion and Bill Maher doesn't. This movie, however, isn't so much about religion, as it is about religious fanaticism and a funny but terrifying reminder of how many billions of people lead lives that make sense only in terms of a faith entirely devoid of humility. In other words, people who believe in peace attained only after the systematic destruction of people who don't believe in the same God they do. The trouble with taking issue with Maher's rhetoric is that in conversations about religion, it is nearly impossible to avoid ad hominem; it's only a matter of degree, and truth be told, the crazies do a much better job making their point than the non-crazies. What's the difference between the two? A crazy will proudly admit that talking snakes make perfect sense to them. The non-crazies will tell you that they feel sorry for those without faith, though they would probably capitalize the word, like so: Faith. I ask, what's the difference? Faith by definition is something built on an idea rather than on fact, so whether you believe in a talking snake or in Jesus, or in any number of Gods, it's still all a question of Faith and none of the versions of it are more or less ridiculous than the other. Would the movie have been more stimulating had Maher engaged more religious people that were both intelligent and articulate? Yes it would have been. As is, it's a fun, surface-level reminder of just how many people are terrified of death and the unknown, and the extreme lengths they'll go to make themselves feel less threatened by their own mortality.

Koko: Let's also remember what Maher himself has stressed on a number of occasions: he is a comedian, not a public intellectual or pundit. His arguments need to be funny, not cogent, but if they happen to be both funny and cogent, as Maher's usually do, well, happy days and tender mercies. Sure, the movie is a cheap shot, and yes, it does cast its stone at the clay feet rather than the iron body. But it made me laugh much more than it made me blush, and besides, if the gigantic figure looms over you, threatening your puny calm and blocking your blessed vitamin D source, which, by the way, was also once considered a god--many times over--then clay feet are fair game, especially if said feet march on Washington and dip their toes in the president's pool. If the overwhelming force of religion, in this country or any other, presents itself more often than not in its most intolerant and incoherent form, and particularly when that intolerance and incoherence putrefy into a political base and an arbiter of law, respectively, Maher can attack the dumbest among us with impunity. And while it is true that intelligent, articulate men believe in supernatural semen and thousand-armed elephants as well, they are relatively few; prudence compels us to dress the wound before we coddle the child. Some matters are more urgent than others. Maher's spitting incomprehension lies with the dull, complacent danger of certainty, whatever its guise, not necessarily with religion per se. Our curious Dionysian cults thrive on the unreflective reflex that brings surety, and while any confidence in what cannot be proved remains premature, the guarantee promised by religion seems, to Maher, to be the most conspicuous, the most profligate, and the most childish certainty of any ritualized behavior--and that includes getting married and not dying, Maher's most hated American customs.

Let's face it: it is the twin delinquencies--confidence and sanctity--that grieve Bill Maher. While religion admittedly makes no sense, and has been justified on those very grounds at least since the Upanishads, its irrationality offends no one, except, maybe, for Christopher Hitchens, who finds everything, including his own fancy, simply repugnant. No; incoherence is a fact of life and a natural product of finite human understanding. What makes religion so endlessly assailable, and so fantastically vulgar to non-believers like Bill Maher, is its insistence that incoherence act as some kind of special seal separating the mysterious and sublime from the commonplace and empirical. Not knowing does not make a privilege of your belief, nor does it remove your argument from the realm of rational discourse where conclusions must subject themselves to the standards of logical congress. Lack of proof does not transform nonsense into grace and it does not transport noise to the magical, cosmic metric ticking away at the music of the spheres.

Rather, religious discourse must be rational, and it must adhere to the same scientific and rhetorical principles that master and make manifest all other natural and human enterprises. For two millenia theologians required of their religions the same logical perfection they assumed as a matter of definition in their creator. Now we regard the divine geometer as Helen Keller, pre-water spout. That is why Maher is justified in his reductive pyrrhonism, and why gods with clay feet should always wear boots. Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Duns Scotus, Occam, Aquinas--and that's just the Christians--they all believed in the extraordinary imperfection of mankind as well as in the total intelligibility of the world. With modesty and earnestness, they offered flawed, meticulous proofs for their beliefs, requiring of them no less logical or rhetorical excellence than is capable of any human endeavor. Today we would call their treatises mathematical science, not theology, if only because their preferred method of argument defers equally to calculation and deduction. And as with Herbert's poetry, we consider the failure a sort of symbolic anti-sacrament. Instead of participating in the grace-conferring ceremony by which God's visible world mutates into our own inner recesses, rendering us clean and cold and brilliant, they offer up to God, as a testimony of their longing for Him, their broken masterpieces, shadows of His perfect light, fragments of eternity. The gifts are silly and laborious, and frequently unpleasant, but they mean something: they demonstrate, as a truth, the terrible power and responsibility of faith.

Faith is no consolation; it does not excuse. Whatever their mistakes--like comparing God to a big circle or deciding that every created thing has its own musical pitch, including moths--the medieval deciders knew that faith hurts; it has to be worked at, and its achievement comes only after, and is sustained through, a tremendous, disintegrating labor. Kierkegaard wrote that in all the Bible only Abraham could be considered a man of faith; only by the murder of his own child, and not knowing that his action was correct, did he commit to his belief; and that, Kierkegaard insisted, distinguished him from all others: unlike David, he had to win his distinction at great cost; unlike Christ, he was not assured of infallibility; unlike Moses, he lacked the luxury of moral certitude. He was a man who acted; he did not merely believe.

Kierkegaard also points out that, having decisively acted to kill his son, Abraham would forever consider his sacrifice--both in its utter mystery and in its arbitrary cruelty--an integral part of his faith. Being in the presence of God inspires in him fear and trembling; he does not merely rejoice at his union with the infinite, for he knows he is finite and foolish, and that his God is a force both abundant and terrifying. He asks for terrible things, and his goodness, like the true tuning of the cosmos, can shatter the fragile materials of his creation.

Had Bill Maher made a ninety minute film on respectable religion--on the tenets of the Pali buddhism, or on Meister Eckhart, or on any of the other thousand intelligent musings on what we cannot know about where we came from, who we are, or why we like cookies, we would have another respectable religious document that would not be funny. Moreover, these exceptions, though, ironically, they are also its beginning, are not real religion. Real religion is the slipshod cowardice that practices retreat while pretending to advance. It is real because nine of ten worshippers sanction it, abuse it, and fail to distinguish it from the exceptional religion of intelligent men and women like Loyola or St. Theresa. It is real because it, and not that other remarkably rare religion, is what surrounds us. And being real, it, too, is fair game. Bill Maher has every right to ask simple questions to simple people and to record their squirming idiocy. When ninety percent of Christians know less about the Bible than I, who believe neither in Jesus nor in belief itself, any critic may raise their ignorance as a serious, and potentially dangerous, fact of twenty-first century life.

And as far as Maher's obvious contempt for those who preach the impossible and explain the unknowable, let me remind you what Christopher Hitchens, the out-Heroding Herod, has to say about it:

"What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof."

I agree. So does every scientist on Planet Earth.

Ass-Headed Bottom: During my acting career (1991-1991), I had the privilege of meeting Bill's cousin, Kevin Maher (and incidentally, my brother was briefly interested in his sister Denise, unless I am much mistaken [I am often mistaken]). The play? Damn Yankees, of course (what the fuck else would I agree to act in?). My role, a bit part by the name of Vernon. Kevin Maher's role? SATAN! And he did it so well... He had this rousing number, called "Those were the Good Old Days," in which he exulted, long before the Stones, in having egged on the cannibals and other worthies. And one endless afternoon of rehearsal, as we all dozed through his ninth-or-so take, he did this thing... I might've dreamed it... he loosened his pants so that they fell down gradually over the course of the song, until he wrapped it all up with his trousers round his ankles, waving mischievously to Mrs. Ryan and the rest of us, resplendent in fittingly scarlet boxers, and can-canning offstage to our laughter and applause. The question is, then, why we don't worship comedians as gods? And why it is not more generally recognized that the Yankees are Satan's team...