The religulous release maher religion people

Maher, who has been picking on organized religion for years on his TV
shows “Politically Incorrect” and “Real Time,” zealously traveled the
world for “Religulous,” his documentary challenging the validity and
value of Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths.

Raised in a Roman Catholic household by a Catholic father and Jewish
mother, Maher decided at an early age that the trappings and mythology
of the world’s religions were preposterous, outdated and even
dangerous.

“Religulous,” directed by fellow doubter Larry Charles (“Borat:
Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of
Kazakhstan”), is intended to inspire similar skepticism in others
— and perhaps get nonbelievers to talk more openly about their
lack of faith.

“I’m not looking to form an anti-religion religion. That would defeat
the purpose,” Maher said in an interview at the Toronto International
Film Festival, where “Religulous” played in advance of its theatrical
release Friday. “It’s the nature of the people who are not believers
that they’re individuals, they’re individualistic. They don’t join and
all lock arms and say, ‘We all believe this and so it must be true
because we have strength in numbers.'”

The numbers Maher and Charles really hope to grab are general
audiences simply looking for a fun night at the movies.

Maher, 52, who started mocking religion back in his early standup
comedy days, has no misconceptions that “Religulous” will shake
people’s lifelong convictions to the core. He’s mainly looking for
laughs such as those the film elicited from the enthusiastic crowd at
its Toronto premiere.

“I was so gratified to finally go to a screening with people last
night and hear how big the laughs are,” Maher said. “Because we set
out to make a comedy. I always said, my primary motivation was I’m a
comedian, and this is comedy gold.

“When you’re talking about a man living to 900 years old, and drinking
the blood of a 2,000-year-old god, and that Creation Museum where they
put a saddle on the dinosaur because people rode dinosaurs. It’s just
a pile of comedy that was waiting for someone to exploit.”

Charles shot 400 to 500 hours of material around the world as Maher
visited a Christian chapel for truckers in North Carolina, a gay
Muslim bar in the Netherlands, the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake
City, and Christian, Muslim and Jewish holy places in Israel.

Maher meets with priests at the Vatican, chats with rabbis and Muslim
scholars in Jerusalem, encounters street preachers in London, and
hangs out with the performer who plays Christ in a crucifixion
enactment at the Holy Land Experience theme park in Florida.

They left Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism alone
largely for budgetary reasons, saying the extra travel and expanded
scope would have made the film too unwieldy.

They also figured that Christianity, Islam and Judaism were the
trinity of faiths at the heart of Western conflict.

Charles grew up Jewish and once considered becoming a rabbi but was
discouraged by his parents, who told him to “get bar-mitzvahed, get
the checks and then get the hell out,” he said. He said he now shares
Maher’s position: Heavy on doubt about the existence of a supreme
being, even heavier on certainty that organized religion is hazardous
to humanity’s health.

“If I believe that Jesus is God and you believe Mohammed is God, then
no matter how tolerant we are, we are never going to meet,” Charles
said. “All you have to do is push that one more step, then somebody’s
like, ‘You’re in the way of people believing in Jesus,’ and ‘You’re in
the way of people believing in Mohammed,’ and the only answer is to
kill you.

“Unfortunately, that sort of thing dominates the religious landscape,
not the Mother Teresas of the world. She becomes the aberration. …
The altruistic wing of religion has been minimized and this
militaristic, warmongering fundamentalism has become the dominant
presence.”

Charles said he assembled the 100-minute film from 14 hours of prime
material. He has suggested to distributor Lionsgate that the 14-hour
cut could be edited into half-hour segments and sold to television as
a series.

Never one to soft-pedal his own opinions, Maher openly scorns remarks
made by Christians, Jews and Muslims he interviews. He hopes audiences
will laugh with him, and that “Religulous” will stand as a testament
for people who share his scorn.

“It is a sobering thought to think that the U.S. Congress has 535
members and there’s not one who represents this point of view, and yet
there are tens of millions of Americans who feel this way,” Maher
said.

“Comedians have always made jokes about religion. It’s a rich topic. I
did when I was a young comedian, but they weren’t jokes that got right
to the essence of it, which is, this is dangerous and this is silly.”

Senator Joe Biden’s tendency to go too far and the hazards of debating
a woman are signs of possible perils ahead.

The Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh looks back on years of walks in
the hills of the West Bank.

An insider look at film director Zhang Yimou, who is directing the
opening cermonies at the Olympic Games.

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Bill Maher Makes an Adolescent Case Against Religion in Religulous;
Muslim Comics Play It Safe in Allah Made Me Funny

Religulous Directed by Larry Charles Lionsgate Films Opens October 1
Allah Made Me Funny Directed by Andrea Kalin Truly Indie Opens October
3

Redolent of Roman decadence and authority gone mad, the title
Religulous rolls pleasingly off the tongue. But Bill Maher’s one-man
stand-up attack on religious fundamentalism is a dog that has more
bark than bite—a skeptical, secular-humanist hounding of the
hypocrites, amusingly annotated with sarcastic subtitles and clips
from cheesy biblical spectacles.

Initially quite funny in its head-on engagement with star-spangled,
self-righteous platitudes, Religulous is one small career move for the
left-libertarian tele-savant Maher and another, equally modest step
toward confronting the migraine-inducing, theocratic With God On Our
Side nonsense that defines much American political
discourse—John McCain gets a cameo insisting that “the
Constitution established the United States as a Christian country,”
but he’s hardly the only public figure out to sever the U.S. from its
Enlightenment roots.

Religulous opens with Maher in Israel at fundamentalist ground zero,
reporting from Megiddo, the designated spot for the Battle of
Armageddon. By way of an alternative vision of the apocalypse, the
movie breaks into a comic montage juxtaposing all manner of holy men,
true believers, and pious pols—then licenses the comedian to
spend the rest of its 101 minutes turning his blunderbuss on this
barrel of fish.

For some, Religulous might seem to articulate what has been imagined
as Hollywood’s secret agenda since the 1920s: Is nothing sacred to
these heathens? Maher, who explains that he was brought up Catholic by
a non-observant Jewish mother (dragged on camera to proclaim: “Every
family is dysfunctional”), seems unambiguously alienated from cosmic
consciousness. Recalling his boyhood, he says that God “wasn’t
relevant to my life—Superman was relevant” and maintains that he
would have worshipped any deity that let him jerk off. (The latter is
counterintuitive to the max: Radical psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich
theorized that it was precisely to keep kids from masturbating that
humanity invented the notion of an invisible, all-seeing God.)

Although his antics are directed by Borat showman Larry Charles, Maher
is hardly comparable to Sacha Baron Cohen as a trickster performance
artist. (His funniest act in Religulous is a brief stint, big glasses
on and ear-flaps down, preaching Scientology in Hyde Park, London. A
few minutes into his rant, a bystander steps out of the crowd and
crowns him King Ding-a-Ling, solemnly placing a garland of balloons on
his fevered brow.) Nor is Maher a swashbuckling provocateur like
Michael Moore, comforting the afflicted and confronting the infidels
with his intimidating bulk. Mainly, Maher is pleased to play devil’s
advocate; occasionally, he presents himself as celebrity Antichrist.

On a road trip through rural North Carolina, Maher and his unseen
entourage pause at a tiny truck-stop chapel for some good-natured
joshing with the congregation. Whereas religion sells “an invisible
product,” Maher explains to them, he’s peddling doubt. Sensing what’s
to come, one believer angrily makes for the door. Maher is always
pleased to challenge, debate, and laugh at the lumpen faithful,
willing as they are to cite “historical facts” to defend any position.
Still, as a polemicist, he’s hardly fair—more than a few
exchanges are recalibrated in the editing, and too many end with Maher
flipping Pascal’s Wager, rejoining a believer’s “What if you’re
wrong?” with an emphatic “What if you’re wrong?”

Such one-sided encounters are more depressing than fun. As a showbiz
wise guy, Maher is more effective when hanging with more public
personalities. He gets a dapper soul singer turned preacher to insist
that “Jesus [also] dressed very well!” and then go on to mangle
Matthew 19:24 (“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a
needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”). He
maneuvers Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas into accepting the premise
that religion is a remnant of the Bronze Age; unperturbed, Pryor
defends his beliefs by lamely pointing out that “you don’t have to
pass an IQ test to be in the Senate.” Maher confounds tourists and an
unhappy public-relations woman in Orlando’s Holy Land theme park by
engaging the star-struck actor who plays Jesus in a theological
debate.

These straw men are Maher’s more formidable opponents. It’s far less
enjoyable to watch him bait an anti-Zionist Hasid, a barely coherent
Scottish Muslim, a guy who claims to be a descendant of Jesus, the
proprietor of a creationist museum of natural history, or a Dutch
pothead who runs a “cannabis ministry.” The last half of the movie is
more or less spent with the freaks on the carnival midway in
preparation for Maher’s big spiel. Throwing his own brand of snake oil
on the fire, he insists that faith makes a virtue of stupidity,
identifies religion as dangerous because it encourages people to
believe they have all the answers, and warns the world to “grow up or
die.”

Heavy stuff. Freud, who devoted his life to the study of irrational
behavior and characterized religion as humanity’s “universal
obsessional neurosis,” concluded The Future of an Illusion on a
wistful note—arguing pragmatic, imperfect scientific thinking as
the only alternative to the delusional totality of religious faith.
Maher more or less short-circuits this line of thought with a fire-
and-brimstone crescendo of exploding nuclear bombs and a chorus of the
Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere.” The anthem isn’t inappropriate:
Religulous doesn’t really go anywhere either. It’s ultimately a
celebration of the old-time religion we call entertainment.

From the multiplex to the stump: It’s caped crusader versus community
organizer, and the end is nigh

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no homosex people ,lairs murderers,, thieves… no talk show hosts
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Bill does have his considerable moments, but all the advance on his
latest diatribe points out his hit-and-run weakness; until he truly
dives into the subject, he’ll never be considered a real trend setter
or opinion leader. The easy “talking snake” and “guy living in a
whale” have been around for decades (centuries?). There is a lot more
meat (so long as it isn’t Friday) to chew on regarding the “Big Three”
other than just the fairy tale aspects of their collective story
books. I like the movie concept, will see the flick and save final
judgment for later; but it looks like a back alley quicky than a real
passionate screw.

I am a great beleiver in God, but I have to say I really like what
Maher is doing. He, in his movies and overall lfe isn’t questioniong
God but us, and the way we beleive and how we show those beleifs. You
manage in your article to loose a lot of people who would agree with
you. Some of you religious types don’t get that you must write for the
everyman as the Bible is written. Not to prove you’ve had a great
education of man by man and have good use of words.You guys have to
stop overeducating us of god and start educating us in and with God.