Religulous movie’s maher religious don’t

Bill Maher is on his soapbox, looking like a lunatic and holding court
in London’s Hyde Park. A crowd forms around the American talk show
host, who is disguised in glasses and a funny hat as he preaches that
aliens have infected our souls and only Scientology provides the
answer. “Xenu brought us here 75 million years ago, stacked us around
volcanoes and blew them up with an H-bomb. You have to rid yourself of
the implants from the extraterrestrial dictators,” Maher says,
imploring folks to use an e-meter, Scientology’s primary tool, to
measure their Thetan level and determine the imprint of these aliens.
This scene appears in Maher’s new documentary, “Religulous,” and it
prompted roars of laughter from an audience at a screening last month.
But it is just the setup. Maher’s punch line, which comes from a
comedy club clip, has nothing to do with the 55-year-old religion —
often called a cult — that’s turned Tom Cruise into such a weirdo.
“Jesus with the virgin birth and dove and snake who talks in a garden
— that’s cool,” Maher says. “But the Scientologists, they’re the
crazy ones.” Comedian and political commentator Maher, host of HBO’s
“Real Time With Bill Maher” and before that “Politically Incorrect” on
ABC and Comedy Central, has become known for attacking drug laws,
organized religion and PC sensibilities. On Oct. 3, his biggest battle
— Maher v. God — will hit theaters. It’s not a mockumentary, but
some of the real-life religious folks in “Religulous” could well have
been in “This Is Spinal Tap.” The film is a series of interviews,
often more debates than conversations, tied together with Maher’s
reflections as he travels between locations. With a talk show host’s
benefit of always getting the last word, Maher outwits, outquips,
outthinks and outperforms his victims. And his subjects — the
evangelical Christian who directs the Human Genome Project, a U.S.
senator, an anti-Zionist rabbi and a Muslim rapper who loves suicide
bombers — are the victims here. Maher’s bias is clear even in his
title’s marriage of “religious” and “ridiculous.” “What I am saying is
if you are religious at all, you are an extremist,” Maher said in a
phone interview last week, later adding, “There is no doubting that
there are brilliant people who are religious…. People find ways to
wall off areas of their mind — that is why I use that phrase,
‘neurological disorder.'” So why did Maher’s subjects sit down with
him? It’s difficult to imagine any religious person familiar with his
politics and godlessness actually agreeing to an interview. The fact
is, nobody knew whom they were dealing with until it was too late. “We
never, ever used my name,” Maher told the L.A. Times’ Patrick
Goldstein of how the interviews were arranged. “We never told anybody
it was me who was going to do the interviews. We even had a fake title
for the film. We called it ‘A Spiritual Journey.'” This art of
deception is only one of the very evident fingerprints of director
Larry Charles, who mastered this skill as director of “Borat: Cultural
Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.”
“Religulous” avoids Eastern religions, worrying only about fanaticism
in the Abrahamic faiths — Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Maher
considers himself a former member of two of the three. His father was
Irish Catholic, and that was how Maher was raised as a child. “It
wasn’t relevant to my life,” Maher says in the film, “Superman was
relevant, and baseball cards.” In his teens, Maher discovered why his
mother never joined the rest of the family at church: She was Jewish.
“I never even knew I was half-Jewish until I was a teenager,” he said
on “Larry King Live” in 2002. “I was just so frightened about the
Catholics and everything that was going on there in the church — and
I was never, you know, molested or anything. And I’m a little
insulted. I guess they never found me attractive. And that’s really
their loss.” Irreverence is Maher’s trademark. In the film, he calls
Jesus “nuts” and Moses “cuckoo.” He considers himself a contemporary,
though much younger, of the late George Carlin, founder of
frisbeeterianism. (When I asked readers of for any questions they had
for Maher, a career church leader wanted to know whether “he’s always
been a douche bag, or is this a new look and feel for him.”) “I always
felt religion was a giant elephant in the room of comedy gold and that
people don’t laugh at it simply because they are used to it,” he said.
This is what could make “Religulous” so difficult for the God-fearing:
It is positively entertaining. Maher visits the Creation Museum in
Hebron, Ky., and Orlando’s Holy Land Experience; he tongue-ties the
brilliant geneticist Francis Collins and walks out of an interview
with Rabbi Dovid Weiss of Neturei Karta International — “Never again,
rabbi.” His religious journey takes him from the Valley of Armageddon
in Israel to the Trucker’s Chapel in Raleigh, N.C. An interview with a
Muslim minister in Amsterdam is interrupted by the imam’s cellphone
ringtone, which is Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.” When Maher asks Sen. Mark
Pryor (D-Ark.) how people who believe in the Bible’s creation story
could be helping to run the most powerful country in the world, the
senator plays into his hand: “You don’t have to pass an IQ test to be
in the Senate, though,” Pryor responds. At times, Maher’s interviews
are frightening, like when the Muslim rapper Propa-Ghandi defends the
19-year-old fatwa against Salman Rushdie for “The Satanic Verses” and
argues that his music, which praises suicide bombers, shouldn’t be
censored. The trailer The so-called New Atheists — bestselling
authors who appeal to science, logic and intellectual elitism —
typically preach only to the choir. “I don’t like the term atheist
because, to me, that is as rigid as religion is,” Maher said. “I
preach the doctrine of ‘I don’t know.’ I don’t know and I don’t think
it should matter. I don’t think people should be so obsessed. Give
yourself a break. You don’t have to worship something, you don’t have
to worship something that is really just in your head, that you made
up.” But Maher avoids two of these major trappings — he can’t help
the high-minded snobbery — and sticks to what he is good at: comedy.
“I think Jesus was probably an awkward teen — big Jewfro, bad at
sports,” he says in the film, at which point a clip of Jonah Hill from
“Superbad” flashes on the screen: “Here I am!” And what better way to
discredit something than to make belief in it laughable? With his
Catholic and Jewish backgrounds, Maher should feel guiltier than
anyone about such heathen humor. But instead, the religious moviegoer
is the only one worrying about God’s forgiveness. “Religion comes off
as looking at best ridiculous in Bill Maher’s new film ‘Religulous.’
But the early buzz has also been correct: Brilliant,” I wrote on The
God Blog the day after seeing a screening. “And so I’ve spent the past
13 hours wondering if there was something wrong with my enjoying the
movie.” But quickly my feelings of guilt faded into an understanding
that the film is a guilty pleasure. “Religulous” is hilarious and
poignant because it pokes fun not just at things that bother Maher,
but that bother countless among the faithful: violence in God’s name,
seeing science as a religious bogeyman, End Times theology. “The only
appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not
arrogant certitude, but doubt,” Maher says in the film’s closing five-
minute monologue, which shifts the tone to dead serious. “The plain
fact is, religion must die for man to live,” he says. For being anti-
religious, he sure is preachy.

The outdoor event, under extensive security, was an old-fashioned
lift-your-voices, wave-the-flag celebration, with a little bit of
everything. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa rang the rafters,
pledging his city’s unbreakable bond with Israel and ending with a
rousing “Am

The outdoor event, under extensive security, was an old-fashioned
lift-your-voices, wave-the-flag celebration, with a little bit of
everything. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa rang the rafters,
pledging his city’s unbreakable bond with Israel and ending with a
rousing “Am

Joseph Stalin is reputed to have said, “Those who cast the votes
decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” I think
he had it half right.

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