Religulous, the Movie

Religulous is the name of an upcoming documentary movie featuring Bill Maher and directed by Larry Charles who also directed Borat. The name comes from combining “religion” and “ridiculous” so that should give you a pretty good idea of the movie’s theme.

Basically, unless it’s toned down significantly between now and its release date sometime in October, you can expect an all out satiric assault by Maher upon religion in general and Christianity in particular.

Lionsgate, the producer of the film, is clearly hoping it will cause howls of outrage which will fuel attendance at the box office. According to one preview I’ve read the film received high marks from film critics at an early screening for entertainment value.

It’s clear that the film intends to drop upon the general population bits of information that will come as surprises to most people including fairly educated ones. This information will include things like the almost non-existent evidence that Jesus actually existed, the anti-Christian sentiments of some of the nation’s founding fathers and the doubt over whether any of the gospel writers ever actually met Jesus and even over who the gospel writers were.

Some of this will be simple fact and some highly debatable, but all of it will be confirmable or deniable, and often both, with a simple flip of an Internet search engine.

The combination of Maher and Charles could be deadly. Maher has absolutely no hesitation about unleashing his caustic wit and religion is one of his favorite targets. Charles has made a name for himself in setting up unsuspecting folks to act as comedic foils and often making them look completely ridiculous in the process. From what I’ve read there will be some of this in the movie.

I don’t have a problem with a movie that attacks and ridicules religion. I do have a problem with the Larry Charles approach to involving unsuspecting schmucks to help out in the ridiculing. I consider this dishonest and the truth of the matter is that the average person stands no chance in a public verbal exchange with an experienced public speaker. Bill Maher, as both a television personality and stand up comedian, could probably make anyone look ridiculous.

If you volunteer for the whooping by agreeing to be interviewed, that’s one thing, but I don’t like it when folks are tricked into it. I wouldn’t like it if it were done to me so I don’t like to see the technique used on anyone else.

What do I think the effect of the movie will be? It’s hard to say. It could bring large numbers of closet atheists and agnostics out of the closet or it could result in a backlash if the humor is too caustic or too offensive.

Then again, given that we’ll be in the middle of what promises to be a red hot presidential race at the time, the whole thing may pass by with little more than a whimper.

Given the unpredictability of the outcome, I wish they’d wait until AFTER the election to release the movie.

I’ll probably want to go see it. Whether or not I’ll get the chance is a whole other story. If there is a furor over the thing, watch these pages for a review of the accuracy of the movie’s claims.