Thoughts on Religulous

Image via WikipediaOn my birthday, Oct. 5, my daughter and I went to New Orleans to see Religulous at the Canal Place Cinema. We went to the matinee. The small theater was about 1/3 full, which is the largest crowd I have ever seen on a Sunday Noonish show at this theater. Madeline and I go fairly regularly as this theater shows films that aren't seen in general release. The movie was very funny and very well made.

A common criticism of the film has been that it attacks the less subtle practitioners of religion, emphasizing literalist, fundamentalist Christians, with the occasional bizarre Jew, Scientologist, and hemp worshipper.

My reply to the critics who say that the film targeted the less sophisticated practitioner of Christianity, and that most of the faithful are far more sophisticated in their understanding of god is...bullshit. I have read, studied and debated with Christian theologians who are supposedly 'sophisticated' and find that they are ultimately no more sophisticated in their thinking than the people portrayed in this documentary. There is a word for their theological sophistry - casuistry.

In one interesting segment in front of the Vatican, Bill talks to a priest who says that no one really believes in heaven, virgin births, miracles, no one scares kids with hell anymore, no one believes any of that stuff anymore. This priest looked like a plumber from Chicago. It turns out he was from a working class family in Wisconsin who happens to have been one of the top Latinist scholars for the Vatican for about forty years. Anyway, he seemed strangely out of touch. My daughter is only seventeen. She went to a Catholic grade school not long ago. If you ask her if they tried to scare her with hell way back, like five years ago, she would tell you 'Oh yeah, big time.'

When I talked to a priest about divorcing my wife in 2006, he had the temerity to threaten me with hell. He said a whole lot of other things that were so sadly rooted in superstition that I think it proves that this movie was not about unsophisticated morons, but mainstream Christians.

Bill also interviewed a Jewish scholar who said that Jews did not deserve to be in the Holy Land, that they had broken their covenant with god and therefore did not deserve to inhabit the ancestral home of their race. He was treated with contempt for his views, which seem totally out of sync with the mainstream of Jewish thought today. Interestingly enough, his was the majority view among Jews for centuries until the ascendance of the Zionist movement in the 19th century.

Anyway, the movie is far more interesting than I thought it would be, and funnier than I thought it would be. The guy with the church of pot was hilarious.

I hope you all get to see it.

Mims

Tags: Religulous, movie, film, Bill Maher, religion