I finally broke down and watched Bill Maher’s “documentary” titled Religulous, only sixteen years after it was first released. The movie came out a couple of years after Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion, around the same time I had begun research for what ultimately became my first published book, Divine Evolution. When the movie was in theaters, I had neither the time nor the interest in watching it because I had a very good idea of what it was about.
The title of the movie appears to be a combination of the words “religious” and “ridiculous”, probably to create the impression that belief in God is ridiculous. However, as my book The God Conclusion demonstrates, belief in God is far more logical and better supported by scientific evidence than atheism. The trickiest part of promoting my book has been getting atheists like Bill Maher to read it.
In fact, I’ve never had any desire to watch Religulous because I was fairly sure there weren’t going to be any surprises and I’d just been reading The God Delusion. I expected Maher to be smug and condescending as he mocked and ridiculed religious belief much like Dawkins had done in his book, and there weren’t any surprises in that regard. I expected him to set up straw men to attack and take a lot of cheap shots at religion and faith, and that’s exactly what he did.
So, in that respect, the movie did not disappoint.
The inspiration for changing my mind and giving the film a try was Maher’s somewhat conciliatory recent public statements regarding conservatives and Trump supporters, where he said we can vote for the other candidate without hating everyone who casts a ballot for the candidate you dislike the most. He sounded quite…reasonable when he said it. It’s a real pity he doesn’t seem to mean it. In a recent interview with Meghan Kelly, Bill’s demeanor changed noticeably when she said she planned to vote for Donald Trump in 2024, despite the fact Bill himself has himself admitted Joe Biden is a terrible candidate, in one interview even describing him as “cadaver-like.”
Bill tried to come across as charming and reasonable in Religulous, but he couldn’t quite pull it off. He came across as an angry atheist barely managing to hide his latent hostility toward the very people he was there to interview. Much like contemporary journalists interviewing a Republican politician, Maher didn’t make a whole lot of effort to hide his contempt for his interviewees.
To be fair, I didn’t hate every last minute of Religulous. Bill did have a few good moments that inspired a laugh. For example, his joke about taking a Jewish lawyer to Catholic confession was not only his best moment on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, it was a true highlight of the movie, and I laughed out loud. The real pity was the joke is over four decades old now, and Maher hasn’t gotten funnier.
I intensely disliked most of the movie, however. Maher is still a liberal and an atheist. Naturally, because Maher was raised as a Catholic, he reserves most of his venom for Christians and Catholic. In one segment Bill actually said to a Christian(slightly paraphrased): if you really believe that being in heaven is better than being here on Earth, why don’t you just kill yourself? What an awful thing for anyone to say. What type of comedian thinks it’s funny to taunt his audience with the temptation to commit suicide? Not a very funny one, in my opinion.
Occasionally, there were a few points of agreement between Maher and me. Bill made a predictable attack on the prosperity pimps, expressing a degree of disgust I happen to share with him. Much of the movie focused on what I’d call low-lying fruit such as the Westboro Baptist Church, with their protest against gay rights at military funerals and their vile signs that claim “God Hates Fags.” What kind of church tells the world that God hates certain people? God hates human behavior, not human beings.
I’m a firm believer that God loves us all, and doesn’t hate anybody. Maher also spoke with a pastor who formerly led a gay lifestyle until he married a former lesbian and had three children. Maher appeared to be offended because the guy preached against homosexuality. Rather than emphasizing the positives of a couple having children, Bill appeared to be criticizing them for no longer being gay. For a guy who had been raised attending mass at Catholic Church, at times Maher acted as if he knew nothing at all about Christianity. At one point he asked, “All these scientists are sinners?”
Bill, Bill, Bill. Have you ever even cracked open a Bible before? For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God. There is none righteous, not even one. Of course every scientist is a sinner, if everyone is a sinner. This is Christianity 101, not rocket science.
Bill visits the Vatican to mock Catholicism and criticize the church for all the prime real estate it owns. He goes to the Creation museum and speaks with Ken Ham, where he implies the argument is a choice between evolution theory and creationism. Maher obviously has never read any of my books, because he’d know that evolution is not a substitute or alternative to creation. Life cannot evolve until it exists. Before evolution can ever become possible, creation (either by God or good luck) has already occurred.
This is Logic 101, also known as the introduction to common sense.
Without question the most interesting part of the movie was Bill’s trip to Florida to The Holy Land Experience, a weird sort of amusement park designed to create the impression of visiting Israel at the time of Christ when your travel budget will only pay for a trip to Orlando.
One of the management types at the park recognized Bill. She was not happy he was there, and the camera followed her briefly, hoping to get the desired reaction–being asked to leave. However, the guy who played Jesus was absolutely outstanding with his passionate defense of God, using the same water analogy with the Trinity that we’ve discussed at our Facebook page for The God Conclusion. Even Bill had to grudgingly admit the guy’s response was brilliant. “The analogy that Jesus at the amusement park yesterday was brilliant about the Trinity is like water: it can be steam, it can be ice, or it can be liquid. Wow, that stopped me in my tracks for a second. That’s just a brilliant analogy. I mean, when you think about it for two minutes it’s still complete B.S. He’s a space god and he sends himself on a suicide mission and he’s a god but he has a kid and it’s just silly.”
Bill’s characterization of Christianity is predictably simplistic and immature. In the movie he even used cartoons to mock religious beliefs taught the Bible, such as Jonah and the whale. Apparently Bill is ignorant of the fact people have been swallowed by whales in modern times. The odds against that happening are allegedly 1 in a trillion, but even so that statistical improbability is a vast improvement over the odds of an unplanned universe. Redshift and cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) is the evidence for the Big Bang that took the belief the universe had an origin from hypothesis to theory. The odds against fine tuning of the universe are allegedly 1 in 10 to the 300th power, which is a one followed by 300 zeros. By comparison, 1 in a trillion is a 1 followed by 9 zeros.
Given the scientific evidence, it is obvious this universe had a beginning. Was this beginning accidental, or was the universe created on purpose? Scientists and experts have helpfully calculated the odds of an unplanned universe, and the odds against success are truly ridiculous. The odds against the fine-tuned Big Bang are terrible, but the Big Bang is only the first step in the process of making this universe. Those odds get worse because of cosmic inflation, and getting cumulatively worse before abiogenesis (the origin of life) ever becomes a possibility. The odds against the fine-tuned Big Bang multiplied by the odds against cosmic inflation and the odds against abiogenesis cause the planned universe to become a very viable option, leaving the unplanned universe to be the absurd alternative.
Most of Maher’s material was neither clever nor original, repeating false claims from the movie Zeitgeist about Jesus sharing many of the same “myths” associated with pagan deities including Mithra, Horus, and Krishna. In the movie Maher asserts these false god also claim to having been born on December 25, having 12 disciples, being conceived by a virgin mother, etc. But Trent Horn effectively destroyed the Zeitgeist arguments at his YouTube channel known as The Counsel of Trent.
Bill visits Salt Lake City to make fun of the Mormons. I confess to finding myself somewhat mystified by his decision to trespass on private property to get a reaction from church officials, who asked them to leave, when he could have gotten a lot more mileage talking about what the Mormon church actually teaches. He also ridicules Scientology, which arguably isn’t even a religion but a cult. Curiously, Maher seems to be most respectful toward believers of a religion when he’s talking with Muslims, joking about how good he looks wearing a Kufi. How…courageous of him.
Maher did touch all the bases of popular atheism, though, covering all of the most popular atheist talking points, even paying homage to the website “Why Doesn’t God Heal Amputees?” At one point the soundtrack plays Bob Dylan’s famous song “Highway 61 Revisited”, while Bill is describing the biblical account of Abraham and Isaac found in Genesis 22 as ludicrous. I confess that I also struggled with understanding the enigma of Abraham and Isaac until participating in a Bible study that caused me to read Genesis 21 immediately beforehand, which put Chapter 22 into a completely new context.
Probably the lowest point of the movie came when Bill interviewed Jose Jesus Miranda, an absolute lunatic claiming to be the 2nd coming of Christ. This is presumably because they shared a name in common. The former heroin user and convicted felon wasn’t a very convincing Savior, to say the least. I would have many more criticisms to offer about Miranda but it turns out he’s dead, and I was taught as a child that it’s not polite to speak ill of those who can no longer defend themselves. But unlike Jesus Christ, Jose Jesus Miranda is still dead, and he won’t be coming back.
My final analysis is to say that Religulous still isn’t worth watching. There were no interviews with Stephen Meyer, William Lane Craig, John Lennox, James Tour, Frank Turek, or any of the Christian intellectuals who could present an argument for Christianity far superior to the one offered by amusement park Jesus, and even that argument proved to be more than Maher could reason against–so he simply brushed it off.
While I’d love to sit down with Maher for an hour or two to discuss both the contents of Religulous and the contents of my book, I don’t believe he’d be willing the spend the time to learn about my argument for God. I’m afraid Bill’s mind has been made up, and not even scientific evidence could change it.
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