It's looking doubtful that I'll get to Bill Maher's "Religulous" so I called upon Mike Carolan, my former next door neighbor (go Julliard Drive!) and partner in bee torture (you don't want to know) to give us all the run down. So without further ado...here's Mike...
One bit of information discussed in the news last week was the detailed questionnaire Obama and his transition staff were using to screen applicants for positions in his administration. As NPR pointed out, controversial blogs and potentially embarrassing Facebook postings could easily jeopardize one’s ability to survive such scrutiny. This stuck in my mind as I pondered launching my own thoughts about Bill Maher’s “Religulous” into the blogosphere. But then, I’m probably not the political appointee type, and all the choicest appointments I can think of (Ambassador to Ireland, Spain, Hawaii…) are probably going to much smarter and way more generous contributors anyway.
So let me start by saying that I find Bill Maher to be somewhat annoyingly arrogant – and not just because he seems like the type of person that probably knew Hawaii doesn’t need a US Embassy (because it’s such a close ally?...), but because he seems to be the type of guy that would point it out to you in a condescending way. I did however, really enjoy his film.
Bill was raised Catholic until he was thirteen or so – when his family decided that they’d just had enough. (I, on the other hand, nobly stuck it out right up to college.) As it turns out, Maher’s mother is Jewish, though she didn’t bother telling her kids until after they were grown. The movie reminded me that Bill was a pretty capable stand-up comedian in his day. In some ways it was reminiscent of Julia Sweeney’s one woman show “Letting Go of God,” which I also enjoyed. Julia’s show concentrated on all of the super crazy things you can find in the Bible, while Bill’s movie tackles the nutty and bizarre aspects of most of the major religions and one or two of the not so major ones, including one in Amsterdam centered exclusively on smoking pot.
His chutzpah is well on display as he places various representatives of the different faiths on the spot, asking questions most people are too polite to ask, and getting some answers that you wouldn’t expect to hear. It wasn’t all that different from watching “Borat” – you find yourself in situations where you expect a major conflict, and instead you get an uncomfortable laugh, an outright cringe or, in a few cases, a kernel of understanding about the human experience.
As a parent of three, I am somewhat reluctant to raise my children without any kind of religion – at least, that was my feeling for the brief period when we did attend the Unitarian Church. In this era of renewed religious zeal in America, however, I think a lot of us are left feeling like a person’s lack of religion means a deficiency of morals and an absence of faith or spirituality. As Maher points out, this was not the attitude of the early shapers of our country – Thomas Jefferson especially.
Though I’m at an age where I’m getting pretty comfortable with myself - deficiencies and all, as a parent, I still sometimes worry that maybe I’m denying my children something important. A good friend of mine’s wife, who also shares this fear (and lack of religion), has actively engaged their only child in a church as an act of what she calls “inoculation.” Her idea is that by having a solid religious upbringing her son will be less likely to fall prey to some REALLY crazy church when he’s grown (if you haven’t guessed, she’s quite a character, and, unsurprisingly, a preacher’s daughter).
Along this vein, Bill Maher’s movie gives us a creepy look at the much darker side of religion, including some of the “rapture-esque” geopolitical goals in play. These dark apocalyptic scenarios seem eerily less implausible when you consider the mindset of many of the people he interviews in his movie. The upside is that I feel much less guilty about my religious “failings” as a parent – though I admit that the inoculation argument I mentioned seems a little less loopy. His point seems to be that you need to take it all with some salt – if not a grain than a pillar.
This movie left me wondering about a lot of things, though it certainly wasn’t a forum for providing answers. On the other hand, it did provide a few laughs, and I find that answers are a lot more meaningful when I’m allowed to figure them out for myself.
-Mike Carolan
One bit of information discussed in the news last week was the detailed questionnaire Obama and his transition staff were using to screen applicants for positions in his administration. As NPR pointed out, controversial blogs and potentially embarrassing Facebook postings could easily jeopardize one’s ability to survive such scrutiny. This stuck in my mind as I pondered launching my own thoughts about Bill Maher’s “Religulous” into the blogosphere. But then, I’m probably not the political appointee type, and all the choicest appointments I can think of (Ambassador to Ireland, Spain, Hawaii…) are probably going to much smarter and way more generous contributors anyway.
So let me start by saying that I find Bill Maher to be somewhat annoyingly arrogant – and not just because he seems like the type of person that probably knew Hawaii doesn’t need a US Embassy (because it’s such a close ally?...), but because he seems to be the type of guy that would point it out to you in a condescending way. I did however, really enjoy his film.
Bill was raised Catholic until he was thirteen or so – when his family decided that they’d just had enough. (I, on the other hand, nobly stuck it out right up to college.) As it turns out, Maher’s mother is Jewish, though she didn’t bother telling her kids until after they were grown. The movie reminded me that Bill was a pretty capable stand-up comedian in his day. In some ways it was reminiscent of Julia Sweeney’s one woman show “Letting Go of God,” which I also enjoyed. Julia’s show concentrated on all of the super crazy things you can find in the Bible, while Bill’s movie tackles the nutty and bizarre aspects of most of the major religions and one or two of the not so major ones, including one in Amsterdam centered exclusively on smoking pot.
His chutzpah is well on display as he places various representatives of the different faiths on the spot, asking questions most people are too polite to ask, and getting some answers that you wouldn’t expect to hear. It wasn’t all that different from watching “Borat” – you find yourself in situations where you expect a major conflict, and instead you get an uncomfortable laugh, an outright cringe or, in a few cases, a kernel of understanding about the human experience.
As a parent of three, I am somewhat reluctant to raise my children without any kind of religion – at least, that was my feeling for the brief period when we did attend the Unitarian Church. In this era of renewed religious zeal in America, however, I think a lot of us are left feeling like a person’s lack of religion means a deficiency of morals and an absence of faith or spirituality. As Maher points out, this was not the attitude of the early shapers of our country – Thomas Jefferson especially.
Though I’m at an age where I’m getting pretty comfortable with myself - deficiencies and all, as a parent, I still sometimes worry that maybe I’m denying my children something important. A good friend of mine’s wife, who also shares this fear (and lack of religion), has actively engaged their only child in a church as an act of what she calls “inoculation.” Her idea is that by having a solid religious upbringing her son will be less likely to fall prey to some REALLY crazy church when he’s grown (if you haven’t guessed, she’s quite a character, and, unsurprisingly, a preacher’s daughter).
Along this vein, Bill Maher’s movie gives us a creepy look at the much darker side of religion, including some of the “rapture-esque” geopolitical goals in play. These dark apocalyptic scenarios seem eerily less implausible when you consider the mindset of many of the people he interviews in his movie. The upside is that I feel much less guilty about my religious “failings” as a parent – though I admit that the inoculation argument I mentioned seems a little less loopy. His point seems to be that you need to take it all with some salt – if not a grain than a pillar.
This movie left me wondering about a lot of things, though it certainly wasn’t a forum for providing answers. On the other hand, it did provide a few laughs, and I find that answers are a lot more meaningful when I’m allowed to figure them out for myself.
-Mike Carolan
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