Religulous (**)

Directed By: Larry Charles (Borat)
Starring:
Seen: December 13th 2008

** Out ****

It is fascinating to see how clueless people can be about what they believe in. Yes, this documentary goes after all religions, but it almost seems that the main aim is on discrediting Christians, and it is shocking how many of us Christians let the faith down because of our own ignorance and lack of answers to some admittedly difficult or tricky questions. Tricky, because Bill Maher has for years been attempting to discredit religion, most notably Christianity, in all he has done, from sand-up comedy years ago, to this documentary.

As Michael Moore has taught us, we shouldn’t take everything in a documentary as the absolute truth, since dialogue is often presented only partially and with the biased view of the creator (not God in this case, for that I would use the uppercase Creator…) overwhelming everything. So we are presented with a series of people who look absolutely clueless and biased towards what they believe in an almost fanatical state to such a point that one can only laugh out loud at the ridiculousness of it all, and from there the title Religion/Ridiculous.

Maher also attacks the Jews, (but that doesn’t last long), the Muslims (more about that a bit later), and even a small Marijuana-smoking Dutch group (which is more funny than serious, I guess). The Muslim segment: you can almost see that Maher was afraid to poke too much fun at the expense of these guys, since he speaks of the murder of a Dutch filmmaker trying to expose the horrors perpetrated on Muslim women in the Middle East, and makes no secret of the fact that he does not want to go down the same route.

Religulous can be shocking to those that do not know where they stand in their faith, but for everyone else it is a clear wake-up call to define your own answers. It is not enough to follow a religion religiously, it must be done for the right reasons. As Maher says plainly, he is not opposed to Christians or Muslims or Jew per se, he is opposed to the lengths that fanatical religion will go to, to defend what they believe to be right, no matter how eschewed it might be from what their doctrine teaches…