Idol Chatter: October 2008 Archives

By Bruce Weinstein, Ph.D.
The Ethics Guy

Bill Maher's "Religulous" is a perfect example of how not to make a good documentary.

A self-confessed agnostic, Maher sets out on a worldwide trek to understand how people can place their faith in something as seemingly irrational as religious belief. At least, this is what he claims his mission is.

It doesn't long, however, to see that what Maher is really after is to make fun of just about everyone he interviews, and to use the formal elements of filmmaking, especially editing and music, to show himself to be a morally superior human being. What a missed opportunity.

Artists are not exempt from the ethical obligations to tell the truth and to treat others with respect that apply to everyone else. What makes "Religulous" so troubling both from an artistic and an ethical perspective is that it flagrantly violates the latter responsibility and has almost no regard for the former. Maher selects as his subjects not the mainstream faithful but oddballs, kooks, and weirdos who represent a miniscule number of like-minded believers. He takes on an anti-Zionist rabbi, an Orthodox Jew who invents contraptions to get around the prohibition against doing work on the Sabbath, a Dutch man whose religion is based on the virtues of marijuana, and a Latino who claims to be Jesus Christ 2.0.

What these nut jobs are doing in a documentary that purports to be a serious exploration of rationality and religion is hard to fathom. Maher may want you to come away from these interviews thinking, "Boy, these religious people are real lunatics," but all you get is the sour feeling that Maher is using delusional people for entertainment value. By taking cheap shots in the name of philosophical inquiry, Maher abuses his privilege as a documentary filmmaker and reveals himself to be more petty, smug, and self-righteous than those he thinks he is exposing. (Is it really news that some whack jobs use religion to justify any bizarre point of view they can come up with?)

By David Wolpe

There are three problems with Bill Maher's new movie mocking faith: It misunderstands religion, misconceives God and gets human nature all wrong.

I have a fantasy of a counter-movie. I would travel around the world and interview every scientist with a crackpot theory or a quack cure. I'd find researchers who were venal, eccentric, foolish or cruel, throwing in a few responsible scientists for credibility. Call it, say, "Scientifictious."

Of course, that would be no more convincing than "Religulous." Religion is not univocal; there are lots of varieties and personalities. There is no shortage of strange beliefs and practices. There is ample opportunity for derision. Think of the movie he could have made about people's eating habits.

What Maher seems not to know, or to understand, is that religion is not a fantasy flung upward but an intuition of something far greater than ourselves. Everyone who lives with open eyes has reason to question. In the search there will be missteps, even cruelties and division, but also sublimity, kindness, beauty, wonder and faith.