by Jason Stotts
I have been meaning to see the movie Religulous for quite some time now, but I never got around to it. I was partly put off by so many people tell me that it wasn’t a good movie and that it didn’t have much content: that it was just Bill Maher making fun of religious people. I can see now why some people wouldn’t want me to see it, it is a full out attack on the irrationality of religious belief and it shows how absurd those beliefs are. The thing is, though, Religulous doesn’t need to make fun of religion; religion does a pretty good job being ridiculous all by itself.
The movie primarily consists of Bill Maher traveling around and talking to religious authorities from different faiths and showing how their beliefs are irrational and even contradictory. Bill Maher mostly seems to be a skeptic about religious belief, moreso than a militant atheist.
I highly recommend seeing Religulous if you haven’t yet.
The following is Bill Maher’s last monologue from the movie. I wholeheartedly agree with him and I’m providing it here as an incentive to go and get the movie.
The irony of religion is that, because of its power to divert man to destructive courses, the world actually could come to an end.
The plain fact is: religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key decisions made by religious people, by irrationalists, by those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken. George Bush prayed a lot about Iraq, but he didn’t learn a lot about it.
Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about and those who preach faith, and enable, and elevate, it are our intellectual slaveholders keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.
Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings, who don’t have all the answers, to think that they do. Most people would think it’s wonderful when someone says, “I’m willing lord, I’ll do whatever you want me to do.” Except that since there are no gods actually talking to us that void is filled in by people with their own corruptions and limitations and agendas.
And anyone who tells you they know, they just know, what happens when you die, I promise you, you don’t. How can I be so sure? Because I don’t know, and you do not possess mental powers that I do not. The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble and that’s what man needs to be; considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong.
This is why rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves. And those who consider themselves only moderately religious really need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you, actually comes at a terrible price.
If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is: you’d resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a mafia wife, for the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travelers.
If the world does come to an end here, or wherever, or if it limps into the future decimated by the effects of a religion-inspired nuclear terrorism, let’s remember what the real problem was. That we learned how to precipitate mass death, before we got passed the neurological disorder of wishing for it.
That’s it.
Grow up or die.