Most of world’s the major religions undergo ridicule in Religulous, a film by satirist Bill Maher and director Larry Charles. The result is genuinely funny, and it highlights the distressing disconnect between faith and reason.
In Religulous, Maher treks the globe inquiring about religion and its societal effects. He interviews several people of varying faiths and succeeds in making asses out of them. The interviewees chosen aren’t religion’s brightest advocates and articulacy escapes them in most cases. One scene shows an Arkansas senator butcher the English language when defending creationism before he asserts, "You don’t have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate."
Edited into the interviews are subtitles and video clips that disrupt the conversational flow and make the arguments for religion seem outlandish. Religulous doesn’t implement the most honest filmmaking techniques, but it does provide ample humor.
As Maher travels from place to place, he meets some interesting and sometimes oxymoronic people, including gay Muslim activists, a theme park Jesus impersonator, a rabbi in cahoots with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the self-proclaimed second coming of Christ. None fare well against Maher’s sharp wit as he asks them to consider the absurdity of their practices, but there’s no getting through to these people – they willfully ignore rationality.
Maher’s chief aim is at fundamentalists – those who preach apocalyptic prophecy, reject scientific principles, rationalize terrorism and know with utter certitude that they’re on the right path.
Maher finds these people irrational and counterproductive to human progress. This view is well conveyed in a scene about a "creation museum" in Kentucky that exhibits models of children coexisting with dinosaurs. Even viewers with the most rudimentary understanding of science will be appalled by this disgraceful distortion of natural history, but thanks to Religulous, they’ll laugh at it too.
The film slumps toward the end. The jokes recede and Maher takes on a preachy tone, warning against the perils of religious faith in modern world where political tension and accessibility to nuclear weapons is on the rise, but after so many laughs, the timing isn’t right to consider these grave implications.
The final minutes of Religulous could have been time well spent on making fun of Mormons’ underwear some more, but instead Maher goes into a polemical rant, as if he could win over hearts and minds after 90 minutes of being a sardonic loudmouth. If Maher truly wanted to make religious people aware of their illogic and how their beliefs are in conflict with modernity, then he should have been more sensitive and instructive from the outset.
In essence, Religulous isn’t about persuasion as much as it is about entertaining the already nonreligious – a contingent that makes up approximately 16 percent of America. With that said, roughly 84 percent of Americans will dislike this movie, but Maher isn’t likely to care.
