Religulous. Again.

Aak, girlfriend, and I went to see Religulous the other night. I enjoyed it immensely. Of course, he picked some pretty weak proponents of religion to argue with, so it was easy to make them look ridiculous. When I invited roommate and her mate to see it they turned it down because they didn't want to see Bill Maher talk down to idiots for two hours, and that's exactly what it was. But you gotta hand it to him. Or at least I do. It was funny. He interspersed discussions with clips that usually mocked the person he was talking to. There was one particular clip of some TV show called Hell Town that had me laughing long after it had passed. You know, one of those laughters where everyone else has moved on and you're still there trying to stifle for about ten minutes because you don't want to piss them off.

The thing I like was how ballsy the movie was. It's true that once you come to matters of faith you're supposed to stop asking once someone throws it out there. I wonder what sort of mortal danger Bill Maher is from whackballs right now. I also liked in the end how he took a stand. It wasn't just two hours of debunking and mockery. He gets on his soapbox and talks about how we need the hocus pocus of religion out of the world's decision making processes. I didn't expect that.

As I'm sure has happened with other people, post movie consisted of a pretty fun and lengthy conversation between us. I don't believe in any religion, but I am curious about whether or not it has had a net benefit on mankind historically. Probably yes, I say. Pissy anti-religious people like Bill Maher always point out wars, terrorist events, and other killings such as the crusades, 9/11 and other suicide bombings, the inquisition, and other easy to cite very very bad things as reasons why religion is devastating to mankind. Fair enough. But how much has human kind survived and thrived based on the stabilizing force that religion creates for all of us? I mentioned this to Aak, and he mentioned how he was doing research for his anthropology class on Muslims. I don't remember the details, but he talked about a bunch of rituals that some people at some event were doing. (I think it was an open-air market?) He'll have to comment on the specifics if he cares enough, but it made my point pretty well.

I just wonder if it's possible for people to have such a stabilizing force that will spread moral behavior without cooking up what I believe to be utter fictions. I don't need to believe that some white bearded guy in the sky sent his son/self to "save" me by getting whipped with a cat of nine tails. I can simply accept that it's wrong for me to steal my neighbor's possessions. Why? Because if I can steal his, he can steal mine. Plus life is so much more enjoyable if you get along with and take care of one another. No resurrections necessary to teach me that.

Back to the movie. I was bummed that Bill Maher didn't spend more time with people who seemed level headed and faithful. There was an astronomer priest who I wanted to hear more from. There were others I can't think of at the moment. He certainly could've found some more. But I would have loved to see someone challenge him.

All in all, a well spent 10.75.

Ha! Sometimes I need to read more before I post. In looking for the above link, I found the post that Aak has already written about this movie. Oh yeah, I forgot about the Japanese Animism.

Well, now I've spent a bunch of time on this and it's going up anyway.