The Irrationality of Rationality

In Religulous, Bill Maher seeks to highlight the irrationality of religious belief. In many cases, he successfully highlights the irrationality of irrational people.

Maher clearly thinks himself to be wise when he declares that he simply doesn't know. He employs the Socratic method to his questioning of the religious believers featured in the film -- from the relatively mundane and benign men in the truck stop chapel or Judaism-to-Christianity convert Steve Burg to crazies like Ken Ham (who ironically resembles the missing link between man and ape) or outright philistines like Rabbi David Weiss.

Yet Maher applies the Socratic method to sophist ends -- something that Socrates actually would have despised. Maher has decided on the message of his film -- that all religion is ridiculous, irrational and dangerous -- from the very beginning, and is merely using the Socratic method to make that argument.

That Maher actually profited from the production of Religious -- not in itself unthinkable -- further demonstrates Maher's sophism.

The greatest irrationality of people who think themselves to be rational is the suspicious eye they cast at anyone who doesn't share their sense of rationality.

Maher successfully demonstrates the irrationality of many of his subjects. However, Maher tends to cherry-pick some of the most extreme examples of religious believers. He magnifies a comparatively marginal sub-strata of religious believers in order to treat them as mainstream.

It's a feat he replicated from individuals such as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers.

There is value in Religulous. While it's hyperbolic, bombastic, and in fact irrational, it's also thought-provoking. As CS Lewis would insist, anything that provokes thought about religion is actually of service to religious believers.

Thanks For Calling, Guys

Bill Maher, Michael Moore, Ben Stein sent packing by Academy Awards

When the Best Documentary Film Oscar is handed out at the 2009 Academy Awards, the producers of Expelled, Religulous and Slacker Uprising will not be accepting the award.

The omission of Ben Stein, Bill Maher and Michael Moore off the 15-film roll call of Oscar nominees, probably represents one of two things: either the less-than-spectacular stature of each of these films, or a rejection of a growing scourge in the genre of documentary film: the documentary style often referred to as Michael Moore-ism.

Films made in the Michael Mooreist style tend to be sensational and ultimately self-promoting; long on rhetoric and short on actual facts. The editing is usually cartoonish, relying on inter-cut clips of cartoon shows or amusing archive footage, often inserted into the film on a random cue -- what Richard Dawkins describes as a "lord privy seal" in his less-than-sparkling criticism of the film.

(Interestingly, Bill Maher's pro-atheist Expelled contained a great many such "lord privy seals" -- something that Dawkins declined to criticize. Commentators on Dawkins blog even went to great lengths to defend Maher's indulgences, which really only reinforces the known hypocrisy of many Dawkinites.)

Sometimes, the questions asked by such films are, in and of themselves, quite valid: Expelled, for example, calls into question the level of academic freedom at many institutions of higher learning, and Religulous questions many of the excesses of the religious faithful. Bowling for Columbine raised important questions about American gun culture, and about the effect organizations such as the NRA have on American society.

In the end, however, each film is ultimately self-promoting. Ben Stein clearly intends to elevate to heroic status among the community of religious believers -- or at least amongst those who believe in Intelligent Design theory. Bill Maher clearly wants to ascend to Dawkins-like status in terms of being a religion fighter. Slacker Uprising turned out to be nothing more than shameless self-promotion on Michael Moore's part, offering little more than a showcase of Moore speaking to large anti-Bush rallies and hobnobbing with like-minded celebrity buddies during the 2004 election.

Rarely has anyone gone to the lengths Moore has gone to in order to promote himself as a hero of the American left -- or, some would say, the global left, as the distinction between the two so often proves to be rather slim.

Films made in the Michael Mooreist style often feature one highly unethical feature: that of the late-film ambush, where an unsuspecting subject is lured into a compromising interview with a surprise interviewer.

Bill Maher lied to many subjects of Religulous in order to get them to appear, and later shamelessly admitted it. Richard Dawkins accused Ben Stein of lying in order to get him to appear in Expelled (but remained oddly silent when Maher admitted to lying in order to lure many of Religulous' subjects into interviews).

In each case, however, it could be argued that lying was the only way to draw these individuals into the richly-deserved limelight of ridicule. Few have parlayed outright arrogance into star status as effectively as Dawkins. And, quite frankly, anybody who has the audacity to claim to be the second coming of Jesus Christ deserves to be forced to defend that assertion in the public eye.

At base level, Moore's ambush of Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine seems to fit the same bill. Yet, as it turned out, Heston was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's disease during the time of the interview. While Heston certainly deserved to be called to account for his callous response to several shooting incidents, what eventually emerged was a failure of human compassion: the badgering of a man at the beginning of a slow, agonizing process of dying.

Perhaps moreso than Farenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine provided the model for the explosion of Michael Mooreist films in the succeeding years. That it won an Oscar and provided its maker with a nearly unprecedented stage from which to pronounce his political views only encouraged the proliferation of such films.

Which makes it perhaps fitting that the pale imitations of this film -- including Moore's own pale imitation -- will likely continue to be snubbed by the Academy.

But one way or the other, so long as self-promoting unethical hacks continue to look at documentary film as a venue through which they can lionize themselves, the Michael Mooreist style isn't going away.

At least now the Academy is set to stop pretending it represents any form of excellence -- technical or otherwise.

Bill Maher and the Atheist Apocalypse

Apocalypticism not just for religious kooks anymore

Normally, Bill Maher is a very funny guy.

At many points of Religulous, he even is funny. But sadly, by the end of the film, he just wants to scare the living shit out of you.

Maher, you see, believes the apocalypse is coming. To his credit, and unlike many religious fundamentalists, he doesn't welcome it. But he is willing to point fingers, and to exploit fear of a potential apocalypse to further his own personal agenda.

That agenda? An agenda of doubt.

"I don't know," he says repeatedly through the film. It's the maxim he preaches: one of skepticism and disbelief.

Most of the film relies on a carefully-constructed "mook" personae, making outrageous -- and often hilarious -- comments while smirking at the beliefs of his subjects. Maher the atheist "mook" also has a self-satisfied sense of superiority. Only when he converses with individuals that he can also regard as an equal -- all too often individuals who are themselves skeptics or can at least mix their religious beliefs with healthy skepticism -- does Maher cast off his "mook" character and cease being the snarky funnyman and try to address the subject matter with a modicum of respect.

Sometimes, it's hard to begrudge Maher his smugness. All too often, his subjects make it remarkably easy for him. One simply must find amusement in Maher's discussion of the virtues of creationism as opposed to evolution with a creationist museum curator -- an individual who looks vaguely as if he himself could be the missing link between man and ape. Or in the case of an amusement park Jesus (for whom an unstrung tunic seems to be the biblical equivalent of a popped collar) who makes an impressively weak pro-belief sales pitch about how the Holy Trinity is like water -- it can be steam, ice or water.

Maher's smirking mookish inquisition of his kooky subjects is amusing and really does serve to highlight some of the crazier beliefs held by various religious believers, but it ultimately ill-serves his thesis by the film's end.

Maher's conclusion that religion can only lead humanity toward nuclear annihilation ultimately arrives stillborn given the lack of attention devoted to actually devoting that thesis.

While his focus on Muslim rioting surrounding the Muhammad Cartoons, death threats issued against Salman Rushdie and the assassination of Theo Van Gogh start to develop the religion as violence theme initially advanced by Dutch legislator Geert Wilders, Maher spends too much time cracking jokes about some of the more controversial beliefs held by Scientologists and Mormons and focusing on self-styled prophets such as Mormon church founder Joseph Smith and Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda (who describes himself as the second coming of Christ) to make his sudden turn toward apocalypticism seem credible.

In the end, in Maher's view, it all has to come down to atheists against believers -- with little or no middle ground to occupy. How can there be, when religion is allegedly going to be the catalyst by which the apocalypse is triggered?

Maher challenges atheists to stop being so damned timid and challenges "moderate believers" to "look themselves in the mirror" and cast off their religious beliefs.

But Maher's challenges encounter two key inconsistencies. First, atheists have been anything but timid, especially of late. Atheists such as Michel Onfray have advocated open warfare between religion and atheism. And of course there's always nonsense like this.

In the end, Maher's "call to arms" is far more damaging than constructive. Maher's clarion call seeks to erase the vital middle ground through which the gap between extremists on either side of the issue -- atheists who seek the destruction of religion and religious fundamentalists, including those who seek to trigger the endtimes themselves -- must be bridged.

No matter what Maher and those who think like him may believe, it simply isn't reasonable -- or rational -- to attempt to define religion only according to the crazed beliefs its most warped adherents subscribe to or by the numerous mistakes that have been made in the name of religion.

To do so would overlook the numerous positive advances that have been made often in the name of religion: Mahatma Ghandi led the non-violent resistance to the British colonization of India based on his Hindu religious beliefs. Dr Martin Luther King Jr mixed Ghandi's methods with his own particular Christian religious beliefs to win civil rights for African Americans. The Protestant Social Gospel has led, in many countries (including Canada) to the emergence of a charitable welfare state.

But Maher doesn't want to talk about that. Like many self-satisfied atheists, Maher doesn't want to recognize these things.

Maher actually wants to wipe out any middle ground occupied by the reformers who helped win these various advances and replace it only with socially and civically destructive polarization.

Sadly, he isn't alone in this desire.

In a certain sense, perhaps Maher's call to arms should be answered -- via a rejection. Those atheists whom Maher considers too "timid" -- timid in the sense that they respect other people's right to believe as they do -- should reject his call. Those moderate believers -- especially reform-minded religious believers -- should not reject their religious believers in deference to Maher's fear mongering. They should reject his call.

While certain religious sects -- such as oppressive Scientology, militant Islam and bigoted Christian organizations -- should be rejected, religion itself has not been such a vulgar thing as Maher's one-sided description of it would insist.

At the very least, these things should not be rejected in favour of what Maher favours -- once again, doubt.

Maher's reasons for his atheism may suit him. But to tell people they must reject their beliefs for the simple virtues of "humble" doubt is an utter farce. For one thing, it says nothing about any positive reason for embracing doubt. It merely speaks to what he considers to be the negative reasons for rejecting religion.

No matter what Maher and his compatriots may insist, there is nothing rational about suggesting that the often irrational-seeming questions asked by religion ("who am I? Where did I come from? What is the meaning of life? What will happen to me after I die?") should not even be asked. That is taking the intellectual coward's way out of questions that it is very much within human nature to ask.

Last, but certainly not least, embracing fearful atheist apocalypticism as his answer to religious apocalypticism is hypocrisy. Nothing more, and nothing less.