I suspect that anyone going to see Bill Maher’s new movie, Religulous, expecting to come away with answers to lifes’ mysteries might be disappointed as Maher let’s us know up front that he is selling doubt.

WHY…..because he freely admits that he doesn’t know!

So Maher takes us on a journey of self-discovery and uses the two tools necessary to get the job done…..a mirror and if need be, a magnifying glass. The miiror shows us just how “ridiculous” we homo sapiens can be; and the magnifying glass to be used if we care to take a closer look and learn why we need to be so ridiculous.

Make sense?

"Religulous," produced on the run with Larry Charles of "Borat" fame behind the camera, ridicules Mormonism and Scientology, Islam and Christianity. It saves Maher’s special wrath for fundamentalism in its many forms.

"Antirationalists," Maher calls them. He lumps together George W. Bush, Tom Cruise, con-artist TV preachers, a Senate Democrat and pretty much anybody who bows to Mecca or weeps at crucifixion reenactments. He outs them, parses their beliefs and frets over the amount of power these folks exercise in our world. The "apocalypse now, or at least soon" crowd has its fingers on the Armageddon button, Maher says.

Maher visits Megiddo, Israel, which believers embrace as the Revelations-revealed location of Armageddon, the final battle between good and evil. He preaches Scientology in London’s Hyde Park, smokes a joint with an Amsterdam doper from a church of cannabis, is tossed out of the Vatican and Salt Lake City, berated in a Jerusalem mosque and hugged by Christian truckers in the Trucker’s Chapel in Raleigh, N.C.

He seems genuinely charmed by the actor playing Jesus at Orlando’s Holy Land Experience theme park. But Maher challenges a pastor who runs a Florida ministry to convert gays, a Christian Human Genome Project scientist, the founder of the Creation Museum and a Muslim Brit rapper who loves his free speech but hates yours if you criticize the Prophet. Maher is flip and funny, but also profane and prone to interruption. He can be rude. But he leaves more than one adversary speechless at his command of the Bible, the Koran and the many shared myths from which Christianity, Judaism and Islam evolved.

"Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking," he argues.

He’s not quite an equal-opportunity offender, though. Maher travels to the Western Wall but goes awfully easy on the chosen people. (He’s half-Catholic, half-Jewish). He leaves out Hinduism and Buddhism and limits himself to religions with apocalyptic leanings.

"Grow up or die," Maher tells the human race. But considering the film’s mocking tone, snippets of gay porn and profanity, there’s no way he’s going to sway any fundamentalist. Rather, he’s reaching out to those who have moved beyond religion. Speak up, he says, or folks who build their lives around narrow interpretations of bizarre texts will doom us all.

EDITORIAL NOTE: Bill Maher does an excellent job at holding a mirror up  so that those with a half-open mind can catch a glimpse of the absurdity of organized religion. Unfortunately, a 101 minute movie could never touch on some of the other reasons why religion is so dangerous and in many cases. counterproductive to is stated goal.

It is ironic that “true believers” see non-believers as being in peril and and their impact on the world as being a danger to all as the truth is exactly the opposite.

Case in point: more people have been persecuted, tortured and killed in the name of religion than any atheistic belief system.

AROUND THE BLOGOSPHERE:

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