Movie Opens Discussion of Religious, Nonreligious views
by Charles Honey
After watching “Religulous,” the new Bill Maher movie that gleefully rips religion limb from limb, a group of religious skeptics gathered at a TGI Friday’s last week to celebrate the event. For many of them, Maher’s mockery of religious faith was a kind of coming out for their besieged minority of atheists and agnostics. They were out in force on opening night, helping to fill a theater with more than 75 members of the self-described free-thinking West Michigan Center for Inquiry.
“The most important part of having a movie like this is it says religion is no longer off the table,” said Jeff Seaver, an ex-Baptist and local Center for Inquiry president. “There are some ideas that are so patently absurd that thinking people should not think they have to hold their tongue.”
Across the table, ex-Catholic Joni Murphy said the movie’s sharp tone reflects the ridicule atheists put up with routinely—like when drivers make obscene gestures at her husband and his ATHEIST license plate. “They don’t respect us in our nonbelief, so it’s very hard to respect them in their belief,” Murphy said, adding she would welcome a more respectful exchange. “Why can’t we have a conversation about this?”
Great, let’s talk, David Myers says. The Hope College psychology professor calls for a cease-fire in the believer vs. nonbeliever war. His new book, “A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists,” seeks common ground among thinkers from both camps.
Healthy skepticism
Skepticism is essential to healthy faith, Myers said in a nod to religion’s harshest critics. “Let’s, with a spirit of humility, put testable ideas to the test and then let’s throw out religion’s dirty bathwater,” he writes. But he adds, “Is there amid the bathwater a respect-worthy baby—a reasonable and beneficial faith?” Indeed there is, Myers and other defenders of faith say in response to recent assaults against it. The charge has been led by a spate of best-selling atheist manifestos, including “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris, “God Is Not Great” by Christopher Hitchens and “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. Their writings speak to no small segment of the U.S. population. About 15 percent, or 32 million Americans, self-identify as having no religion, according to the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. That includes 10 percent who call themselves atheists or agnostics.
Now comes “Religulous,” a humorous skewering of religious belief and practice from Maher, a popular talk-show host who bluntly disdains both the religious and the political right wing. Indicting the superstitious beliefs and “arrogant certitude” of religious believers, Maher in the film interrogates everyone from a militant Muslim rapper and a Jew for Jesus to a bejeweled prosperity preacher and tourists at the Creation Museum. The mostly light lampoon ends with an apocalyptic warning: “Religion must die if mankind is to live.”
An easy argument
Myers says Maher effectively ridicules the irrationality of fundamentalists who bring to mind the author Madeline L’Engle’s comment, “Christians have given Christianity a bad name.” But the argument is hollow, Myers says. “Mocking religious nut cases is cheap and easy, and one could do the same to make anything look bad, including the professions of medicine, law and politics,” he adds.
by Charles Honey | The Grand Rapids Press
Friday October 10, 2008, 11:48 PM
Reprinted here by R. Rectenwald November 6, 2008
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