Opinion: Religulous Is Ridiculous

By Broadside Opinion Columnist Michael Gryboski

Bill Maher’s Religulous treats American filmgoers to yet another vitriolic denunciation of all things religious. Maher, host of left-leaning political shows like Politically Incorrect and Real Time, attempts to expose the absurdities of spiritual belief by talking with crazy individuals and alluding to religious extremism. Maher’s documentary is not alone, but rather part of an apparently growing industry of anti-religious material, including books by religion-haters like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Yet all of this seems a bit aloof intellectually.

One wonders what they are trying to prove, be it Maher’s Religulous, Hitchens’ best-selling book God is not Great or anything written by Dawkins. Perchance they are claiming religion is fundamentally harmful. After all, they can point to real life examples, which is what Maher did in his film. But what does that really prove? History is laden with figures that were destructive and hated religion just as much as Maher, Dawkins, Hitchens and their compatriots. Examples abound: Joseph Stalin, a man who believed religion was an opiate, killed people by the millions in Russia. Mussolini, another atheist, crushed political dissent in Italy and had his armies commit several massacres in Ethiopia. Closer to home, the shooters at Columbine High School in Colorado were non-theists, with one of them wearing a shirt that read “Natural Selection.”

What about these people? None of them were religious believers and yet they did awful things. If asked about these telling examples, Maher would most likely ignore them. Describing these people as proof that atheism is inherently immoral would be simple-minded since these people represent only a minority of the atheist population. This point could be very well argued by Maher, but it would lead to another question. If the likes of Stalin, Mussolini, and the Columbine school shooters cannot be used as proof that atheism is wrong, then why then should the people Maher interviews for his documentary be used as examples that theism is wrong? Using the most extreme examples of any group of people as their representatives isn’t only misleading, it’s malicious. It represents a deliberate attempt to smear that group of people.

A more campus-related example can be used to reflect how Maher went about gathering evidence for his theory that religion is stupid. Although some time has passed, most certainly we Mason students can recall Brother Micah, whose vitriol and inflammatory rhetoric drew large crowds by the statue of our university’s namesake. Maher, had he been in attendance, would have looked at the screaming preacher and seen him as proof for his religion-is-stupid thesis. But what would Maher say about the many Bible-believing Christians, who came out and did their best to counter Brother Micah, either via direct verbal confrontation or through attempting to direct people away from the sight so as to better dialogue on matters of spiritual truth? Does that one bad example negate all those good examples? In the mind of Maher, the answer would most likely be yes.

So, if we can agree on the obvious, which is that every ideology, religious and secular, has its rotten apples, let’s return to the question: Why would people like Maher make a documentary that generalizes religious believers and ignores the countless examples of atheists and agnostics who have caused harm sometimes on an astronomical scale? My personal opinion is it must be frustration.

Atheist missionaries like Bill Maher have to be frustrated. It is exasperating to them that even in Great Britain, a nation where the General Theory of Evolution is perpetuated as true in every institution, less than half the population polled by the British Broadcasting Corporation said they believed in Darwin’s theory. It is frustrating to them that despite every possible effort to “enlighten” the populace, a Pew Research Poll in 2008 found that 92 percent of Americans believe in a Supreme Being and 80 percent believe in miracles. This frustration is only destined to get worse. Whereas Religulous earned $3.4 million dollars for its opening weekend, the pro-Christian evangelical-themed film Fireproof earned $6.8 million, double its ideological opposite.

Maher’s documentary, along with the books of Dawkins, Hitchens, and others, really proves nothing about which is better, religion or irreligion. If the best Maher can do is point to the extremist fringe as proof that religion is wrong, then he is no better than people who claim that all Arabs are terrorists or all Hispanic immigrants are illegal. Bill Maher and those like him are judging the religious as a whole by the worst of us, and it’s a shame that some will take him seriously.