can we start anticipating Religulous? "you start disputing my god and you got a problem"

i have no use for him but vaya con dios

The gay muslim activists were funny

clip 1 and 2 are pretty funny
http://www.comingsoon.net/films.php?id=36716clip 1 and 2

I don't think Maher was the best choice to play Michael Moore in this. I'm sure he'll be repeatedly OTM, though.

The trailer makes me wish that the focus was a bit different. It seems like it would be stronger if they focused in on the politics-religion-armageddon interaction, rather than opening it up to a full scale "you're dumb for being religious" critique.

yeah otm - maher is way too extremist on his stance against religion for this to have any significant effect, unfortunately

the key to the whole trailer & probably the movie as well is to put the idea into peoples heads that religion actually = madness, im sure thatll go over well

I think his focus is exactly what the movie is called: Religulous. Nothing too strong, but a jest at stupid religious stuff and ridiculously stupid followers.

The fact that it doesn't come on strong is why there will be many people moviegoers for this film. And that's all that matters.

And I don't believe he will allude to the point that religion = madness. I think he is going to let people speak for themselves, and let the viewer decide that some people are outrageously stupid. I think there's a difference there because, he isn't going to state facts but just have lots of funny interviews like Borat.

And I don't believe he will allude to the point that religion = madness

uhh did you watch the trailer??

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2SUAAsYg-o

^ nabisco otm

well, it will me more politically correct, religion = ridiculous (less strong of a word)

we won't buy it, so yes, he will allude to religion = madness. you are correct sir

he lost me at relijewlous

but won't it be grand to make fun of religions! isn't that fun because people will leave the movie angry!

Nothing too strong, but a jest at stupid religious stuff and ridiculously stupid followers.

Doesn't he compare God to Santa Claus in the trailer? While I agree with him, I think many people would consider that to be more than just "stupid religous stuff". I mean, that's a jest at the concept of omnipotence.

and then we can throw popcorn at the the disgruntled people and say things like "ha ha ha, you are upset"

what I meant to say is that the message will be very strong but the way he tries to sell the message, and is polite with people he interviews, will make the movie more light and attract more viewers, which is all that matters.

Maher does at least have Obama's pulse:

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2008/08/right_on_it.php

the god who wasn't there is a great anti-jesus doc if that's yr fancy

I'm glad that the belief this film seems to deepen in critics is that Maher is a self-worshipping asshole.

this looks like the worst fucking movie ever

no results for cmd-f "religulolus"... for shame

n/a otm. i've only seen the trailer twice and i still hate this movie with the intensity of a 1000 suns, etc.

it was classic what a dick he was talking about this movie on the daily show. he started out making a derisive point about sarah palin's intelligence bc of that video of her being protected from witches, but his comment ended up in an o_O place of "what's next, the secretary of the treasury with a bone through his nose?" nice.

he was sort of funny rehearsing the trinity, though. he had clearly practiced in front of the mirror, which came off douchey, but what are you going to do.

I remember hearing BM say on "Politically Incorrect" that "America doesn't have an empire, and we could," which is just as fantastic as any dogmatic myth.

from a NYT feature on Religulous:

“Anyone who’s religious is extremist. See, we’re just used to religion. It’s like what Matthew Arnold said about a tree. It’s not that there are no miracles. A tree is a miracle. You’re just used to it. And conversely religion is something we’re just used to. So the notion that God had a son, that he’s a single parent, and the son went on a suicide mission, and you’re drinking his blood on Sunday, that a man lived inside a whale and that the earth is 5,000 years old — all the essentials of religion that are in the Bible or the Koran — we’re used to them. But it doesn’t mean they’re not crazy, doesn’t mean they’re not ridiculous. And so to be religious at all is to be an extremist, is to be irrational. "

Yeah, every observant Jew and Christian believes all that literally. ILXworthy strawman stuff there.

I have a really annoying friend who is a self described militant atheist, church of the flying spaghetti monster, hard science graduate student Dawkins fellater, and he came online the other night and raved to me about how great this movie was. I don't really know if such a thing is possible but he holds these viewpoints to feel "cool" and superior to others. He's basically the biggest poser in existance after Bill Maher.

I know, Morbs, but except for the blood part (low-church theology on transubstantiation being what it is), I was taught to believe that stuff literally. I dunno if I was just more gullible than other people....

I mean, They Are Definitely Out There.

I wish he'd gone on the Colbert Report, since Colbert actually gives a shit about religion and would have semi-seriously debated him, instead of letting him give his spiel the way Stewart did.

haha Morbs OTM, though about the ILX strawman stuff, i.e. "OMG we interviewed the dude that plays Jesus at the Xtian theme park and he was CRAZY OMG LOL." what a surprise!

i dunno if dudes talking about "dawkins fellaters" and brushing off "cool" posers can really complain about people trying to feel superior to others

you'll have to take me on faith, then

i hate to say it but Dr. Morbious OTM

haha

this movie looks so stupid

Maher's main crime is that he isn't funny.

Yeah, my parents and everyone at the church I grew up in believed all of that literally, along with many other things. I remember one sermon that was dedicated to the verse about "It is easier for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven", and outlining how that was literally true (The explanation given was that apparently there is/was some gate to an ancient city known as the eye of the needle, it was very small, and a camel would have to get down on its knees to enter it. If you were wondering).

Anyway, yes, strawman argument, but if Maher ever hung out anywhere near where I lived, it wouldn't surprise me that he would think that a lot of Christians are like that.

It's gotta be better than An American Carol though, right?

akm otm

I was only taught to believe transubstantiation literally! cuz rlly, otherwise yer just a Protestant. (They taught us evolution in Catholic school too.)

ok this movie looks really smug & irritating and won't change anyone's mind but using that as a jump-off to talk shit about atheism from the fence-sitting moderate "michael moore is the left's ann coulter" position is str8 garbage - stick 2 facts

btw maher believes in the vaccine/autism link if you're looking for evidence of idiotic, harmful beliefs - really disappointing. i dont think hes fall-down-lol like ever but dude is on point like 90% of the time and a pretty hilarious dick the other 10%

i cannot stand this guys smug clay face

lol
http://www.iwatchstuff.com/2007/07/13/Maher_Hooker.jpg

morbs otm again. as a catholic, there's nothing like eating the flesh of your savior on a Sunday morning to make you feel that all's well with the world.

one of the wha? moments of the Daily Show interview is that Maher backs off of identifying as an atheist, which i thought was kind of cowardly, not to mention false, given what he'd already said.

http://www.bossip.com/uploaded_images/Bill%20Maher1-795571.jpg

ew god ew

sorry, i still like him

He often makes me laugh but, on balance, I really hate this douchebag.

just like olbermann anybody who can come from the left with lolzy "NEW RULE!" asshole game gets props from me

btw, he voted for Dole in '96.

We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, that's not cowardly. Stupid maybe, but not cowardly.

* Politically Incorrect, September 17, 2001

most of the reviews i read blamed this movie's shittiness on larry charles

Paying a lot of lip service to religion and believing it's a necessary aspect to society while not really caring yourself is one of the main tenets of classic neoconservatism, which makes endorsing that viewpoint kind of creepy to me.

Kristol noted that Strauss' contribution was to help neoconservatives to understand the importance of religion in the political life of a nation. "Religion was not part of elite culture found at places like Harvard," said Kristol. "It was not thought appropriate for highly educated people to learn too much about religion." Straussians, who were not well regarded in the academy, took religion seriously. "They played a very important role in the culture war by keeping neoconservative intellectuals pro-religion," says Kristol. This pro-religion stance gave neoconservative intellectuals a way to influence the wider American culture. Liberal and left intellectuals who disdained religious belief were distrusted by most Americans and this distrust helped check liberal influence and policies.

However, Kristol pointed out that Straussians were not generally themselves committed to religion. Kristol added that Americans "don't bother with theology. The fact is that the moral dimension of religion is what counts for Americans."

http://www.reason.com/news/show/34900.html

well that's the straight-up soviet underpinning of neoconservatism for you. saying "religion contains wisdom and lots of people really like it" is a different thing from "it keeps the rabble in line while we remake the world in our image"

xp

Paying a lot of lip service to religion and believing it's a necessary aspect to society while not really caring yourself is one of the main tenets of classic neoconservatism, which makes endorsing that viewpoint kind of creepy to me.

― mh, Monday, October 6, 2008 3:48 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

necessary is beside the point - its an intrinsic aspect of human society - and i would argue a manifestation of certain inherent qualities of the human mind

The thing about the "noisy atheist" arguments is that it's not always clear to me what effect they have -- I'm sure there is a level on which they make atheism more visible and comfortable to many who are already somewhat inclined that way, but there comes a point where certain approaches just validate the very reason many Americans are afraid or resentful of atheists: this sense that they represent an attack on mainstream values and a process of subversion, that they're not just politely asking for pluralistic tolerance but seeking to undermine society in some way.

no offense nabisco, but that's skating a little close to the "i don't mind gay people as long as i never have to see them or hear about them, why do they have to impose their lifestyle on ME?" line. and ok, maher and hitchens aren't "politely asking" for tolerance, but so what? i can point you to plenty of polite and thoughtful agnostic voices out there, just like you can point me to plenty of reflective religious voices. none of which make very much noise in the pop marketplace of ideas, precisely because of their politeness and thoughtfulness. and as long as we're going to have yr james dobsons and george bushes and sarah palins, i'm happy to have some loudmouths making an oppositional case.

People like Dawkins/Hitchens strike me as too academic in their methods for this impression to really be their fault, but I don't know about Maher. Either way, I think the effect Tipsy wants to see might sometimes be better served by concentrating on demonstrating to people the ways in which the non-religious are constantly imposed upon by our culture, not ALWAYS by playing offense against easy-target religious views.

first, i think to some degree they do demonstrate that, simply by making the point that in fact nonreligious people live in this society and are confronted every day with a fair amount of overbearing religiosity (the overbearing bits are the bits that maher, e.g., tends to single out). and second, the things these guys go after might be "easy targets," but they're not all straw men. the religious right does not represent all or most religious americans, obviously. but it's not just some flakey fringe group either. it has real political power, and isn't shy about using it. on balance, as a nonreligious american, i'm happy for there to be some loudly nonreligious voices.

yes being atheist is just like being gay

...

it is in that i beat them both up

truth bomb

wait no

ok ban me

― am0n, Monday, June 23, 2008 1:29 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark

just think of how many problems we could stop in ther tracks if we could just run our cars by harnessing the power of people arguing about atheism on the internet.

hah what a day to change my username

and then yell out the car window

and then not tip someone

while opening a beer with yr ronahildo can opener

The bigger question here would be whether Bill Maher leaves a tip when he receives communion

hahaha xposts

(fwiw it doesn't even have to do with being atheist or agnostic, as far as i'm concerned. i grew up in a practicing religious family that happened to be part of a very tiny religious minority, and a fair amount of my childhood and adolescence was spent contending with feeling basically marginalized, ridiculed and excluded from mainstream society. i identify as agnostic now, when compelled to identify at all, but challenging christian hegemony over american discourse is not just about saying THERE'S NO GOD. it's largely about saying, make some room, save us a seat, we're here too.)

xpost - I'm not sure what's particularly untrue or sinister about pointing out the following sets of facts:

(a) religion plays an important part in the social organization and moral framework of American life, in an extra-political way that neither party is going to fundamentally change, or has much business trying to fundamentally change

(b) people's religious sentiments and affiliations can be used -- sometimes cynically, sometimes earnestly and meaningfully -- to mobilize them to vote in certain ways
(c) they can also be used outside of politics to mobilize them in support of socio-political changes, whether we want to consider those changes "bad" (sexual intolerance) or "good" (civil-rights organizing, fighting poverty)

(d) therefore it behooves any politician to recognize point (a) and find ways to communicate his or her socio-political vision in a way that makes sense to and draws upon the religious values and moral frameworks of the people he or she is asking for votes, the same way he/she would when talking about the economic situation those people are in

^^ there is no good reason this should be given up as a cynical neoconservative tactic when it's just common sense: if religion plays a role in the social framework of a nation, it makes sense to look for ways to draw on that framework in ways that promote the things you wish to accomplish. And there is no reason the left should let conservatives appeal to people's values frameworks without making similar appeals to quasi-religious values about social justice, caring for the needy, encouraging pluralism, etc. etc. etc.

xpost - Tipsy I don't think it's skating that line at ALL, and you're conflating two very different things -- you're conflating EXISTENCE with RHETORIC. More on this in a second, maybe, but surely a film like Maher's is an explicitly rhetorical activity, and as such it's completely fair to ask what that rhetoric wants to accomplish and whether it will succeed at it. That is completely different from what you're suggesting there...

i grew up in a practicing religious family that happened to be part of a very tiny religious minority and felt only slightly annoyed by christian hegemony

good for you. i spent years either not saying the "under god" part of the pledge of allegiance and hoping no one noticed, or saying it and feeling kind of nauseated. sometimes i split the difference by mouthing it silently.

Tipsy I don't think it's skating that line at ALL, and you're conflating two very different things -- you're conflating EXISTENCE with RHETORIC. More on this in a second, maybe, but surely a film like Maher's is an explicitly rhetorical activity, and as such it's completely fair to ask what that rhetoric wants to accomplish and whether it will succeed at it. That is completely different from what you're suggesting there...

the rhetoric is the accomplishment. it's an assertion of existence.

and not to get all red-state/blue-state on you, but it's very easy to say that existence doesn't need to be asserted if you happen to live in a pluralistic, multicultural etc. place. lots of americans don't.

good for you. i spent years either not saying the "under god" part of the pledge of allegiance and hoping no one noticed, or saying it and feeling kind of nauseated. sometimes i split the difference by mouthing it silently.

― tipsy mothra, Monday, October 6, 2008 4:15 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol i did this too - but it never seemed like a huge deal

Maher's approach just reinforces the persecution complex a lot of religious people have. most people might believe in some form of God, but each religion thinks they are the one true religion and lump the other religions in with the non-believers.

lol at blue states automatically being pluralistic multicultural places to live; I should take you to the town in MN where JJ and I went to high school

i spent years either not saying the "justice for all" part of the pledge of allegiance, beginning with the week Ford pardoned Nixon.

and not to get all red-state/blue-state on you, but it's very easy to say that existence doesn't need to be asserted if you happen to live in a pluralistic, multicultural etc. place. lots of americans don't.

― tipsy mothra, Monday, October 6, 2008 4:18 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is a valid point i think - not to get any more trademarked ilx faux outrage by comparing marginalized atheist teens to marginalized gay teens but just as i talk to kids who grew up in douglasville or idaho or whatever and are just now discovering hitchens/dawkins/etc when i talk to gay kids from those same places i find out they idolized rupaul and margaret cho instead of less confrontational gay icons

it never seemed like a huge deal

it didn't wreck my life or anything, but i resented it. like i resent "in god we trust" on our money, and the way the public meetings i had to cover as a reporter opened with prayers to jesus, and a lot of the other little ways christianity deliberately asserts its dominance in american public life. (oddly, christmas wasn't one of those ways -- my mom loves christmas and refused to give it up, so we had trees and cookies and presents and carols and the whole deal. to this day the nativity story is the only part of christianity that gives me a warm feeling, because i somehow internalized it as a valuable myth without feeling like i had to "belong" in order to appreciate it.)

Okay, Tipsy, I'm having a hard time locating the nugget of disagreement in this. You seem to be saying that so long as we all exist in a noisy pluralistic context where there are needling religious gadflies, you don't mind having a few needling agnostic gadflies, just to keep the conversation balanced, which is better than one side of that conversation being cowed and disappearing -- this is completely fair and I'm not sure I have any huge argument about it. But ... maybe I'm wrong here, but the way you're phrasing that seems to acknowledge that maybe the needling-gadfly approach is not the most positive one? I think that's true on both sides: if I were arguing for more religious presence in American life, I would not want fundamentalists making my case. My point here is similar: that if there's a paranoid fear here that atheists and agnostics are looking to undermine fundamentals of society, it makes sense to me for such people to frame their rhetoric in a way that makes clear that this isn't the case, so as not to shore up the very arguments that marginalize them in the first place. I mean, asserting your existence is not an accomplishment if you assert it in a way that is misleading, misunderstood, and stands to turn people against you -- if you wind up asserting not your own existence, but instead the caricature of you that your enemies hold!

I'm not saying Maher's in that position, I'm just saying that it's something I think is worth keeping in mind when making such arguments. In any argument it's possible to become trapped into presenting yourself dishonestly, presenting something that doesn't serve your purposes and isn't even you in the first place.

i mean i never see more of the "lol let the hicks have their jesus" point of view when i'm living in midtown atlanta with all my atheist buddies but when i go back home to south carolina i see how awful this shit is and it really does inflame the most basic hitchens-style outrage inside me

bill maher: the rupaul of atheists

just out of curiosity tipsy what very tiny religious minority was this?

P.S. I can't remember if I posted it upthread, but I do agree that the best rhetorical result of this sort of thing DOES have to do with young people who aren't otherwise exposed to these ideas, but are in some way inclined to them anyway -- yes, those are the people that something like this film helps reassure and induct into a community

it is a valid point--i tend to think of it less as existence that needs to be asserted and more as rights to be protected--like the case of the nonreligous kid being forced to say "under god" is about the unconstitutionality of the pledge, but i take tipsy's point.

xposts

(NB the argument I'm trying to make here isn't a particularly subtle or complicated one; in principle it's something we'd all understand if, e.g., Maher's approach in this film were to go around shooting people outside of churches. "That's not helpful and it misrepresents what non-religious people are like," we'd all say, which is the only principle I'm trying to introduce here.)

But ... maybe I'm wrong here, but the way you're phrasing that seems to acknowledge that maybe the needling-gadfly approach is not the most positive one? I think that's true on both sides: if I were arguing for more religious presence in American life, I would not want fundamentalists making my case.

no it's the most positive approach, it's sort of a consciously negative approach, but i think it's a valid response to at least the noisier and more aggressive manifestations of religion in public life. i'm sure you wouldn't want fundamentalists making your case, but there they are out there anyway, slapping anti-gay-marriage amendments on state constitutions, scaring science teachers away from darwin, trying to take tax money to fund their schools, etc etc.

if there's a paranoid fear here that atheists and agnostics are looking to undermine fundamentals of society, it makes sense to me for such people to frame their rhetoric in a way that makes clear that this isn't the case, so as not to shore up the very arguments that marginalize them in the first place.

i guess i'm not too bothered about some sensitivities being offended, since in my experience even in places where conservative christians are the majority -- culturally and politically -- they still present themselves as being persecuted by a god-hating secular world. they're not going to think that any less just because bill maher says please and thank you. and yeah, i guess i'm not concerned with the effectiveness of the approach of something like religulous in terms of changing minds or earning new recruits or anything. i think maher has said he mainly means it as a rally-the-base move, for a base that doesn't get a whole lot of explicit rallying in pop culture. i don't think there's anything particularly wrong with that.

just out of curiosity tipsy what very tiny religious minority was this?

zen buddhism. spent a lot of time trying to tell people that my parents didn't worship big gold statues of fat guys.

lol at blue states automatically being pluralistic multicultural places to live; I should take you to the town in MN where JJ and I went to high school

yeah, my experience was in rural western new york. same deal.

mine too! i think mostly people thought what i was (muslim) was the same thing as being hindu. and no clear idea what either of those things were.

oh, not rural western new york. just western new york

And while it might not be funny or biting or entertaining, I do think that any serious critique of the overall notion of religion needs to take the tone you'd take when talking to those people, not the tone you'd take when talking to people even mainstream believers would consider a bit nuts.

I think the dickish tone that many anti-religious folk adopt is a direct product of having a wacko fundie president, school boards wanting to ban teaching of evolution/teach creationism. "Mainstream believers" are not the issue or focus of attacks. It's the fact that they are by proxy legitamizing the wacko beliefs of people in positions of true power that is the problem.

i think my distrust of this virulent anti-religion thing comes basically down to 'whats the point' - like why spend your time on this - and that ive known plenty of completely decent people who believe in shit i think is kind of nutty

maybe you'd feel differently if the leader of your country was making decisions that affected the welfare of thousands of citizens based on his nutty beliefs? or if people with said nutty beliefs were trying to ban certain things to be taught and instead have their nutty beliefs taught in public schools??

the point about religion being nebulous is that it then becomes virtually immune to criticism. is one supposed to say "ok and I'm only talking about the wacko religions here btw"?

my family, tibetan buddhists

but i lived in a super liberal boston suburb

fwiw my father--who went to a seminary and was on the road to being a priest while spending time as a community organizer (lol, useless) working in the robert taylor projects in chicago in the mid to late '60s--has spent years grappling with being socially liberal while adhering to religious principles. after finding over the years that his social views were becoming less welcome the more they progressed he has effectively abandoned churchgoing for private religious exploration and study. he occasionally will broach the subject of religion with me and sort of apologizes on its behalf because he doesn't think it is being represented in the best of lights. my family has had roots in the diocese of chicago going back to the 1850s, very much part and parcel of its history, and my father i think always wanted to be a part of it and he feels as though the religion has perhaps corrupted by association and by less-than-noble pursuits. i believe, in a certain way, in the religion as he would like it to be (cf wide open arms to everyone regardless of anything, charity, and so on) but there's no way i can get down with it now. he knows this and it sort of sucks because he raised me in the manner he would like it to be, but it no longer is.

"Mainstream believers" are not the issue or focus of attacks.

I don't get what's so hard to understand about the following: if you frame your attack as being an attack on the bedrock notion of religion, then "mainstream believers" are a focus whether you want them to be or not. It is also not particularly hard to differentiate between sinister components of religion and religion as a concept, as evidenced by the fact that you're doing precisely that in this post.

and that's why i said it sucks that religion is so nebulous that when in the course of criticizing the nutty aspects of it you end up criticizing "mainstream believers". the subject constantly shifts, you can't lock in on a good target. i guess the problem is that the nutty aspects of religion hook on like barnacles to the bedrock of it.

"Mainstream believers" are not the issue or focus of attacks.

btw this is exactly the same reasoning as what into McCain's "I will always hate the gooks" comment and his subsequent comical backpedalling.

xpost - and scraping off barnacles tends to be easier than sinking the ship, especially since the people aboard will help you instead of shooting harpoons

But whatever, I'm not sure I have any substantive disagreement with Tipsy on this

maher is one of these milk-hating people too which is pretty lol

this belief is very important to him. don't be a dick.

xp for sure, i think i agree with you on the point of bm's and other noisy atheist's motives being counter-productive

some of you are OTM about Maher, but this movie is hilarious. everyone should see it i think. Larry Charles did a great job directing it (it does have a Borat feel to it) but there's this weird misstep in tone at the very end, when it goes from 85 minutes of 'LOL RIDICULOUSNESS' to 'DO YOU REALLY WANT THESE PEOPLE TO HAVE THEIR FINGER ON THE NUCLEAR BUTTON?' which i of course agree with BM in saying OH HELL NO, but the 90-degree turn left my friend and I going 'WTF was that'?