Do you smell something burning?
Jun 24th, 2008 by Waffles
That’s my IMMORTAL SOUL!
Just found this movie on the Apple Movie trailers website. I was looking for Choke, the movie version of Chuck Palahniuk’s awesome novel by the same name, and I ran across this documentary, Religulous. Although I’m not really a fan of Bill Maher, I usually agree with him on some political and social points. But this looks pretty good. He asks questions not even Michael Moore has ever really gotten into. This is my favorite exchange on the trailer:
Ex-Jew for Jesus guy: I don’t really believe in Santa Claus.
Bill Maher: Of course not! That’s one man, flying all around the world and dropping presents down chimneys.
(Ex-Jew for Jesus guy nods.)
Bill: But one man hearing everbody murmur to him at the same time, that I get.
(Cue Ex-Jew for Jesus’s blank expression)
Check out the trailer here.
WANT.
(to see)
An experienced, sophisticated apologist would have responded that Maher was equivocating on the word “guy”, and the deity they believe in doesn’t have an intelligence or spatial and temporal awareness that’s limited by human constraints. Then Maher, if he’s up to snuff on his rhetorical smack-downery, can illustrate the contradiction between this ethereal, theistic god and the petulant crybaby character that populates the pages of their favorite holy book, and that the majority of believers actually worship. The apologist could deny that those people are following their religion correctly, then Maher could ask how he knows that, and why he doesn’t tell the rest of his co-congregationalists that, and the apologist would talk about Pascal’s Wager or about their feelings, and around and around we go, and… I start to… nod… zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Fortunately, most of the devoutly religious aren’t such wormtongues, and so we ought to have a movie full of honest morons being morons. Which serves the noble but unpleasant job of illustrating how many of our compatriots are gibbering morons.