Valteron,thank you for that response.
Jeus H Christ, then what simple term should I use to explain his Catholic history? Lapsed seemed appropriate in religous terms. Sorry, if I wasn’t PC enough. For being non-religous, you atheists sure do adhere to dogma.
After all, the brave people at this site http://http://www.ex-muslim.org.uk/who risk being murdered by religious fanatics in Britain (as well as many other western countries where such councils exist) call themselves ex-Muslims. So as an apostate who frankly has it very easy compared to these heroic people, I am honoured to use the analogous designation “ex-Catholic”. I have also had the honour of contributing to them financially, which I would recommend to anyone who cares about freedom.
Or you could call us “reasonable” but that would be arrogant on my part.
You have put me in mind of a little story. A Pastor goes by a little girl taking care of a boxful of abandondoned newborn kittens. “They’re Christian kittens”, says the little girl, “because they are being raised in love”.
A few days later, the Pastor, walking with one of his friends, goes by the same little girl and tells his friend to ask her about the kittens.
“They’re atheist kittens” says the little girl.
“But last time you said they were Christian kittens” says the Pastor.
“Yes, but now their eyes are opened” replies the little girl.
I saw the movie last night.
It was funny in points, it really was. Good lines at the creationist museum and when talking to the person from exodus ministries etc etc. The movie as a whole, though, I thought was terrible. Two main reasons:
1.) Talking to the wrong people about the wrong things, and thus drawing the wrong conclusions.
Bill Maher interviewed a lot of people who were ignorant and uninformed, or perhaps willfully deluded. Most of these had fundamentalist views. The people in positions of power and responsibility who fit the above description are justly condemned. But what of the people who are either not professional Christians (the truckers) or who are Christians but are not ignorant, uninformed, or willfully deluded (the scientists, the Catholics)?
The truckers I thought were about as eloquent in their expression of Christianity as they would be in the expression of their political views. Have you ever seen the grass roots of a political campaign? Religion isn’t the only topic for which people’s opinions are based on misunderstandings. I have seen some very smart people say some very stupid things in defense of their political beliefs, but I would not condemn politics for it. Rather, it is rational for people to be less than perfectly informed about political, social, philosophical, and religious issues - we simply don’t have time (see the term “rationally ignorant” as it is used in political science and psychology) - provided they do not make such issues their life’s work. If the truckers represent the average people in the pews, I am not too concerned. They acted kind to Bill Maher, even as he was less so to them, and they were open to discussion.
The treatment of the scientists and the Catholics is the largest weakness of the film. These people are smart and well informed. The Vatican Astronomer? A Franciscan who believes the Bible, correctly understood, does not condemn homosexuals? A member of the Human Genome project who believes in God? Wouldn’t you have liked to hear more from these people? Let Christianity be something other than a strawman. Educated, informed Christians often have complicated views about the Bible. Given them the microphone. If you think all religion is ridiculous then set a hard test. Talk to non-ridiculous people in a serious way about why they believe. Talk to ordinary people not about why they believe but instead about what role belief plays in their lives. It would have been a very different movie had Bill Maher done that and shown that discussion.
2.) Hammering silly points
I don’t believe in the creation story as told in Genesis. I imagine that any of the religious scientists he talked to would have said the same. Only a fundamenalist or literalist reading of the Bible insists on the literal truth of the creation story. Many people have other readings. Why not acknowledge that? Why not admit that the most silly parts of Christianity are those that many Christian scholars do not accept (here my examples would be the Catholic Church and large portions of mainstream Protestantism, notably Anglicans and ELCA Lutherans)?
Also Horus. I went through trying to find serious scholarship on this question. Not much came up. Take a look at this
http://www.canadianchristianity.com/cgi-bin/na.cgi?nationalupdates/040623was
and this
http://tektonics.org/copycat/osy.html
and this
http://creativecounterpart.wordpress.com/2008/01/10/ending-the-myths-of-horus-jesus/
and this
http://www.kingdavid8.com/Copycat/JesusHorus.html
though.
I can’t vouch for those sources, but I’ll take them over Bill Maher at this point.
In sum, I think Bill Maher made an amusing movie, but a poor one. Mocking fundamentalism and corruption is good fun, but I’m unimpressed with his general mocking of religion. Above I take issue with his portrayal of Christianity because it is the religion i know best and because he spends the most time attacking it.
I doubt if anyone claims to *know *what happens (other than someone arguing from personal NDE, maybe). Believers are just that: they *believe *that Jesus talked about the Kingdom of Heaven and that good things will happen. Maher does not.
So believers are people who believe what is Jesus may or may not have said, as related to them in four texts of uncertain authorship that were written decades after Jesus lived by people who probably never met him. Do you realize how inadmissable such third-hand hearsay would be in court?
But slap the title “Faith” on it and say: “It’s a matter of Faith” (bow head slightly) as if that settles the matter. No criticism. You are a boor if you ridicule the ridiculous thinghs I believe.
Normally, people who believe outlandish things for which there is no evidence are considered stupid, naiive or delusional. But when it is about religion it becomes the “virtue” of “Faith”.
In past ages, religion protected itself from criticism of its absurdities through extremely repressive and violent means such as the Inquisition.
Today, as the atheist population grows everywhere on Earth, religion has built a defensive wall around itself, namely, the idea that criticism and ridicule of anything covered by “Faith” is taboo. But in the early 21st century, that wall is being breached by a series of books, by stand-up comics and by movies such as Religulous.
Religions know that once that wall falls, they are very vulnerable.
Once people start to wonder “Since when is a refusal to think a virtue?” religion knows it will be in big trouble. Our critical faculties of reason and skepticism are our most precious human traits. But “Faith” tells people that they will be “saved” only if they refuse to use those faculties.
Even the modern militancy of Islam is happening at a time when more and more Muslims are stepping out of the atheist closet, even at the risk of their lives, especially in western countries. Religion is in trouble and it knows it.
The vicious old bitch of religion will someday die and be remembered much as we remember witch burnings and the Crusades, like a bad dream from which humanity has awakened.
But before that old bitch dies, she will draw a lot of blood. Do not look for it to disappear in our lifetimes.
[quote=“Telcontar, post:44, topic:465821”]
http://www.kingdavid8.com/Copycat/JesusHorus.html
though.
I can’t vouch for those sources, but I’ll take them over Bill Maher at this point.
QUOTE]
The last of those sources says that Jesus did not disappear during his “lost years” but “worked humbly as a carpenter”. I wonder what the source bases that on? Oh yes, that Faith thing again?
I was using Maher’s own words, from an interview I heard Friday morning. Clearly he’s run into some who claim to know what lies beyond.
[quote=“Valteron, post:47, topic:465821”]
And the reason for your rudeness is?
Actually I think it is eminently reasonable to presume he worked as a carpenter. It was Joseph’s trade and apprenticeships started young. It also isn’t exactly a key point of either the article’s argument or Christian teaching (I’m less than certain that none of the Gospels said that he worked as a carpenter, I wouldn’t have noticed one way or the other). I imagine that the author is saying that no one claims Jesus disappeared from the earth. Not being more familiar with what Horus is supposed to be doing during those 18 years, I am not sure what parallel is being rebutted.
I will admit to you that many mainstream Christians have jettisoned the really batshit crazy stuff in the Bible, probably as scientific advances have made it so indefensible that they had to fall back to a safer psotion. Only the Fundies are making idiots of themselves with dioramas of T-Rex on Noah’s Ark.
But the fact remains that the RC and other Christian Churches used to believe it all (see Gallileo).
And if the Bible is inspired by an almighty and omniscient God, how come scientific knowledge keeps proving that it is so full of absurdities?
The Muslims even have a doctrine of “abrogation” that recognizes that when a later verse contradicts an earlier verse in the Koran, the earlier verse is “abrogated” by the later. In fact, Allah even tells Mohammed that when he abrogates a verse, he replaces it with a better one. (By the way, may of the so-called “tolerant” verses such as “there is no compulsion in religion” that are liberally quoted by Muslim apologists in the west are widely held to have been abrogated by the later, more violent verses written when Muslims were stronger and able to “slay the infidels wherever ye find them.”)
But in the case of either the Bible or the Koran, why could an omniscient God not get it right the first time?
Just to give one tiny example. In one part of the Bible we are told that God sent bears to tear apart some 45 little children because they had mocked one of his prophets for being bald.
Now, you either beleive he did this or you don’t.
If you do, then why is your God so cruel? And if you don’t believe this happened, why would God allow such horrible, slanderous crap to be written about him in what is supposedly his holy word?
What other beliefs do you think you might abandon in future after scientific discovery exposes them as ridiculous and indefensible?
If Bill Maher had wanted to go after mainstream religions more, there was plenty of material there. Transubstantiation of a cracker into the body and blood of an invisible being, the Virgin Birth, Lourdes (what, no wooden legs?) to name but a few. God wanted Henry VIII and his descendants to be Supreme Governors of his Church in England. Yeah, right!
It’s just that he chose to go after the REALLY funny stuff, like the cartoon of Joe Smith sitting next to Jesus and judging you after death.
I don’t remember the quote from that Franciscan about homosexuals, frankly, but I stand to be corrected. When you have no faith you are open the persuasion by evidence, you know.
But I note you say “does not condemn homosexuals”. (Emphasis mine). This is an old slight-of-hand trick by the RC Church so they can appear liberal and still not be. They do not condemn a person for being homosexual. Never have, as far as I can see.
What they condemn is homosexual actions.
Kind of like the diet that lets you eat anything you want but not swallow. Or as if a dictator were to say that belief in Christianity is not outlawed in his country, only the practice.
So what exactly does that Franciscan say?
Nothing of the sort; and yes, that is precisely what believers believe. And I’m not arguing any distinction between “belief” and “faith” – tht would be silly, as they’re virtually synonymous. I was arguing a distinction between belief and certainty.
In case anyone thinks I was making up that business about God sending bears to maul kids, here is the reference: It is from 2 Kings 2: 23-25. Sorry, I was wrong about the number of kids that God’s bears slaughtered. It was 42.:
“Then (the Prophet Elisha) went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up by the way, young lads came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, “Go up, you baldhead; go up, you baldhead!” When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two lads of their number.”
If Christians do not believe their loving God actually did this, then why did their omniscient God allow such a horrible falsehood about himself to contaminate his holy Bible?
Sorry, folks, but Bill Maher did not go after mainstream religions as much because the REALLY hilarious ones are the fringe groups like Mormons and Scientology. But if the movie had been longer, this story could have been in there.
How about a sequel, Bill!!!
Thay are not synonymous at all. My dictionary defines “Faith” as “believing without proof”. It defines “believe” as “accepting as true or real”.
In other words, faith is a subset of belief, namely, belief without proof.
Some beliefs are amply proven. I believe I am living in Canada. I use Canadian stamps, everbody around me says we are in Canada, I have Canadian money in my wallet. I could give thousands of pieces of evidence to justify my belief, but you get the idea.
Then there is belief without proof, when that belief is founded on a reasonable supposition. I believe I will live to be at least 65. I am 60 at present. I cannot prove my belief is right, but based on the state of my health and other factors and precedents, it is a reasonable belief. It is unproven to be sure, but it is not a matter of faith. I have actuarial tables, statistics, the opinion of my doctor, etc. to back up that belief.
Then there is the belief that when I die, an invisible part of me will go up to heaven to be judged by Joseph Smith, Jesus and Elohim (if I were a Mormon, say).
Or that if I am a good Muslim, I will go to a paradise that as one wit said resembles an open-air bordello.
Or I will go to Purgatory and then Heaven, or maybe Hell.
The last three are beliefs, to be sure, but they are based on faith. There is not an iota of hard evidence to justify them, except for some vague old texts from people who claim an invisible supreme being talked to them.
If Bill Maher is really curious about the difference between believers and non-believers, here’s something he could explore in a follow-up documentary. From an article by Thomas D. Williams at NCRegister.com:
I saw this earlier tonight.
I’m an atheist, ostensibly the target demographic, and yet I didn’t really care for it.
I agreed, and agree, with all of Maher’s observations and conclusions about why people believe and what religion does in the world; he’s a smart man who is right on the money with his perceptions of things, at least on this subject.
Unfortunately, he’s also a giant asshole about it.
There is an enormous distinction to be made between mocking a belief and mocking the person who holds that belief. Maher makes his derision personal. He goes beyond calling the mythologies foolish; he calls the adherents of those mythologies fools.
As noted, I’m an atheist (a strong one: I actively believe there are no gods or supernatural beings or powers of any kind), and I think a lot of the religious narratives are goofy, weird, and ripe targets for mockery; but I draw the line at attacking the people who put these narratives at the centers of their lives. There are many legitimate reasons, psychological and neurological, why people should find meaning and comfort in these Bronze Age legends. Examination of the phenomenon of religion provides insight and illumination into the nature of humanity. Sarcastic dismissal is not only obnoxious, it’s counter-productive, because it gets in the way of one’s own opportunities to learn.
The worst part of the movie is Maher’s failure to recognize the irony of his own approach. He comes to the film with as much of an agenda as the creationist-museum director came to his own project. Neither is interested in learning or listening. Both are there to preach to whomever will listen, with closed ears and closed minds.
The only place Maher really gets things right is in the segment where he sets up a location in London’s Hyde Park, among the other would-be prophets and religious barkers, and starts trying to sell people on Scientology. He plays it basically straight, representing Scientology’s tenets and belief structure, and their explanatory narrative, more or less as the CoS would. (Well, except for not charging people to listen. Zing!) The wackiness of the story speaks for itself. No need to exaggerate, and no need to rumble into somebody else’s church and take a metaphorical shit on the altar.
Other than that, Maher clearly didn’t learn anything at all on his World Tour of God, and by extension, neither do we.
It’s just a rant. And it’s a huge missed opportunity.
A major disappointment.
P.S. Julia Sweeney’s Letting Go of God is a much, much better film on this subject. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be getting any sort of a theatrical release.
That’s interesting. It seems that despite the promise of eternal life and the big guy upstairs keeping an eye out for them, the religious are only 10 pts more charitable with their cash, and 26 pts more generous with their time than the non-religious.
Frankly, 71% to 61% (religious vs. secular) giving to non-religious causes is not an earth-shattering difference. If you found differences such as 71% to 10%, for example, then I would conclude that non-belief makes people less likely to love and care about their fellow humans. I am proud to note that almost 2 out of every 3 non-religious give to non-religious causes, even though most of them presumably have no “otherworldly” motivation to do so.
The following Youtube presentation of atheist-related statistics http://http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=T27kB4BjbEg is interesting. Now, I realize that statistics on atheists are notriously hard to pin down because so much varies according to the definition used. Also, it has been pointed out that the relatively lower crime rate among non-believers and atheists may be due to the fact that they generally belong to a higher esducation/income class that generally has a lower crime rate anyhow.
But that is really beside the point. The simple fact is that if religion were necessary to ensure moral behaviour, then our jails would be overflowing with atheists and agnostics who, having no religion, would be unable to live moral lives. The fact that atheists and agnostics are generally under-represented in the prison population and in the crime rate simply blows out of the water the pretension that religion is somehow necessary for morality.
This is not just an academic debate. I cannot tell you how many couples I know who essentially admit that they do not believe in any religion, but send their children to some confessional school because it will “give them a moral grounding”. They are wasting their money and saddling their children’s minds with superstition that they themselves have discarded.
But you know, some would argue that that kind of laid-back, non-confrontational attitude towards religious folk is why we’re in the situation we’re in with so many world leaders calling upon ridiculous religious interpretations to govern the world. I don’t think Maher was ever an outright asshole. For the most part, he really did just ask questions and let the religious people answer them (to the best of their ability). And that said, why shouldn’t we be more asshole-ish in confronting these silly, dated beliefs? Why should we continue to let religion have their free pass and promise never to be mean or say things that may hurt people’s feelings? That’s what’s been happening since forever and since you saw the movie, I’m sure you’re aware of all the good that’s resulted in letting religion have a free pass…
Again, I agreed, objectively, with what he had to say, especially the bit at the end where he described the statistical demographic of the (for lack of a better word) freethinking rationalists, and suggested that we should organize a lobby of some kind.
But he crosses the line when he attacks the people personally.
A few examples: asking the “ex-gay” preacher, after the hug, whether that was a boner; the terrorist-themed subtitles added when the Muslim holy man got the text message; and razzing the gay Muslim activists. None of this, none of it, has anything to do with the basic idea that religious beliefs and stories make absolutely no rational sense and that it’s insane to put so much stock in Bronze Age campfire tales.
Maher is right that those of us who want doubt and critical thinking to be more honored than they are should forcefully represent ourselves in the world. But he’s very, very wrong about the most productive way to go about it.