I suppose that BIll Maher’s ego has gotten the best of him and he decided, that he just HAD to make a movie and somehow contribute to the demise of organized religion, which he believes is one of the greatest obstacles to human progress. So he goes around, skewering religious types, ranging from the truck stop evangelicals to your hapless, un-media savvy imam.
Part of the film is autobiographical, in that Maher talks about his own upbringing: his mother is Jewish and his father Catholic, and he was raised a catholic.
Maher’s real beef is with literalists, those whose insistence on various dogma handed down to us from our ancient forebears in the Promised Land impedes the adoption of more liberal and, Maher would say, modern, normal, outlooks and values. Maher knows the Bible fairly well, and of course, he’s a “skilled debater” of sorts, that is, he knows, from being both a standup and TV personality, the art of rhetoric. However, Maher ends up being something less than the Socratic gadfly: He is interested in the truth, yes, but there are greater truths that he is missing out on.
What I mean is this: Nietzsche, for example, was well aware that while organized religion, and in particular the Lutheranism of his father and compatriots, was perhaps a crock of shit, opiates for the many mediocre people of which society is formed, but he knew that humanity’s *religiosity*–was not something that could be so easily jettisoned, replaced by a smirky, Maher-esque Enlightenment reason. How does Maher, for example, think about death: he believes that there is nothing after life, and that at best we ought to remain skeptical about the grand questions. And that attitude is fine, but that begs the question, I think–the religiosity is always going to rear its ugly head, and you can’t expect everyone to just take Maher’s attitude. Not many people, in the history of humanity, have been satisfied with his answers.
Organized religion versus mysticism: this is a theme that i’ve run into a lot recently. I saw a documentary about sufism in Pakistan–a country more known as being, in certain areas at least, a hotbed of militant, retrogressive Islam. And then there was a quote from the French philosopher Henri Bergson, where he said that organized religion was (and here I paraphrase) that which cools what was poured, white-hot, into the soul of man. That is to say, that mysticism is not just a “non-mainstream” type of religion, a la sufism, but is, in fact, the very core of humanity’s religious instinct.
People need to know how to deal with death, and with the issues of meaning.
I don’t mean to entirely negate Maher’s movie just because I think books do a better job of navigating these issues, but hell, they do. And here are the books that I would recommend, having just read or re-read them:
Andre Comte-Sponville: The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality
Henry David Thoreau: Walden
Ernest Becker: The Denial of Death
Christopher Hitchens: God is not Great.
These books run the gamut but, I think, give a good basis for why we ought to be skeptical of organized religions (especially when it becomes the last refuge of charlatans and scoundrels) while remaining, at our core, profoundly religious, mystical, etc.



