The Father, Son, and Bill Maher

                I don’t know whether or not any of you have seen (or have heard of) the 2008 movie “Religulous,” but it’s the topic of my discussion today. The gist of the movie is essentially that Bill Maher, comedian and host of the show “Real Time with Bill Maher,” goes out and interviews numerous people of varying religious backgrounds and affiliations, asking them about their beliefs and why they hold them. Now Maher makes it no secret that he is far from religious; some might say he is anti-religious. Whatever the case, the movie is a bit misleading for me. While it presents itself as a documentary, I find the discourse in this movie to be pretty frustrating, and quite far from civic.

                For some reason, I can't embed the clip I want to show you, but you can find it here. Maher is, obviously, the guy with the slicked hair asking the questions to the truckers from the pulpit. Now I understand that Maher is a comedian, and he has an audience in mind that is going to be expecting comedy, but it bothers me that he isn’t really doing a documentary so much as he is simply making religion look foolish. As much as I love comedy, and Bill Maher is no exception, I also really like discussing religion. Now this isn’t an invitation to comment on this blog with your idea of what is “right,” I’m just stating this because the movie creates a conflict for me. I’ll admit it, many parts of the movie are funny, and I think Bill Maher is a smart guy, but in this particular clip, as is the case in much of the movie, he doesn’t try very hard at all to portray two sides to an argument; it just seems here like he’s trying to pick a fight with a few guys that probably aren’t educated enough to defend themselves properly. But what do you think? Is this only classifiable as comedy, or is there actually something to be taken away from this?