Bill Maher still hates your religion

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Bill Maher just won’t go away. His documentary, ‘Religulous,’ grossed nearly $1 million over the weekend, putting it over the $10-million mark in its fourth week in theaters. Granted, that’s still about $68 million less than ‘Beverly Hills Chihuahua’ has made, but it’s a pretty impressive performance for a documentary. In fact, at $10.6 million, the movie is now in the all-time box office Top 10 for documentaries. Lionsgate execs say ‘Religulous’ isn’t just a hit among the nonbelieving, non-’true American’ crowd. They say the doc has been putting fannies in the seats in every state in the country. Most of its top performing theaters have been in New York and L.A., but two of the film’s Top 20 theaters were in Denver and one was the Broadway Center Six in (gasp!) Salt Lake City.

Since I’m still getting comments from my last Maher interview, I decided to check in with him again, just to see if success had softened his loathing for any and all religion. I think its fair to say the answer is--no, no way, not a chance. You might say Maher has a gift for the wicked jab. So far Maher has been getting mostly kudos for the film, so I thought I’d try to rattle him by raising some of the complaints registered by the Weekly Standard’s critic John Podhoretz, who grouched that Maher repeatedly made fun of obese people in the film. The comic’s response: ‘What did you expect? We did the film in America and it’s a fat country. I think Podhoretz is fat and he’s just especially sensitive to it.’

OK. What about Podhoretz’s claim that he’s never seen anyone conduct himself as rudely on camera (‘or in real life’) as Maher. Podhoretz wrote that Maher’s method in ‘Religulous’’ is ‘to interview people who are far poorer, far less sophisticated and vastly better mannered than he, and as he does so, to laugh at them, tell them that their deepest beliefs are the sort of nonsense he gave up when he was 11 years old, and then press ahead with another question intended only to expose their idiocy.’

Maher’s response? ‘That’s ridiculous. Even the people who didn’t want to like this movie say how genteel I was. They were expecting me to be snotty and rude and I was nothing of the kind. I don’t know what movie Podhoretz saw, but it clearly wasn’t mine. To say that I only pick on the weak-minded is totally bogus. I interviewed a U.S. senator--is he poorer or more unsophisticated than me? What about the Vatican astronomer I interviewed? Is he less intellectual than me? Please!’

Podhoretz also complained that the only rabbi Maher interviewed was an anti-Zionist nut. Wasn’t that unfair, I asked.

Maher’s response: ‘We don’t present him as representing the entire Jewish religion. It was actually difficult, ironically, to find a Jewish guy who was funny. Because it’s not fear based, their religion is a harder target for ridicule. The Jews just don’t believe a lot of the crazy things I find so dangerous in Christianity and Islam. They don’t look forward to Armageddon, like Sarah Palin and George W. Bush and all the other end-timers do. It’s one reason I find them so dangerous. It makes me nervous that people are convinced that Jesus is going to fix all of mankind’s problems when he comes back. I mean, that can’t have a positive effect on our ability to come up with practical solutions if our political leadership believes that everything is coming to an end soon anyway.’

To be honest, Maher wasn’t any easier on me when I volunteered my own criticism of the movie. Is it really possible that he doesn’t find anything positive about religion at all?

My biggest complaint about his philosophical point--that all religion is dangerous and deluded--remains this: Religion has been in the forefront of a host of social-issue movements, starting with the civil rights movement, whose moral leadership came not from politicians but from religious figures like Rev. Martin Luther King, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Rev. Jesse Jackson and many others. Much of the leadership in today’s fight for the rights of illegal immigrants has come from the Catholic church. Hasn’t religion, in fact, been in the forefront of many social struggles?

If it’s any consolation to Podhoretz, Maher was just as dismissive of my arguments. ‘The civil rights revolution would have come about anyway, whether the religious leaders had been in the forefront or not,’ he says. ‘Where was religion in 1876 when Reconstruction came to an end and the dream of freedom for African Americans in the South came to an end? It’s a pretty tenuous argument. You certainly couldn’t say that religionists were on the right side of social causes during the Crusades, or in countries beset by religiously maddened suicide bombers or in Iraq, when it was torn apart by different religious sects.

‘Religion never stopped any of the white racists who ruled for generations in the South. In fact, people use religion to justify whatever they want it to. White people were always citing the Bible as their justification for slavery, saying the Bible didn’t preach against slavery, simply against how to treat your slaves. If you want to defend the Bible, go ahead, but as far as I’m concerned, there’s no one who can defend this stuff and come out with right on his side.’

I guess you could say that if I was trying to get Maher to admit there were two sides to this argument, ahem--I seem to failed.