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Just saw "Religulous"
The movie makes a bunch of points that I basically agree with, but makes them in such an annoying, patronizing, unnecessarily-confrontational way that one is almost ashamed to call oneself an agnostic. The movie is full of "cheap shots", most often abrupt edits to excise a few seconds of somebody's speech or insert a few seconds of TV news footage of stuff blowing up, so it starts to feel like a high-voltage TV commercial. It doesn't even pretend to be even-handed, or even respectful of difference: Bill Maher is right and all religious people are wrong, end of story.
OK, so he despises and disdains religion. I can understand that. What specific aspects of religion does he go after?
- hatred, bigotry, intolerance, and violent nationalism
- literal interpretations of sacred texts as historically true
- anti-intellectualism and ignorance
- corruption among religious leaders
All of these things richly deserve to be "gone after"... but there are large segments of any major religion that don't do those things. Maher almost acknowledges this, for a moment, by interviewing a Vatican astronomer who disavows Biblical literalism. But for the most part, Maher doesn't seem to acknowledge that there can be legitimate differences within a religion, cutting quickly between a Muslim scholar talking about peace and footage of Ruhollah Khomeini preaching violence as though they were the same person. Sometimes he is equally inconsistent himself: in interviewing a Senator, he criticizes the assumption that ten commandments written down 2500 years ago are good choices for guiding today's society, but a moment later he ridicules a young Muslim woman for suggesting that the Koran be interpreted in the context of the time it was written, and reinterpreted to be relevant to today's society.
Most of the movie is simply Maher making fun of people, and with the aid of a sharp editing blade, he can make them look pretty stupid and ridiculous. He (or his editor) appears particularly fond of making people look stupid by showing them pausing for a few seconds after saying something. At one point, apparently unable to find a real Scientologist to interview, he dresses up with a goofy hat, stands on a street corner, and preaches Scientology to a crowd. The whole thing is an exercise in shooting fish in a barrel.
I would really like to see this movie done by a journalist rather than a stand-up comic.
Re: Different Audiences
If nothing else, it proves that atheists can be jerks, too :->