(2008) How can it be that you can be so absolutely certain that you're right and everyone else outside of your faith is completely wrong? Bill Maher's documentary with a provocative bias that religion is ridiculous travels to some of the world's holy sites - Jerusalem, the Vatican, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Orlando, Florida - to ask people of various belief systems (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Scientology) what makes them so righteously sure they have the divine answer, a special favor that God has denied to others. Directed by Larry Charles and produced by Maher, this documentary that makes a mockery of religious faith is hilariously profound; film clips are inserted to nail the palms and crucify arrogant absolutism.

We begin at the end, at Megiddo, where the book of Revelations says the world will come to an end. After commenting on his own religious education in a household with a Jewish mother and a Roman Catholic father - traumatized first by being told there is no Santa Claus followed by there is no Jesus Christ - Maher, promoting the product of doubt, proclaims: "I preach the gospel of I don't know!"

He expresses amazement that otherwise rational people on Sunday can believe in the transubstantiation of wine into blood and wafers into flesh. At the Truckers Chapel in Raleigh, NC, while Maher asks questions of men who drive big trucks (Remember the movie Duel with Dennis Weaver?), a large fellow says: "I don't like the way this thing's going. I don't know what this documentary's supposed to be, but I don't like where you're going."

Conceding that "not having faith is a luxury sometimes," such when incarcerated or during wartime, nevertheless: "The Gospels are not history." The Biblical texts ("an anthology of faerie tales") don't match; we have no eyewitness accounts (though in the Fourth Gospel, composed about 60 years or more after the crucifixion, John claims to have been present).

Among those Maher interviews are Rev Jeremiah Cummings (formerly a singer with Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes) of the Amazing Life World Outreach (reaching out to grab manna and money from heaven), who wears bling and lizard shoes; Pastor John Westcott ("You don't have the same relationship with Jesus Christ as I do"), an ex-gay now married as a heterosexual who denies that anyone is born homosexual; Steve Burg, an ex-Jew for Jesus who confuses coincidences with miracles; Miami, Florida's Growing in Grace Ministry's Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda, who claims to be a descendant of Christ and the Second Coming; Senator Mark Pryor, an evangelical Christian who waffles over Maher's asking if he believes in evolution or Genesis, admitting: "You don't have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate."

Maher also wants to know from whence arose the association of "God and country" (not Jesus's message) or America as a Christian nation (among the Founding Fathers the opposite view was held by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson). Along with thou shalt not kill or steal, why didn't God put prohibitions against child abuse, torture, and slavery in the Ten Commandments?

At the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, where the curators claim they've reconciled science with Scripture, exhibits show human beings co-existing with dinosaurs; besides, scientists who disagree are sinners anyway.

In Orlando, Florida, Maher chats with Holy Land tourists and an actor who portrays the Son of God, who responds to Maher's unanswerable inquiries by saying there's no way of understanding these mysteries: "God has a plan." However, this amusement-park Jesus's analogy of the Holy Trinity with water's taking three forms in ice, liquid, and steam momentarily stops the quick-witted comedian in his tracks.

But Jesus in being born of a virgin and resurrected from death wasn't original since he was preceded in these feats by such deities as Krishna, a millennium earlier in India, Persia's Mithra, and Egypt's Horus. More recent religions such as Mormonism (Native Americans as the Jewish Lost Tribes) and Scientology (souls infected by aliens), both inventions of novelists (Solomon Spaulding's View of the Hebrews and sci-fi author L. Ron Hubbard, respectively), have had to up the ante, getting even crazier to attract attention.

Asking how one might define what's crazy and what's not in religion, Maher (asserting that religion is a neurological disorder) discusses neurotheology with Dr Andrew Newberg, MD. Of course, the Bible - Christianity (New Testament) and Judaism (Old Testament) - doesn't have a monopoly on homophobia, misogyny, and violence; Maher also quotes from the Qur'an.

In Monsey, NY, a Jewish rabbi argues that the state of Israel should not exist. But it does, so we journey to Jerusalem for visits to both Jewish and Islamic shrines. Next Maher takes us to the Netherlands where filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was assassinated by Muslims; our host talks to a pair of gay Muslim activists in Amsterdam.

Freedom of speech ends at religion: You have truth, says Maher, but I have fiction. "Faith," he pronounces, makes "virtue out of not thinking."

To be evenhanded, Maher should also have included atheists among his targets of people who maintain an absolute certainty that cannot be disproved in their thinking (you can't prove a negative) by any humbling doubt.

In a series of monologues in the DVD's bonus features, Maher says that "religions are maintained by people who can't get laid," so they oppressed women; he questions if the Vatican, "a giant bureaucratic building," was what Christ had in mind, where one man was granted the power of infallibility & to excommunicate. "It's just too easy to start a religion," says Maher in that one's "selling an invisible product" that offers eternal life as an entitlement.

Among the deleted scenes he sits down with Harold Bloom, Crème Trance, David Icke (who claims the elites such as the Pope and all the Bushes are actually reptiles), Rael and his disciples, polygamist wives, and anti-abortionist Michael Bray, who speaks approvingly of Wichita's Dr George Tiller's being wounded in both arms.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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