Roseyland

I saw Bill Maher’s Religulous last weekend. I can not resist a good documentary, especially when it is about religion or social issues, so I knew that I had to see this film. I had high expectations for Religulous. I have lots of issues with religion and the things religious people do. I was hoping that Bill Maher would lay it all out there and put the hypocrisies and injustices of religion on full display, but I also hoped that he would look at the positive aspects of religion too. I wanted Religulous to seriously ask the question of whether religion has a positive or negative net affect on today’s society, and maybe even provide insight into how religion could evolve for the better. While I am glad that I finally saw Religulous, I was disappointed.

The biggest problem with Religulous is that it only deals with religion on a surface level. Bill Maher spends most of the film interviewing some of the more colorful religious people out there. These are the people who interpret religious text literally, or who use religion to manipulate people and perpetuate their own warped view of reality. These people are absolutely a liability to any type of sane society, and I give Bill Maher credit for calling them out for what they are. However, the religious experiences documented in Religulous represent only a fraction of the ways in which people practice religion. It’s not really fair to judge all of religion based on the more extreme elements.

I’ve been going to church almost every Sunday for the past year. My church practices communion every Sunday, and it has become my favorite part of the worship service. There is a chant about the mystery of faith, music (some of it in latin), people lined up to receive the bread and wine, people praying (some at prayer rails, some at their seats). It’s all a very spiritual experience. That being said, I don’t believe that there is anything magical or supernatural going on. If you look at what communion is in a literal sense, it’s pretty F’ed up. I mean you are supposed to be eating the blood and flesh of Jesus. What the hell? Who came up with that? I don’t think the literal details are what’s important though. It’s a ritual that invokes all of your senses. It connects you to the church community and puts you in the mind set of being a part of something larger than yourself. The details of the experience are somewhat arbitrary, but the experience you get from it can be very powerful.

Many people become obsessed with the literal details of religion, and in the process, they can do some horrible things in the name of God. Bill Maher tries to use this a rationale for abandoning religion completely. I can understand his point, but I think it’s shortsighted and unbelievable unrealistic. It’s pretty much the abstinence only approach to religion. Good luck with that. No matter how you look at it, our existence is a complete mystery. Why are we here? Why is the universe so fine tuned toward the existence of life? Is this all random or is there some meaning to life? Are we supposed to accomplish something while we are here? We may never be able to answer these questions, but we have an innate desire to ponder them. We can’t just turn that desire off, and if we could, this life would be a miserable existence.

The way I see it, we are like a bunch of kids who have been given a pile of Legos, but nobody told us what to make out of them. So we break in to groups and we start to build stuff. Then we develop rules, and procedures, and beliefs that help us focus our building efforts. Pretty soon we start to fight and argue about these beliefs and chaos ensues. You could look at the chaos and say that we should just stop playing with the Legos, but then we would just be a bunch of kids sitting around staring at a pile of Legos. That would suck. The fact of the matter is, we don’t know what humanity would be like without religion. It’s entirely likely that we would not have come nearly as far without our belief systems. I don’t know if there is any great purpose or meaning to this life, I believe that there is, but I don’t know. I’m just saying, if you give me a pile of Legos, I’m going to build something, because I can’t imagine living life any other way.