Full disclosure: I was raised Unitarian, which is technically a distant branch of Protestantism, but which (as my Christian friends used to scoff) is pretty much “just” a philosophy that cherry-picks most of the “be nice to people” bits of the world’s belief systems while jettisoning all the dogma and certainty.
So I’m very much the choir to whom Bill Maher is preaching in his current documentary, Religulous, which posits fervent religious belief as a potentially dangerous mental disorder that’s caused untold suffering and could easily lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy of man-made Armageddon if the rational atheists and agnostics of the world aren’t willing to stand up and be counted.
Of course, one topic Maher doesn’t cover in his fish-in-a-barrel interviews with “reformed” homosexual Christians and deluded Muslim rappers is the hypocritical dogma of many atheists, whose strident and absolute faith (ah, there’s that word) in a godless universe is just as annoying and potentially harmful as the religion they rail against -- the Khmer Rouge, Maoists, Stalinists and Manson Girls managed plenty of atrocity without benefit of supernatural holy books, after all -- and Stephen Hawking can Vocoder me ‘til he’s blue in the face about the Big Bang, but I’m still gonna wonder what came before that and what it’s all for...and until science can absolutely prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that my soul is nothing but chemical illusions and existence is essentially meaningless, I’ll happily continue to ignore THAT grim fucking view of things, no matter how much the atheists shake their heads and chuckle at my naïveté.
But far more conspicuous in a movie predicated on skewering religion is Maher’s near total refusal to criticize one important world religion centered in the Holy Land that's had an effect on recent (and ancient) Middle Eastern history...no, not the Christians or the Muslims but, y'know...
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