Insight Scoop | The Ignatius Press Blog: Greydanus on "Religulous vs. American Carol"

Steven Greydaus reviews both movies for National Catholic Register (Oct. 12-18, 2008 edition) and finds them to be rather loathsome pieces of polemical trash:

Keep your head down if you venture into the theater this week. The bomb-throwers are out in force — and they’re lobbing grenades in both directions.

Opening head-to-head last weekend, David Zucker’s liberal-bashing An American Carol and Bill Maher’s faith-skewering Religulous are pretty typical examples of what passes for reasoned dialogue in American culture today — which effectively means smug, cheap shots, tasteless shock tactics, sound bites over substance, mind-numbingly one-sided polemics, and a complete dearth of self-critical thinking.

Zucker, a longtime Hollywood satirist with a résumé that includes Airplane!, the Naked Gun movies and a couple of Scary Movie sequels, is a self-described “former liberal Democrat turned conservative Republican.”

An American Carol is his election-season riposte to Michael Moore’s guerrilla documentary agitprop. That’s the same genre used by Maher, a dogmatic agnostic scathingly contemptuous of religion, as the vehicle for his most recent attack on faith.

To the faithful on either side, the ends may justify the means.

If watching a bumbling terrorist cell (all named Muhammad Hussein) send a clueless suicide bomber on a slapstick out-of-control bicycle ride that ends with the bomber spinning through the air before smashing onto a car, and then blowing up along with a fellow jihadist who pulls the pin strikes you as irreverently hilarious, you might enjoy An American Carol.

On the other side, Religulous offers footage of popes and bishops intercut with garishly dressed rock stars or mushroom clouds, ambush interviews with subjects ranging from average Joe Sixpacks to deranged fringe figures, and a smattering of uncritically regurgitated anti-religious talking points that may titillate and flatter self-styled free thinkers.

Neither film withstands much critical thinking, although Religulous makes shrewder use of genre and rhetoric to get its point across. Truth may or may not be stranger than fiction, but satirizing Michael Moore with a look-alike actor is easier to see through than satirizing the real beliefs of real people.

Read the entire review.

Barbara Kay, writing for MercatorNet, wonders why it is that humor trumps intelligence:

Comedian Bill Maher's religion-mocking film Religulous opened over the weekend, and most reviewers seemed to like it. If it's funny, it works, seems to be the main criterion. Robert W. Butler of the Kansas City Star says: "The film is one-sided, less a measured argument than a bunch of rants and barbed observations. But it's also very funny, which trumps everything else."

I wonder if Mr Butler would have the same reaction to a film about film reviewers that was funny, even though it was basically a "bunch of rants and barbed observations." Perhaps he wouldn't be rolling in the aisles with quite the same abandon, but then anyone stupid enough to mock film reviewers in a film would have a very short career, wouldn't he? That's never the problem with mocking Christians, since they have no power to retaliate nowadays.

Molly Zeigler Hemingway, in a piece written last month for Wall Street Journal, points out some of Maher's less than logical beliefs:

On Oct. 3, Mr. Maher debuts "Religulous," his documentary that attacks religious belief. He talks to Hasidic scholars, Jews for Jesus, Muslims, polygamists, Satanists, creationists, and even Rael -- prophet of the Raelians -- before telling viewers: "The plain fact is religion must die for man to live."

But it turns out that the late-night comic is no icon of rationality himself. In fact, he is a fervent advocate of pseudoscience. The night before his performance on Conan O'Brien, Mr. Maher told David Letterman -- a quintuple bypass survivor -- to stop taking the pills that his doctor had prescribed for him. He proudly stated that he didn't accept Western medicine. On his HBO show in 2005, Mr. Maher said: "I don't believe in vaccination. . . . Another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur [germ] theory." He has told CNN's Larry King that he won't take aspirin because he believes it is lethal and that he doesn't even believe the Salk vaccine eradicated polio.

Anti-religionists such as Mr. Maher bring to mind the assertion of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown character that all atheists, secularists, humanists and rationalists are susceptible to superstition: "It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can't see things as they are."

Both Kay and Hemingway mention recent surveys that suggest traditional religious beliefs, rather than making people vulnerable to superstitious and irrational notions, actually "reduces credulity." Meanwhile, a "nationwide survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reveals yet another mystery: that one-fifth of people who say they are atheists also say they believe in God."

Finally, Bobby Maddex of Salvo has some fun with Maher's methodlogy.

Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles and Book Excerpts:
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• Pascal for Today | Peter Kreeft | From the Preface to Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal's Pensées (Edited, Outlined, and Explained)
• The Illusion of Freedom Separated from Moral Virtue | Raymond L. Dennehy
• Atheism and Fatherlessness | A Review of Paul Vitz's Faith of the Fatherless | Fr. Brian Van Hove, S.J.
• The Tragic Misunderstanding of Atheist Humanism | Henri de Lubac | From Chapter One of The Drama of Atheist Humanism
• The Obfuscation of the New Atheism | Dr. Jose Maria Yulo
• Professor Dawkins and the Origins of Religion | Fr. Thomas Crean, O.P. | From God Is No Delusion: A Refutation of Richard Dawkins
• Dawkins' Delusions | An interview with Fr. Thomas Crean, O.P.
• Are Truth, Faith, and Tolerance Compatible? | Joseph Ratzinger
• Atheism and the Purely "Human" Ethic | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• Is Religion Evil? Secularism's Pride and Irrational Prejudice | Carl E. Olson
• A Short Introduction to Atheism | Carl E. Olson
• The Source of Certitude | Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.
• Deadly Architects | An Interview with Donald De Marco & Benjamin Wiker
• Dark Ages and Secularist Rages: A Response to Professor A.C. Grayling | Carl E. Olson
• The Universe is Meaning-full | An interview with Dr. Benjamin Wiker
• The Mythological Conflict Between Christianity and Science | An interview with Dr. Stephen Barr