Bill Maher has taken an important first step toward faith (part 1)

This isn’t exactly “current.” These are some of my thoughts as I’ve just gotten around to watching Bill Maher’s “Religulous.”

Sometimes you can take an idea that’s very obviously stupid and repeat it enough times until people sort of forget how stupid it is. Better yet, you can voice it enough times that, by sheer volume of chatter, it becomes a very real thing, and we’re forced to deal with it as such, even if it didn’t exist in the world before you started speaking it.

This is how propaganda works. If I went up to a calm person with even a pinch of empathy and asked, “Should people A remove people B from their country,” I’d expect them to gasp and say something like, “For the love of God, no! That’s terrible!” But if it were no longer a disinterested third party, and I were instead able to convince you (not through the quality of my ideas but through the sheer quantity of times that I voice them) that the situation is not neutral but that people B is “them” and “they” are a threat to “our” way of life; regardless of whether “they” are the Jews or the Tutsis or the Infidels, history is sadly unambiguous on how this normally turns out.

Propaganda is powerful not because it’s true but because it’s persistent. It doesn’t comment on reality, as such. It creates an alternative reality through volume and urgency. One of the most dangerous examples of this in the modern world is any version of the “we got saved” theology, which exists in segments of nearly every major religion around the world and appears to be the only kind of theology available to the producers of “Religulous.”

In each of these distorted sects, it’s never really made clear why this or that action should bring one into the inner circle of this or that god, it just does. And the religions might bicker on the details of how one might get saved and might not even call it getting “saved.” All that matters is that a clear boundary is drawn between who’s in and who’s out for those of a certain insecure disposition who cling to such boundaries.   

As a disinterested third party, like Bill Maher, it doesn’t take an abnormally active mind to see how silly this is. If I were to suggest that Zeragon is the goddess of Omega Centauri and she promises eternal life to the fair creatures of her galaxy at the moment that they spin around a baseball bat ten times (or the Omega Centauri equivalent, maybe a cricket paddle?), a disinterested Milky Way dweller might respond, “Assuming all of this is true, why, pray tell, would Zeragon choose something as arbitrary as spinning around a baseball bat? Why not counting backwards from M1.111 or going on a vision journey through the edible forests of Lemda-5? But moreover, how would a god of galactic proportions communicate such a requirement to her tiny subjects?” It’s not logically impossible but still a stretch for most of us to think of a very large goddess taking the time to post very small brochures on coffee shop community boards all over her domain.

But this is not objectively any more silly than saying that a god should be swayed by the saying of 30 Hail Marys or the joining of a certain denomination that was founded in 1847 except that the chatter about these latter methods has been enough and we have enough skin in the game to believe that these are somehow less arbitrary. And it’s not just the credulous who lend these methods more legitimacy than those of Zeragon, it’s  perhaps even more the unbelievers who actually consider it worth their time to critique them.

About halfway through “Religulous,” I succumbed to the realization that I was waiting in vain for its narrator to make a critique of my own Christian tradition that I haven’t already made myself (and often much more harshly). I got the impression of someone who was just dipping his toe in the waters of a debate that has been rushing forward like a deluge for thousands of years. I realized what one of my favorite theologians meant when he talked about the “banality of modern atheism.” I found it difficult to respond to someone who was trying mightily to be disagreeable but wasn’t far enough along in the debate to really say something with which I disagree.

Maher’s critiques of “religion” (he doesn’t really have a more precise critique of this religion or that religion) are functional. That is, religion is bad because it results in bad things in the world. If such a basic critique is going to be at all adversarial rather than obvious, it requires a naïve and easily preyed-upon opposition. So Maher scours the backwoods trailers and small town magisterial buildings of the most uninformed spokespersons for the faith that he can find.

I confess that for the first twenty minutes or so I myself was naïve enough to believe that this was just the introductory stunt before we moved into the serious interviews in the halls of Harvard divinity school or, for that matter, even just the local office of your mainstream parish pastor. That latter part never came. And it’s here that Maher gets short-circuited after what is otherwise an important first step toward a vital theology

Any person of faith whose theological worldview is worth a pittance needs to start with this same qualitative critique. But where the reformer would take the next step--

If such and such religion is madness

And assuming that God were to exist, God would not be madness,

Then God must not be synonymous with such and such religion--

it’s not clear that Maher ever fully crosses the important chasm of disassociating the god from the religion, and so he gets short circuited in this invalid loop:

The religion is madness

Therefore the god is madness

The first premise is correct. Religion is madness. So it should be obvious enough that a mad religion has told us nothing about what God is or isn’t.

If we don’t hold this against him and still appreciate his one correct premise for what it is, we have still only gotten back to square one, where any commonly sensible person would’ve been before all the insane propaganda brainwashed him or her in the first place. God must not be a religion. So we can critique this religion or that religion until we’re blue in the face and still have not said the first word about God.

Put aside, for now, that the sum total of Maher’s other arguments amount to a truism (i.e. bad religion is bad) and a non sequitur (bad religion = bad God). Next week, I will write on where else we might go if, rather than short-circuiting, we use that one invaluable premise to move to what serious theologians, who were conspicuously absent from “Religulous,” call a “second naïveté.”