Count Me Officially Not a Fan of Bill Maher

[dreams_of_wings]

This evening, after hearing some rave reviews of it from two people I very much like and respect, Tish and I went with in_parentheses and spooky_thing to see Bill Maher's film Religulous. And it would not be going too far to say that I hated it

Comments

[dreams_of_wings]

I haven't read either of the books you're talking about here, though I have heard of the Harris book and might give both a look through if I can find them at the library this week.

This story keeps popping into my head as I sit here to write this, so I'll relate it and see if I can make it all fit together. Sometime fairly early in my grad school experience I was looking for a a local church to attend and the easiest one for me to get to via mass transit was the UU church in Harvard Sq. I went twice and both times found the tenor of the service nauseatingly self-congratulatory, chock-full of the sentiment that "we're UU's, we're so liberal and tolerant and good, aren't we cool?" There was no intellectual content and no engagement with the real world. Again, this was a group in which I was the choir that was being preached to but I felt that the whole experience was, because of the way its message was being presented, working counter to its own message.

My experiences as a writing teacher only confirm for me how very very important the way a thing is presented is. Just this semester I was reading some articles from Bitch magazine with my students and one of them (in a class of 9) reported being entirely turned off from one of the author's arguments because of the one moment in the text that included the work "fuck." My student said that he felt that that was the moment when the essay turned, for him, from appropriate and well-expressed anger into anger that was too much, that lost his respect for the author.

I don't know how we could possibly EVER manage to create anything close to real dialogue with fundies, or even those middle-of-the-road types Harris is referring to, if we start right off the bat by insulting and degrading them. Since that is already a pretty tall order I think Maher's approach is just dead wrong.

Of course, I also hate and avoid humor based on humiliation in general, regardless of its topic.

[daniel_t_miles]

Ah, this might be a difference of lenses. I spent some time in the trenches with some "fundies" in their natural habitat (surrounded by other fundies) when I worked at HP (the whole company isn't one of fundies, I just happened to land in a nest of them). After that, I believe that trying to open a "real dialogue with fundies" will never get us anywhere. They're devoted to their beliefs with every fiber of their being and, perhaps most alarmingly, they believe their devotion to hatred and bigotry is a devotion to love and tolerance (your description of the UU church in Harvard Sq. reminds me of them, actually) and they think liberals the intolerant ones because we won't help "the gays" get better by telling them how wrong they are and we want the government to steal people's money.

But they're a real political and social force in this country so giving up isn't an option, either. That's why I took a lot of heart in Sam Harris' book because he convinced me that the overwhelming majority of religious people (1) are good people, (2) blow off the crazy bits of the religion, and (3) acknowledge they're doing it. So even if it's not possible to "save" the fundies, it may be possible to take them out of power if we can get the general religious population to see them like we do.

So maybe I was primed to see something that Maher didn't intend but when I watched this movie, that's what I saw Maher trying to do. I heard a message that these supposed holy people aren't respectable or wise. They're crazy because they lack internal consistency in their own beliefs, silly because they wear funny costumes and it's strange that our majority of intelligent, thinking people would put them in power when they haven't earned our trust through good deeds or successful results in other pursuits.

[daniel_t_miles]

...So putting Maher aside for a moment, I really liked what you had to say about presentation and I suspect the main stream religious people (non-fundie) didn't see what I saw in that movie. As a language professional, do you have any tips for a presentation that actually conveys that message?