Bill Maher: Religulous

Post Reply New Topic

For those of you who saw this, what did you think of it?

I watched it last night with a friend. Admittedly the end conclusions were rushed and sloppy, really it just showed his own leap of faith on the idea that theism can only exist with fundies and weirdos. However, for most of the movie before that though I actually liked the questions he was asking and that he was asking them. Of course there were also blatant misunderstandings on his part of what certain scriptures meant (the camel through the eye of a needle is one most people get wrong though, he had a few others but I'm having a hard time remembering them though).

Also, Orwell, I can see what you were saying about being surrounded by some rather funny people. Where I live though they're so rare that its kind of easy to forget that they exist.

I didn't enjoy it personally. Just wasn't all that funny if you get where I'm coming from.

Trailer looked good though.

I have never seen the film. I have heard it criticized on the basis of making an argument from ridicule though.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2d/talking_snak ... nary_tale/

Yes, this was really just an excuse to post this article, but I like the article as it shows a lot of ability for the person to look analytically at their own opinion in relationship to other people's opinions.

I loved it.

I've yet to see a documentary of any kind that wasn't a load of crap.

You'd think if someone was pouring thousands and thousands of dollars into producing a film, they'd at least bother to do fifteen minutes or so of basic background research on Wikipedia.

Yeah, but I think its still useful in this sense - will people from Podunk, Nebraska understand high philosophical theories or more advanced reasoning? I don't know about you but I and my friends have gotten the correction 100x over from people we know "____, you know, you have a really high way of speaking....it goes over people's head...you might want to just tune it down a notch because it makes people uncomfortable". It seems like if the heartland was going to get a better understanding of what they're praying to or who they worship and why, they have to at least have a well-built set of thoughts and answers to the stupid attacks before they could start taking on the Christopher Hitchens and Dan Barkers of the world in debate.

Yeah, that's one thing that was obvious - its as if he thought it was TOO easy. Expelled bothered me a lot in that sense - as in if you have a point to make, if you think it may be earth-shatteringly big enough to actually make a difference in the public sphere (although yes, Expelled didn't) - you need to make your case air-tight, I mean you have to be really anal and really prude about every potential exposure or possible lapse of fact or logic. Otherwise, your doing your idea a huge disservice, *especially* if its an extremely important idea and your lax gets it laughed off the stage from then on.

I loved it, I found if funny and frightening how religion can be.

Yeah.... it is hilarious how bad "documentaries" are.