Maher’s ‘Religulous’ is funny but not too complicated

 

Bill Maher’s “Religulous,” a film screed against religion, is very funny and has a lot of truth to it. Religion is pretty screwed up. Maher, who hosts an HBO talk show, grabs at a lot of low-hanging fruit to mock the dysfunctional branches of faith.

Among his targets is a group, called Answers in Genesis, that opine dinosaurs were horses for early man. Other easy targets including a rapping suicide bombing enthusiast, radical Islamics and Jews, and a dimwitted U.S. evangelical senator.

Those are the lazy parts of “Religulous,” where Maher, who is a very intelligent debater, ties his foils into frustrated, rhetorical knots. Of course, he has the advantage — he demands proof. The others rely only on faith. One can’t help but feel that one reason Maher despises faith is that he doesn’t know anyone he would deem as cool who believes.

It would have been interesting had Maher tried to examine faith, and its relationship to theology and religious belief. But “Religulous” won’t tread into the serious. It’s designed to mock those who believe in Christ, virgin births, “magic underwear” or take the Bible seriously … you get the picture. It’s manna for the religion of atheism, of which Maher is a high priest … even if he won’t admit to any “faith.” 

Hey Maher! We know there’s a lot of inconsistencies in religion. How about finding some new ones. I’m tired of seeing Ted Haggard in anti-God screeds. How about examining what Camille Paglia points out, that as the world gets more unstable, more of us turn to God. In “Religulous,” Maher is a reverse Glenn Beck without tears, clucking over those “God-lovers.”

Nevertheless, pop atheism, along the lines of Maher, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, has value. There is a lot wrong with religion today. We have one political party whose members are moving away from it, and another whose members have tried to co-opt it into a political party. In Utah, the LDS faith and the Republican Party have what seems to be an eternal marriage. Maher may enrage in “Religulous” (and there are very blasphemous scenes in the film) but he is taking the time to talk with believers and deconstruct their beliefs. That he wins most of the debates underscores a troubling trend with religion — too many believers can’t defend their beliefs.

Maher’s segment on Mormonism, I’m sorry to say, is a real clunker. Instead of confronting the 21st Century LDS Church, he obviously researched old 19th century speeches that are of dubious value today. It provides punch lines for several doctrines, including a very offensive clip involving Mary and God. The only Mormons Maher talks to are a couple who have left the faith, and there’s the requisite “get kicked off property by LDS security” scene. 

I can think of dozens of Mormon scholars Maher could have interviewed and matched wits with but again, in a pop atheist screed, interesting debate only happens by accident. Maher plays funny but not too complicated. 

In fact, the most interesting parts of “Religulous” are when Maher’s subjects match him in intelligence, or at least common sense. A man who plays Jesus at a cheesy amusement park uses faith to debate on even terms. Even Maher admits he was stumped at one point. There are Christians in a battered truck stop church who ask to pray with Maher. To the host’s credit, he is very respectful of his subjects while interviewing them, although the snarkiness comes out when Maher’s with his crew.

Maher’s conversation with a senior Vatican priest, Father Reginald Foster, is alternately the most rewarding and frustrating part of “Religulous.” Foster, a very candid man, agrees with Maher on many points, including that the authors of the Scriptures can’t be relied on to be in sync with what we know today. Rather than press on and learn something, Maher just basks in the praise of having someone agree with him. How interesting it would have been had he tried to learn why Foster agrees with him and still believes in God. That, apparently, is too much for pop atheism — and Maher — to tackle.

As a close friend said, you can learn more about religion watching “Nacho Libre” than “Religulous.”

Agreed, but “Religulous” is slightly funnier. Watch the trailer here.

-- Doug Gibson

-- Originally published long ago at StandardBlogs

So what exactly is a Son of Perdition?

We Mormons have a name for hell — it’s called Sons of Perdition. We’re pretty confident that Satan, Cain and Judas will be residents there, but after that things get a little hazy. Frankly, we’re not even sure what it’s going to be like, other than God and his minions have no plans to visit. 

We’re not even sure if there are “daughters of perdition” out there in outer darkness. That makes sense because no one wants a Son of Perdition to be able to place his hands on a daughter of any kind. To be honest, we have long been encouraged to not dwell too much on the Sons of Perdition. Instead, as the song goes, we should accentuate the positive, and focus on the greatness of the Celestial Kingdom and happiness.

But I can’t help myself. The case of evangelical pastor Chad Holtz losing his post because he no longer believed that a loving Heavenly Father would burn his children forever and ever reignited my interest in where Old Scratch resides. Frankly, the idea that God would subject his children to a punishment a million times more physically painful than Christ suffered — and let’s face it; lots of people were crucified; that’s no big deal, in the eternal sense — seems to be a doctrine that comes from old Satan himself. The doctrine of sinners in the hands of an angry God ought to go the way of infant damnation. I personally like C.S. Lewis’ definition of hell — detailed in the novella The Great Divorce — where “hell” is where we most feel comfortable in the afterlife.

But back to the Latter-day Saints and Perdition: Standard-Examiner blogger Ryan Jenkins once posted an excellent piece detailing Mormon beliefs on punishment and reward, and God being a deity of salvation, rather than damnation, but we still don’t get an idea of exactly who is ending up there. To be a “Son of Perdition” is to deny the Holy Ghost, but even that creates more questions, as does this quote from the Prophet Joseph Smith: 

"What must a man do to commit the unpardonable sin? He must receive the Holy Ghost, have the heavens opened unto him, and know God, and then sin against Him. After a man has sinned against the Holy Ghost, there is no repentance for him. He has got to say that the sun does not shine while he sees it; he has got to deny Jesus Christ when the heavens have been opened unto him, and to deny the plan of salvation with his eyes open to the truth of it; and from that time he begins to be an enemy." (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, sel. Joseph Fielding Smith [1976], 358).

If you read Doctrine and Covenants, Section 76, verses 32 through 38, the sufferings of the Sons of Perdition rival the sufferings of the damned in that bizarre Christian novel action “Left Behind” series. “Lakes of fire” and “better for them never to have been born” fill the verses. But the real puzzler — at least to me — is verse 35, which reads that to be a Son of Perdition involves “Having denied the Holy Spirit after having received it, and having denied the Only Begotten Son of the Father, having crucified him unto themselves and put him to an open shame."

That seems to indicate that a Son of Perdition needs to have accepted Christ as his savior, then rejected that belief and done everything to lead others away from Christ. That “Mormon” definition of qualifying for hell seems to jibe with many other Christian beliefs. But what about those evil people who never accepted Christ in the first place? Is a person who was born in the Amazon jungle 500 years ago and enjoyed raping and murdering for sport exempt from hell, or Sons of Perdition because he never had a chance to embrace Christ?

Or, as I’ve heard many LDS brothers and sisters tell me in my lifetime, is the Sons of Perdition reserved for LDS apostates who fight against “the church?” How do they end up in Perdition and that creep I saw profiled on Cable TV on the crime documentary channel escape the “Mormon hell?”

I’m tying myself into the0logical knots here trying to grasp understanding of a concept I admit I don’t understand. But I doubt that makes me unusual. I wonder if LDS Church leaders fully understand Perdition and what it is. And what about the Left Behind crowd or those nitwits who dismiss pastors for believing in a God who doesn’t torture?

Personally, I believe God will be a heck of a lot more merciful than most of us think, but I can’t say that definitively. 

Perhaps the more intriguing question is, why do so many followers of the peaceful Christ buy the allegorical descriptions of a burning, torture-dungeon hell? And what are the motives of those who preach of, advocate, or wish for such a hell or Perdition?

-- Originally published in 2011.

-- Doug Gibson