There is a song of Bob Dylan’s, Highway 61 Revisited, that conjures up a little bit of black comedy in a dialogue that pretty much characterises the God of the Old Testament:
God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe said, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God said “No,” Abe said “What?”
God said, “You can do what you wanna but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Abe said, “Where d’you want this killin’ done?”
Here is the Jehovah or Yahweh who demanded that we “fear” him — and he didn’t just mean treat him with respect, as his words are often glossed. No, he really wanted people to be afraid of him. He was a jealous god; he spent a lot of the Old Testament smiting his enemies and those in his chosen people’s Lebensraum. Smite, smite, smite! In the first few books of the Bible several hundred thousand non-Israelites get wiped out, on God’s orders, in what can only be called ethnic cleansing.
This is Yahweh, whom I like to call Yod. Of course, by the time we get to the New Testament, he’s a god of love — him and Barry White. Amazing what having a son and then sending him to earth to get tortured to death can do for your emotional life. You do less smiting! But the interested reader would have to investigate books such as Jack Miles’s brilliant pair, God: A Biography and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, or Karen Armstrong’s excellent A History of God, to find out how that transition in God’s personality takes place.
At any rate, we can be clear that fear is the start of faith. Instead of fearing the terrors of existence itself, Yod promises his people, fear me instead — and everything will be okay. I may not answer all your prayers, or any of them for that matter, and you will still suffer a lot in the course of your life, like so many millions of others, but at least you will have a fantasy Yodfather looking out for you. Be reassured: he has a plan.
The Dylan song quoted above is used in Bill Maher’s film, Religulous, over footage from an old Bible movie — I think it’s John Huston’s 1966 adaptation of the Book of Genesis, The Bible: In the Beginning …, with George C Scott as Abraham, and a compliant Isaac uttering comforting words (not in the Bible) from the stone altar where he nearly got knifed for Yod. Such old Bible movies are often used in Religulous to poke fun at Christianity, which is amusing, but often you get the sense that Maher is not so much poking fun at Christianity itself as he is mocking old Bible movies. Given how kitschy most of them are, they are an easy target.
Maher is a talk-show host whose Politically Incorrect was pulled off the American air because he offended people in the wake of 9/11, but he reappeared in 2003 with Real Time with Bill Maher. The idea of Religulous is to show how ridiculous religion is — hence a title that, presumably, merges those two words. Maher travels around the United States, and pays a few visits to other countries, talking to religious believers and asking them leading questions. He visits the actor who plays Jesus at a Christian theme park, for instance, and a Jewish man who makes complicated contraptions for those who don’t want to break the sabbath by switching off a light or boiling water for a cup of tea.
The answers given to Maher’s wry questioning reveal how preposterous most religious beliefs are. But it’s easy to make fun of fundamentalists who regard the Bible as a source of literal truths and facts. See the guy who runs a creationist museum and how he looks at Maher with total hatred, just for asking a few obvious questions. And Maher doesn’t even ask him about brainwashing children.
Biblical literalism is an obvious target, and I liked the Vatican astrologer who shrugs it off, but then the Catholics are a more sophisticated type of Christian than those who run creationist museums or play-act crucifixions for the tourists’ cameras. The Catholics have much practice at arguing with sceptics, developed over the 400 or 500 years since they stopped burning them at the stake. But it’s not just a matter of believing that biblical truths like the virgin birth are literally true — there’s morality, a much trickier issue. Does religion provide us with a moral compass? Is it okay to murder abortionists, for instance? Is it okay for Muslims to kill unrepentant infidels, as the Qur’an asks them to do?
In the latter case, I think Maher lets the relevant imam off too easily. He has a good go at Christianity and Judaism, but Islam doesn’t get the same amount of attention. And he’s concerned only with the three big monotheisms here: Hinduism and so forth are presumably beneath comic attack, or perhaps they don’t require sending up to an American audience, who will see such polytheisms, with their brightly coloured elephant-headed gods and the like, as obviously bonkers. Judge not —
Maher et al are willing to pop a few subtitles on the screen to contradict the statements of Christians who claim, for instance, that the Bible wants you to get rich. When it comes to the imam, though, who gently but flatly denies being instructed to kill those who won’t convert, Maher and his co-filmmakers content themselves with a satirical version of an imaged SMS exchange. At least the imam has a cellphone, which means he can handle a little bit of the 21st century.
Maher’s approach is funny, but it’s hardly a cohesive argument. Perhaps he (and director Larry Charles, who made Borat) decided that the thoroughgoing arguments had been done, and extensively so, by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. It makes sense that Maher would opt simply to expose the silliness of most religious beliefs. But deeper than that he won’t go.
Certainly, Religulous makes you laugh. I thought that, on a laugh-per-minute basis, it was funnier than any feature film I’d seen this year. Real life and real people are often funnier (in a depressing sort of way) than any characters cooked up in a fiction. And if making the ridiculousness of religion obvious helps people think through their beliefs and interrogate them, whether that reinforces their faith or destroys it, it’s a plus as far as I’m concerned.
Not that Religulous is likely to change many minds, unless it catches some people at an impressionable age. I hope it does. I could have done with such a film in my early teens; it would have saved me reading the Bible all the way through to see what nonsense it was.
Still, in the same week that Nu Metro released Religulous it announced a new DVD deal with a bunch of Christian propagandists, the people who made Hansie and Faith like Potatoes. Go figure. You’ve got to give such distributors points for believing in freedom of speech (or is it just the promiscuity of capitalism?). As a fellow critic said to me, the more you argue against the religionists the more they have to froth about from their pulpits. It just feeds them. So maybe laughter is the best medicine, after all. Faith like potatoes? Make mine French-fried.