‘Religulous’ a laugh-out-loud assault on organized religion

Bill Maher is preaching to the choir with “Religulous,” a documentary that dissects organized religion, but he’s doing it in his laceratingly funny, typically sardonic way.

The comic has touched on this topic often in his standup act and on his HBO talk show “Real Time With Bill Maher,” but here he uses his formidable debating skills to go on a full, focused attack. Pretty much no one emerges unscathed (except those who practice Eastern religions, for some reason).

Although Maher’s mother was Jewish, he was raised in the Catholicism of his father’s side of the family; now he calls himself a rationalist, and thinks the idea that we all came from a garden with a talking snake is a fairy tale for overgrown children and crazies.

If you’re an atheist or an agnostic, you’ll be completely on board and happy to tag along with Maher as he travels the globe asking people about their faith — everywhere from Jerusalem to the Vatican to Amsterdam, where he finds not only the Cannabis Ministry but also a Muslim gay bar (with two people in it). At a makeshift truckers’ chapel in Raleigh, N.C., the drivers put their hands on his shoulders and pray in a circle that he’ll find the Lord (good luck with all that); at the shlocky Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando, Fla., Maher interviews the actor playing Jesus, a hippie who wears a headset microphone to perform on stage.

If you’re a true believer, though, you’ll probably be offended — and some of his subjects become visibly agitated with him on camera. Maher is surely smart enough to realize that his movie will convert no one, but he seems to get off on the thrill of the challenge nonetheless.

“Religulous” comes from director Larry Charles, who teamed up with Sacha Baron Cohen for “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” and it has a structure reminiscent of that 2006 comedy as well as similarly uproarious laughs. The ones on the receiving end of Maher’s Socratic-style questioning are often humorless — they don’t get that he’s toying with them — which makes the results even more absurdly amusing. The more Maher probes, the more hypocrisies he exposes.

Canadians are leery about mixing politics and religion

What do Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin, have in common?

All four candidates for U.S. president and vice-president have made it clear, exceedingly clear, they’re proud Christians.

None is willing to follow the wishes of many annoyed Canadians and refrain from ending speeches with “God bless America.”

Religion, specifically Christianity, plays a much bigger role in American politics than it does north of the border. God talk just can’t be avoided down there — thanks to the overwhelming Protestant presence.

And even though it’s not unethical by definition to invoke a Supreme Being from a political stage, the practice can be manipulated. It can even be abused for demogoguery, through suggesting, for instance, questionable wars and policies reflect “God’s will.”

That doesn’t mean the word God doesn’t ever sneak into Canadian politics. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who is quiet about his loyalty to the evangelical Alliance Church, will sometimes talk of his faith, carefully. Harper has also been known to declare “God bless Canada.”

Former Liberal PM Jean Chretien, a Catholic, occasionally mentioned God, including in this novel way: “God gave me a physical defect [a facial tic] . . . but I accepted that because God gave me other qualities and I’m grateful.”

Still, there are many fascinating reasons Canadian politicians are much less inclined than their American counterparts to, as typically skeptical Canadians might put it, “play the God card.”

I’ll cite a few of them.

The most obvious is the rising strength of white evangelical Protestants. They make up one out of four Americans.

They feel divinely motivated to convert others to their Jesus, and some are ready to use politics as part of that. Seventy-eight per cent of conservative white evangelicals voted for George W. Bush in the past two presidential campaigns. It made all the difference.

Conservative politicians north of the border don’t have this huge religious voting advantage because fewer than one out of 10 Canadians belong to evangelical churches.

And while many evangelicals quietly support Canada’s Conservatives — half of Harper’s caucus of MPs are evangelical — most don’t have any illusions they can openly bring most Canadians onside with their beliefs.

Canadians are like secularized Europeans that way. Of the world’s industrialized countries, the U.S. is the most religious and most Christian.

It wasn’t always this way.

In the early 20th century, Canada had a much higher percentage of the population attending churches than in the U.S., as North America’s leading historian of religion, Mark Noll (an evangelical), writes in A History of Christianity in Canada and the U.S.

Beginning in the 1950s, however, Canadian church attendance dropped off dramatically, as it did in Europe. At the same time, however, U.S. evangelical churches began to become more appealing, particularly to the middle classes.

The trend has caused many U.S. evangelical leaders to become carried away and aggressively declare theirs is a “Christian nation” — and always has been.

Religion: why do people believe in God?

As scientists prove that faith can relieve pain, distinguished psychologist Dorothy Rowe examines the case for and against religion

I’m not religious, but I have thought about religion all of my life. My mother never attended church but she insisted that I went to St Andrew’s Church, a cold, unfriendly place filled with cold, unfriendly people. At home, my father, an atheist, would read aloud to us from the essays of Robert Ingersoll, the 19th-century militant atheist.

Ingersoll’s prose had the music and majesty of King James’s Bible. I loved the language of them both. I learned how to use Ingersoll’s logic to examine the teachings of the Bible. My disapproval of the cruelty and vanity of the Presbyterian God knew no bounds, but I felt at home with Jesus, whom I saw as a kind, loving man like my father.

God had not been in the trenches, or anywhere else, with the ex-Servicemen whom I met at university. When religion was discussed, we listed the cruelties and stupidities of religion throughout history, just as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens were to do 40 years later.

However, when I went to work in psychiatric hospitals, I realised that criticising religion was not enough. I needed to understand why religion becomes an integral part of a person’s life - and doesn’t cease to be so when such beliefs cause the person much pain and guilt, or lead him to commit murder, even to the point of genocide.

Although they had not recognised it, my depressed or psychotic patients were struggling with the questions that theologians and philosophers had struggled with for thousands of years. “What will happen to me when I die?” “How can I be a good person?” “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

Siegfried, a depressed, alcoholic psychiatrist, told me about his uncle, who was in the RAF during the war. He provided the love and concern for Siegfried that was lacking in Siegfried’s parents. He said: “Then, one day his aeroplane came down a bit too fast.

“Up to that time, aged 13, I’d had some vague concept of God - I sang in the church choir every Sunday. My last memories of any contact with God was that particular night when I called Him all the filthy language I knew. I thought, if He exists, He’s a s–t.” I asked him how he felt about God now. He said, ‘If He exists, He’s a s–t’.”

Unable to find satisfactory answers about the meaning of their existence, the psychotic patients had constructed very idiosyncratic fantasies. Ella was a beautiful 16-year-old who had become withdrawn and isolated. Her parents had taken time to recognise that there was a problem because, to them, she was the perfectly obedient child they wanted.

Ella’s mother told me: “I always obeyed my parents and I expect my children to obey me.” Fearing her parents’ anger, Ella learned to avoid all spontaneous decisions and actions. She told me: “I’ve begun to wonder whether I’m the only person who’s really alive - the only living person. Everyone else is a vision. I’m living each person’s life in turn.”

Creationism: Your questions answered

By Roger Ebert

Questions and answers on Creationism, which should be discussed in schools as an alternative to the theory of evolution:

Q. When was the earth created?

A. Archbishop James Usher, working out a chronology from the Bible, calculated in 1654 that the earth was created on the night of October 23, 4004 B.C. Other timetables reach back as far as 10,000 years.

Q. What about oil and coal, which seem to have been generated from ancient forests millions of years ago?

A. They are evidence of a Great Flood about 4,400 years ago, which laid down all the layers of sediment at once. They are nowhere near as old as evolutionists and archeologists say. A fossil claimed to be 200 million years old, found in Nevada in 1917, shows a shoe print. [See photograph]

Q. What about bones representing such species as Cro-Magnon Man and Neanderthal Man?

A. Created at the same time as man. They did not survive. In fact, all surviving species and many others were created fully formed at the same time. At that moment they were of various ages and in varying degrees of health. Some individuals died an instant later, others within seconds, minutes or hours.

Q. Were there ice ages lasting millions of years?

A. No, but a recent and catastrophic Ice Epoch.

Q. Did the Colorado River carve out the mile-deep Grand Canyon over eons?

A. It was the result of Ice Epochs, the Great Flood and other catastrophes within the last 64 to 100 centuries.

Q. Was there a Noah, and did he have an Ark?

A. Certainly. There are many unverified reports of a massive wooden vessel on Mount Ararat. The Arc contained eight people, from whom we are all descended. It also contained two of each kind of animal. Since living species were obviously not created through an evolutionary process, every surviving land-based mammal species (about 5,400) had both ancestors on the Arc.

Q: What about dinosaurs?

A. They walked the earth at the same time as man, but were wiped out by the Flood, whose turbulence buried their bones in non-sequential sediments.

Q. What did the creatures on the Ark eat?

A. Food on board, fish, and possibly trapped sea birds.

Q. How long did the Great Flood last?

A. We know that Noah was 600 years, two months and 17 days old when he sailed. Using that as a starting point and counting forward, Genesis tells us it lasted for 40, 150, 253, 314 or 370 days.

Q. Since the earth was completely covered, even to the highest mountains, where did the waters go?

A. This is explained in Psalm 104, verses 6 and 7: “Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment: the waters stood above the mountains. At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away.”

Q. What about such cosmic phenomena as the rings of Saturn?

A. Evidence of a catastrophic collision between Saturn and another object within the same 10,000-year span.

Q. Why would God create such an absurd creature as a moose?

A. In charity, we must observe that the moose probably does not seem absurd to itself.

It’s nice to see the pope feel compassion for those who’s existence is marked by pain and suffering by telling them to suck it up and deal with it.

Pope to sick: ‘Accept death at hour chosen by God’

LOURDES, France (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI urged ailing pilgrims to accept death “at the hour chosen by God,” reasserting the Vatican’s opposition to euthanasia on Monday at an open-air Mass for the sick in Lourdes.

Benedict administered the sacrament of the sick to pilgrims outside the French shrine reputed for its curative powers. In the crowd, many pilgrims in wheelchairs and on gurneys were bundled in quilts against the chill.

In his homily, the pope said the ill should pray to find “the grace to accept, without fear or bitterness, to leave this world at the hour chosen by God.” The Vatican vehemently maintains that life must continue to its natural end.

The message has special resonance in Europe. Belgium and the Netherlands have legalized euthanasia, and Switzerland allows counselors or physicians to prepare a lethal dose, though patients must take it on their own.

France permits patients to refuse treatment that can keep them alive but stops short of allowing euthanasia. The debate in France was revived this year with the death of a woman whose tumor burrowed through her head, leaving her with constant pain, hemorrhaging and difficulty eating.

Benedict’s Mass for the sick outside the gold mosaic facade of the Basilica of the Rosary was the final stop of his visit to Lourdes. The shrine in the foothills of the French Pyrenees draws 6 million pilgrims a year, many of whom believe that Lourdes’ spring water has the power to heal and even work miracles.

Helped by attendants, the sick bathe in pools of the cool water and take it home in plastic jugs and vials in the shape of the Virgin Mary. Thousands of people have claimed to be cured here, and the Roman Catholic church has officially recognized 67 incidents of miraculous healing linked to Lourdes.

At the close of Mass, Benedict anointed 10 ailing pilgrims, ranging from a teenage boy to an elderly nun in a white habit. He gently touched their foreheads and palms with oil and addressed each one in his or her own language.

The pope urged the ailing to remember that “dignity never abandons the sick person.”

“Unfortunately we know only too well: the endurance of suffering can upset life’s most stable equilibrium, it can shake the firmest foundations of confidence, and sometimes even leads people to despair of the meaning and value of life,” the pope said.

“There are struggles that we cannot sustain alone, without the help of divine grace,” he said.

Maryse Bargain, a 48-year-old woman from the Brittany region of northwest France, was among those praying for healing. She expressed hope that the pope, “someone else or the Virgin” might help cure the blindness she has suffered from since birth.

Benedict planned his trip to mark the 150th anniversary of visions of the Virgin Mary to a Lourdes peasant girl, 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous, who was later named a saint. On Monday he wrapped up a visit of sites linked to Bernadette’s life, stopping at the chapel where she received her First Communion.

The pontiff departed by plane for Rome en route to the papal summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo after his four-day trip to Paris and Lourdes — his first visit to France since his election as pope in 2005.

Benedict said he hoped to return to France though that decision was “in the hands of God.”

Why is this man said to have “significant mental health issues” because he said that god asked him to kill evil people? If he claimed that god asked him to attend church and sing songs and praise and all that, would he be more sane?

Stolen guns used in fatal Wash. shooting rampage

SEATTLE - Authorities said the man accused of a shooting rampage that left six people dead in northwest Washington stole the guns used in the attacks as well as a pickup truck involved in a high-speed chase.

According to court documents unsealed Wednesday in Skagit County District Court, Isaac Zamora stole a rifle, a handgun and ammunition from a residence near his mother’s home in the small town of Alger, about 70 miles north of Seattle.

The Sept. 2 shootings that claimed the life of a Skagit County sheriff’s deputy, two Alger area residents and two construction workers, continued as the shooter fled south on Interstate 5, firing at two cars and a Washington State Patrol trooper on the freeway, fatally injuring one driver.

After a high-speed police pursuit, Zamora, 28, surrendered at a sheriff’s office in Mount Vernon, about 20 miles south of Alger.

Zamora has been charged with six counts of murder and four counts of assault. He is being held on $5 million bail with his next court appearance set for Oct. 3.

According to court documents, in a police interview after his arrest Zamora refused to discuss his specific actions but said God told him what to do and told him to “kill evil.”

“God, why did I do it?” he blurted at one point in the interview.

Zamora’s only comment in court when he was charged last Friday was to twice declare: “I kill for God. I listen to God.”

Keith Tyne, a public defender appointed to represent Zamora, has said little about the case. After Zamora was charged, Tyne said, “Clearly there are significant mental health issues at play.”

According to the documents, the events on Sept. 2 began with a 911 call from Dennise Zamora, the mother of Isaac Zamora, who called police because she was afraid her son was breaking into neighbor’s houses, and might get shot doing so. Dennise Zamora has said her son has struggled for years with serious mental illness.

Here’s an interactive map of the US showing Creationist controversies in schools in each state.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=creationism-controversy-state-map

I just heard someone use the oft-used phrase “my relationship with God”, and had to stop the conversation right there.

In what sort of twisted world do we live in, where people can say something like that and expect to be taken seriously? You very literally have to be delusional to believe you can have a relationship with a god.

First off, if you believe you can hear the voice of god, you should seriously get your head checked. It bothers me to no end when people passively accept when people claim god spoke to them instead of telling them “no, that you was you talking to yourself”, or, “you’re crazy”. This complacency is entirely harmful, not just to the person making the claim, but also those around him/her. Letting people believe anything they want to is entirely harmful, in the same way letting a child believe he can fly if he jumps off the roof of a building.

Secondly, what sort of twisted definition of the word relationship do you have to have, in order to feel you can have a relationship with a being that never gives even the slightest response? When was the last time that god actually did anything for you? Has he ever cut the lawn when you asked? Give you a backrub when you feel tired? What about doing the dishes? Obviously not only an able bodied person can do such things, but what if anything has god EVER done in your “relationship”? I often get anecdotes of some obscure occurrence that was then construed as being an act of god, which can always be more accurately explained in a rational way.

This leads to believe that dogmatic individuals have no real concept of a relationship, which is quite an irony given that it is the religious crazies that feel the need to go on and on about our relationships and love all the time. Then again, they see no irony that a celibate old man should be teaching them of things like love. Why? Because of the intensely loving relationship the priest has with god. Hahaha.

So, what have I derived from all this? Religious folk are far more in love with ideas and dreams than they are with reality. They would much rather exist in a dream-like state than spend their life awake and self-aware. Don’t believe me? Why do all religions spend so much time fixated on the wonders of the after-life than on pre-after-life?

You only get one life, don’t spend it day dreaming of what’s next.

The rise of Miliband brings at last the prospect of an atheist prime minister

When Labour cabinet members were asked about their religious allegiances last December, following Tony Blair’s official conversion to Roman Catholicism, it turned out that more than half of them are not believers. The least equivocal about their atheism were the health secretary, Alan Johnson, and foreign secretary David Miliband.

The fact that Miliband is an atheist is a matter of special interest given the likelihood that he may one day, and perhaps soon, occupy No 10. In our present uncomfortable climate of quarrels between pushy religionists and resisting secularists - or attack-dog secularists and defensive religionists: which side you are on determines how you see it - there are many reasons why it would be a great advantage to everyone to have an atheist prime minister.

Atheist leaders are not going to think they are getting messages from Beyond telling them to go to war. They will not cloak themselves in supernaturalistic justifications, as Blair came perilously close to doing when interviewed about the decision to invade Iraq.

Atheist leaders will be sceptical about the claims of religious groups to be more important than other civil society organisations in doing good, getting public funds, meriting special privileges and exemptions from laws, and having seats in the legislature and legal protection from criticism, satire and challenge.

Atheist leaders are going to be more sceptical about inculcating sectarian beliefs into small children ghettoised into publicly funded faith-based schools, risking social divisiveness and possible future conflict. They will be readier to learn Northern Ireland’s bleak lesson in this regard.

Atheist leaders will, by definition, be neutral between the different religious pressure groups in society, and will have no temptation not to be even-handed because of an allegiance to the outlook of just one of those groups.