By Jeff Scoggins

I recently watched “Religulous,” which is Bill Maher’s documentary on the ridiculousness of religion. His basic premise is that religion itself is baseless, stupid, and even dangerous. I think that in fairness the film should have been classified as a comedy or a mockumentary rather than a documentary, because it is blatantly one-sided both in its editing and in the people Maher chose to interview.

Also, because of its classification as a documentary on religion it never occurred to me to check the film rating, which it turns out is rated R. For that reason alone I won’t recommend it. Since I never have time to watch TV I had never heard of Bill Maher and was clueless about who he is in the film industry. Now I know.

I must give Maher credit for being somewhat informed on religion. I also must give him credit for being right about one point in particular: Christians, and religious people in general, need to be more humble in what we assert. Maher points out that he places himself in the category of “I don’t know,” whereas religious people tend to place themselves in the category of “I certainly know,” no matter how ridiculous their beliefs sound.

And they do sound ridiculous compared to the “rational” thinking of modern life—at least on the surface level where Maher operates. Rational thinking, I got the feeling from Maher’s film, has placed itself on the pedestal of believable, particularly in relation to science and evolution.

Over and over Maher points out that Christians assert that the fantastic notion of an all-knowing, all-powerful God is believable while at the same time considering fairy tales and evolution to be unbelievable. He emphasizes that this is illogical and he is right. Christians do this. And we think that if we simply assert our belief more loudly and with more conviction that it becomes more believable. It doesn’t. The very notion of God is ridiculous to someone uninterested in acknowledging God.

However, from my point of view, Christians have it easier than rationalists who believe in evolution for the origin of life. Christians must accept only one fantastic idea: that an all-knowing, all-powerful God exists. With that one outrageous premise Christians can answer every question, even when the answer is “I don’t know.”

Rational thinking, on the other hand, must accept multiple fantastic ideas in order to maintain its complex belief system, not the least of which is the idea that a big explosion set the stage for life and then progressed into the world as we know it today through outrageous chance after outrageous chance.

For me, rationally speaking, it’s much easier to accept one outrageous concept of God than to accept multiple outrageous chances.

Maher also correctly points out that religion can be dangerous because we have innumerable examples of atrocities committed in the name of religion. The distinction that Maher does not make, however, is the difference between Christianity as it ought to be as opposed to what human beings have made of it.

Religion that twists God into something that he is not is truly dangerous. Indeed, according to Revelation, twisted religion is the very thing that is going to wrap things up here on planet earth—much the way that Maher fears it will. So in a sense that Maher was likely clueless about, his mockumentary was actually prophetic, in a way. Hopefully Christians will take some hints from the little that is right in the film.