Foo unto others

Religulous

Crit

I may not agree with your beliefs, but I will always at least feign respect for them: I will call you an irrational loony only behind your back, while discussing your beliefs with fellow nonbelievers or doubters. This may be hypocritical, but it reflects my liberal humanist understanding of the social contract.
Bill Maher is not having any of that shit. He's not only going to tell you how ridiculous your beliefs are; he's going to try to reason you out of them. This film is nothing less than an antireligious jihad.
My point in avoiding confrontation is that--just as I don't want anyone else telling me what I can or cannot believe, or, to the extent that it doesn't do anyone else any harm, what I can or cannot do--I don't think that I have any right to pull the wings off of anyone else's beloved butterflies of belief.
Maher's point is that there is no such thing as religious belief that does him no harm--that even apart from what he sees as the Quran's inescapable declaration of holy war against the rest of us, and the historical culpability of the two other monotheistic biggies in countless atrocities--the sheer intellectual bankruptcy that religion demands makes his world an uglier and unhappier place.
Well, that's as may be, and I must say that I'm made uncomfortable by polls showing that huge majorities of Americans embrace religion, and by the political correlative whereby an atheist cannot be elected to an office of any responsibility, and the Democratic Party feels compelled to establish its evangelical bona fides.
But come on, Bill: do you really think the way to people's brains is by pissing on their hearts? Isn't the sort of hypocrisy that says, "Look, I have no problem with what you believe, and I won't try to legislate against it; but to be fair, to be logical, don't you therefore have to accord me the same tolerance?" Yeah, I know: that doesn't work, either; but at least it lets me continue to think that I'm embracing the principles on which the democracy was founded. If I start calling people fucking idiots, I'm thinking they're even less likely to come around to my side of the argument.

Trailers

• Morning Light #6. Incidentally, I noticed this yesterday: one thing I like about the trailer is the chair Roy Disney is sitting in when he gives the crew its pep talk; check it out. Only other trailer was for W.; somehow I think it's going to get a bigger share of the Religulous crowd than is the Disney heartwarmer.