Religulous

[Bling]

I can highly recommend the movie Religulous. It has opinions from both sides of the story but it fundamentally shows the ridiculousness of religion and the beliefs people have. Both skeptics and believers will learn lots! Fascinating stuff.

Here's a trailer

The last 5 minutes of the film is worth a watch if you don't want to see the whole thing

[media=]

You can buy the DVD but there's also loads of it, if not all, on Youtube.

[Grandpa Greenman]

I own it. I really like Bill.

[Simbi Laveau]

He got death threats because of it .Great movie

[Grandpa Greenman]

I bet he did, which is why religions can't coexist. Religious people take it all much to serous. They can't seem to agree to disagree.

[Bendy Demon]

Oh yeah. I seen this movie and really liked it, it clearly showed just how silly, ridiculous and childish all religions are.

I would watch it again if I had the chance.

[Abramelin]

I can highly recommend the movie Religulous. It has opinions from both sides of the story but it fundamentally shows the ridiculousness of religion and the beliefs people have. Both skeptics and believers will learn lots! Fascinating stuff.

Here's a trailer

The last 5 minutes of the film is worth a watch if you don't want to see the whole thing

[media=]

You can buy the DVD but there's also loads of it, if not all, on Youtube.

Haven't seen it but I will try to find all the parts of it on YouTube.

Btw, what does that guy in the first video say at 1:06 ?? I repeated those few seconds like 20 times, but I still have no idea what he says. This is what I 'heard', lol: "Isn't that something "callnemocoshomomatata"?" Or was that just a brainfart??

.

Edited August 29, 2012 by Abramelin

[BaalZebul Nehebkau]

lol I remember when I mentioned this to my father. He said that it was ridiculous and that Bill would end up in hell because of his ignorance of God. . .

*snicker*

Christians,

[notoverrated]

i dont understand why people care so much. now i think gov and religion should be separate (since i dont believe in god) but i think a lot of people need to and it helps them. idc what you want to think or wat you want to believe as long as it doesn't hurt anyone you can be racist, religious, anti gay, vegan >.> , atheist , agnostic, or just plain crazy. and to say something like grow up or die religion is killing us is just crap. greed is killing us, addiction is killing us, hate is killing us. but the sick people in charge use people faith to control them the evil greed b******* that only care about them selves is what need to go. but we do need to grow up and stop being so separated, i find it silly to say im christian or im atheist because you like an idea better then another one to me its just like separating your self by what color you like "oh you like blue?! wtf is wrong with you that is crazy and it makes no sense, everyone knows red is better" jut plain silly.

[karmakazi]

I'm with notoverrated.... live and let live. That goes for both sides.

[redhen]

Ho hum, Bill Maher mocking Fundies, yawn... Bill thinks all Christians are literalists. He doesn't know what to make out of a vatican astronomer, he thinks it's an oxymoron.

[media=]

[/media]

Looking for this clip I stumbled on why maybe Bill gives a pass to Catholicsm and Jewish fundies;

""So Maher is half Jew and half Catholic. The best people in the film are Catholics and Jews. The worst: Protestants and Muslims."" http://mondoweiss.ne...-for-jihad.html

hmm..

[CommunitarianKevin]

I love Bill but this movie is very biased and one-sided. Like someone else suggested, he is talking to Fundies. He also plays the roll of superior intelect but makes goofs himself that any Religious Studies majors would pick up on (for example when he says "Literacy?" when the congressmen says "religious literacy." Religious Literacy is a book by Religion scholar Stephen Prothero and a commonly used term in the study of religion.) I like the movie and would recomend it, but keep in mind, it does have its issues.

[Imaginarynumber1]

I love this movie. It's absolutely hilarious.

As mentioned by some, the film does focus on the fundamentalists more, but these are also the people that are gaining the most political power and influencing US policies and laws. These people need to be shown for how utterly bats!t insane they are.

[Odin11]

Haven't seen it but I will try to find all the parts of it on YouTube.

Btw, what does that guy in the first video say at 1:06 ?? I repeated those few seconds like 20 times, but I still have no idea what he says. This is what I 'heard', lol: "Isn't that something "callnemocoshomomatata"?" Or was that just a brainfart??

.

The guy at 1:06 is speaking in tongues.

Edited August 30, 2012 by Odin11

[+and-then]

I haven't watched all of it. For someone who has: How does he treat Islam? He hit's Christian fundies pretty hard in the parts I saw. just wondering if he had the guts to lash out at someone who might lash back?

[Bling]

I haven't watched all of it. For someone who has: How does he treat Islam? He hit's Christian fundies pretty hard in the parts I saw. just wondering if he had the guts to lash out at someone who might lash back?

He covers Islam too

[Hasina]

He's always comes off to me as kind of high horsed know it all, but to each their own I suppose.

[Abramelin]

The guy at 1:06 is speaking in tongues.

OK, so it's a brainfart.

++

EDIT:

I have said a couple of times that religion is sort of a brain disease.

I think it is the result of some short circuiting in the parietal lobe of the brains.

It's like the common cold, but more debilitating, meaning: many of us suffer from it now and then, but some can't get rid of it and suffer the consequences.

.

Edited August 30, 2012 by Abramelin

[Imaginarynumber1]

OK, so it's a brainfart.

++

EDIT:

I have said a couple of times that religion is sort of a brain disease.

I think it is the result of some short circuiting in the parietal lobe of the brains.

It's like the common cold, but more debilitating, meaning: many of us suffer from it now and then, but some can't get rid of it and suffer the consequences.

.

Your part about religion being a brain diesease reminded me of an article by Dawkins where he equated religion to a drug that people get hooked on:

Gerin Oil (or Geriniol to give it its scientific name) is a powerful drug which acts directly on the central nervous system to produce a range of symptoms, often of an anti-social or self-damaging nature. It can permanently modify the child brain to produce adult disorders, including dangerous delusions which are hard to treat. The four doomed flights of September 11th 2001 were Gerin Oil trips: all nineteen of the hijackers were high on the drug at the time. Historically, Geriniolism was responsible for atrocities such as the Salem Witch Hunts and the massacres of Native South Americans by Conquistadores. Gerin Oil fuelled most of the wars of the European Middle Ages and, in more recent times, the carnage that attended the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent and of Ireland.

Gerin Oil intoxication can drive previously sane individuals to run away from a normally fulfilled human life and retreat to closed communities of confirmed addicts. These communities are usually limited to one sex only, and they vigorously, often obsessively, forbid sexual activity. Indeed, a tendency towards agonized sexual prohibition emerges as a drably recurring theme amid all the colourful variations of Gerin Oil symptomatology. Gerin Oil does not seem to reduce the libido per se, but it frequently leads to a preoccupation with reducing the sexual pleasure of others. A current example is the prurience with which many habitual 'Oilers' condemn homosexuality.

As with other drugs, refined Gerin Oil in low doses is largely harmless, and can serve as a lubricant on social occasions such as marriages, funerals, and state ceremonies. Experts differ over whether such social tripping, though harmless in itself, is a risk factor for upgrading to harder and more addictive forms of the drug.

Medium doses of Gerin Oil, though not in themselves dangerous, can distort perceptions of reality. Beliefs that have no basis in fact are immunized, by the drug's direct effects on the nervous system, against evidence from the real world. Oil-heads can be heard talking to thin air or muttering to themselves, apparently in the belief that private wishes so expressed will come true, even at the cost of other people's welfare and mild violation of the laws of physics. This autolocutory disorder is often accompanied by weird tics and hand gestures, manic stereotypies such as rhythmic head-nodding toward a wall, or Obsessive Compulsive Orientation Syndrome' (OCOS: facing towards the east five times a day).

Gerin Oil in strong doses is hallucinogenic. Hardcore mainliners may hear voices in the head, or experience visual illusions which seem to the sufferers so real that they often succeed in persuading others of their reality. An individual who convincingly reports high-grade hallucinations may be venerated, and even followed as some kind of leader, by others who regard themselves as less fortunate. Such follower-pathology can long post-date the original leader's death, and may expand into bizarre psychedelia such as the cannibalistic fantasy of 'drinking the blood and eating the flesh' of the leader.

Chronic abuse of Geriniol can lead to 'bad trips', in which the user suffers terrifying delusions, including fears of being tortured, not in the real world but in a postmortem fantasy world. Bad trips of this kind are bound up with a morbid punishment-lore which is as characteristic of this drug as the obsessive fear of sexuality already noted. The punishment-culture fostered by Gerin Oil ranges from 'smack' through 'lash' to getting 'stoned' (especially adulteresses and rape victims), and 'demanifestation' (amputation of one hand), up to the sinister fantasy of allo-punishment or 'cross-topping', the execution of one individual for the sins of others.

You might think that such a potentially dangerous and addictive drug would head the list of proscribed intoxicants, with exemplary sentences handed out for pushing it. But no, it is readily obtainable anywhere in the world and you don't even need a prescription. Professional traffickers are numerous, and organized in hierarchical cartels, openly trading on street corners and in purpose-made buildings. Some of these cartels are adept at fleecing poor people desperate to feed their habit. 'Godfathers' occupy influential positions in high places, and they have the ear of Royalty, of Presidents and Prime Ministers. Governments don't just turn a blind eye to the trade, they grant it tax-exempt status. Worse, they subsidize schools founded with the specific intention of getting children hooked.

I was prompted to write this article by the smiling face of a happy man in Bali. He was ecstatically greeting his death sentence for the brutal murder of large numbers of innocent holidaymakers whom he had never met, and against whom he bore no personal grudge. Some people in the court were shocked at his lack of remorse. Far from remorse, his response was one of obvious exhilaration. He punched the air, delirious with joy that he was to be 'martyred', to use the jargon of his group of abusers. Make no mistake about it, that beatific smile, looking forward with unalloyed pleasure to the firing squad, is the smile of a junkie. Here we have the archetypal mainliner, doped up with hard, unrefined, unadulterated, high-octane Gerin Oil.

Whatever your view of the vengeance and deterrence theories of capital punishment, it should be obvious that this case is special. Martyrdom is a strange revenge against those who crave it, and, far from deterring, it always recruits more martyrs than it kills. The important point is that the problem would not arise in the first place if children were protected from getting hooked on a drug with such a bad prognosis for their adult minds.

[BaalZebul Nehebkau]

yeah I can see why you'd call religion a mental illness. . . I remember one of my old pastors spouting off at Bill Maher in one of his sermons when he and George Carlin said that. Man, ministers p*** me off. They hold the minds of all of their congregations in their hand (whether they know it or not it irrelevant) and then inject them with misinformation at every chance they get.

[Hasina]

Do we atheists really have the high ground that we deserve to point and laugh at religious people? I find religion just as dangerous as others, but I also see how it can be helpful to a person in need.

[BaalZebul Nehebkau]

Do we atheists really have the high ground that we deserve to point and laugh at religious people? I find religion just as dangerous as others, but I also see how it can be helpful to a person in need.

yes, it is a bit malicious to point and laugh, but. . . . hey we're not perfect are we?

And no, it isn't helpful at all. You should hear what Sam Harris has to say about that.