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Religulous
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the4thcircle's house, where I'm staying overnight.
Today has been mostly good! We made some good progress with the filking (which I forgot to mention includes composition as well as transcription) and it's been wonderful to see both Stacy and Becky again; I love being with them, and I believe the reverse is also true. (Although I do sometimes worry that I put undue stress on them both unintentionally; I seem to goof up a lot. They tell me everything's okay, though.)
We finished off the evening by watching a film called Religulous, and to be honest it made me a little uncomfortable. I want to use the rest of this post to explain the reasons why. This is going to contain religous discussion, so I'm going to put it under a cut in case you don't want to see said discussion.
Religulous is, by the judgement you would get from viewing it, a documentary-type film on religion. However, the central figure, Bill Maher, is a stand-up comedian, and has highly critical views about religion, and it comes through very much in the film. As such, it'd be better described as a comedy targeted towards atheists, mainly consisting of "Haha, look at those stupid idiots who believe in religion!" (It should be noted that the film itself *is* marketed as a comedy, according to IMDb.)
I myself am an ex-Christian, but I'm not an atheist. I would count myself as spiritual but not aligning myself to any one path. I do feel that there is more to this world than we understand, but I don't claim to understand it. (I'll write more about this later; this entry isn't the place for it.) As such, there are things in this film that I can agree with, and some that I don't.
The very biggest issue that I have with this film is that while ostensibly being a documentary, it is incredibly obvious that the interviews have not only been cherry picked for maximum effect, but have also been heavily edited - and the end result simply makes fun of people and religions. The underlying aim of the film is to "expose" religions for the crazy, nonsensical delusions that Bill Maher considers them to be, and as such only the interviews that result in Bill Maher winning one over the religions in question are included, and those ones are edited to make the speaker sound clueless - for example, inserting 'awkward' pauses after embarrassing questions, cutting away after short excerpts of answers that don't seem to explain much at all, etc. I also suspect that at least in one case, an entirely different answer was swapped for a question. (I also suspect that if there were any interviews with religious people where Bill didn't win one over them, they were quietly dropped.)
Yes, there are quotes in there that will make you wonder how on earth they thought it would be a good idea to say that. (For example, the US Senator who, at one point, retorts "Yeah, but you don't need to take an IQ test to be a Senator.") But I worry that at least some people's responses in this vein are just taken out of context. We don't get to see the full interviews behind these, because that just wouldn't be comedic, right? Don't get me wrong, I think Bill tries hard to portray his point of view in a semi-serious manner, but it's still very obviously first and foremost a comedy.
I said there were things in this film that I agreed with. I personally think that religion is the cause of way too many problems culturally (wars being the obvious - but not *nearly* the only - example), and I also believe that, if a god exists, it just isn't possible to know what that god is saying to you, because when people 'know' what their god is saying to them, it invariably conflicts with something that someone else's god has told them. How would we know what the truth is? We don't, plain and simple - that's the nature of faith. And it's the conflicts in this sort of thing that drove me away from religion.
But I don't make fun of people or other religions in the way this film does. I find that the way this film goes about doing what it does is absolutely deplorable. It's not nice at all.
One last thing. The film is interspersed with quotes from various people and holy texts from various religions illustrating whatever point Bill is making at that point. One of these quotes is at the very end of the film, right before the credits. The end of the DVD talks about how various religions predict that the world will end, and many quotes from holy texts are shown illustrating this. At the very end of this section, there's a quote from Osama bin Laden, which went something along the lines of "The acquisition of nuclear weapons in defense of Muslims is a religious duty." (I couldn't remember the quote exactly; I'm fairly sure there was more to the quote, but it did at least mention nuclear weapons specifically in the DVD; the Internet seems to disagree on whether or not 'nuclear' was mentioned, but.)
I think many Muslims would probably be outraged to see that sort of thing on this DVD apparently representing Islam, and I was kind of saddened to see it there, especially as it was obviously placed to make it seem as if Osama was speaking for the whole of Islam on the topic of the end of the world. :/
And since I know that both Stacy and Becky will be reading this, I should say that I am happy that you put it on to watch; I try to be very open-minded about these things and it was good to see another's point of view! So please don't take any of this as a criticism of you or the decision to put it on; my criticisms are purely aimed at the film itself. :)
the4thcircle's house, where I'm staying overnight.Today has been mostly good! We made some good progress with the filking (which I forgot to mention includes composition as well as transcription) and it's been wonderful to see both Stacy and Becky again; I love being with them, and I believe the reverse is also true. (Although I do sometimes worry that I put undue stress on them both unintentionally; I seem to goof up a lot. They tell me everything's okay, though.)
We finished off the evening by watching a film called Religulous, and to be honest it made me a little uncomfortable. I want to use the rest of this post to explain the reasons why. This is going to contain religous discussion, so I'm going to put it under a cut in case you don't want to see said discussion.
Religulous is, by the judgement you would get from viewing it, a documentary-type film on religion. However, the central figure, Bill Maher, is a stand-up comedian, and has highly critical views about religion, and it comes through very much in the film. As such, it'd be better described as a comedy targeted towards atheists, mainly consisting of "Haha, look at those stupid idiots who believe in religion!" (It should be noted that the film itself *is* marketed as a comedy, according to IMDb.)
I myself am an ex-Christian, but I'm not an atheist. I would count myself as spiritual but not aligning myself to any one path. I do feel that there is more to this world than we understand, but I don't claim to understand it. (I'll write more about this later; this entry isn't the place for it.) As such, there are things in this film that I can agree with, and some that I don't.
The very biggest issue that I have with this film is that while ostensibly being a documentary, it is incredibly obvious that the interviews have not only been cherry picked for maximum effect, but have also been heavily edited - and the end result simply makes fun of people and religions. The underlying aim of the film is to "expose" religions for the crazy, nonsensical delusions that Bill Maher considers them to be, and as such only the interviews that result in Bill Maher winning one over the religions in question are included, and those ones are edited to make the speaker sound clueless - for example, inserting 'awkward' pauses after embarrassing questions, cutting away after short excerpts of answers that don't seem to explain much at all, etc. I also suspect that at least in one case, an entirely different answer was swapped for a question. (I also suspect that if there were any interviews with religious people where Bill didn't win one over them, they were quietly dropped.)
Yes, there are quotes in there that will make you wonder how on earth they thought it would be a good idea to say that. (For example, the US Senator who, at one point, retorts "Yeah, but you don't need to take an IQ test to be a Senator.") But I worry that at least some people's responses in this vein are just taken out of context. We don't get to see the full interviews behind these, because that just wouldn't be comedic, right? Don't get me wrong, I think Bill tries hard to portray his point of view in a semi-serious manner, but it's still very obviously first and foremost a comedy.
I said there were things in this film that I agreed with. I personally think that religion is the cause of way too many problems culturally (wars being the obvious - but not *nearly* the only - example), and I also believe that, if a god exists, it just isn't possible to know what that god is saying to you, because when people 'know' what their god is saying to them, it invariably conflicts with something that someone else's god has told them. How would we know what the truth is? We don't, plain and simple - that's the nature of faith. And it's the conflicts in this sort of thing that drove me away from religion.
But I don't make fun of people or other religions in the way this film does. I find that the way this film goes about doing what it does is absolutely deplorable. It's not nice at all.
One last thing. The film is interspersed with quotes from various people and holy texts from various religions illustrating whatever point Bill is making at that point. One of these quotes is at the very end of the film, right before the credits. The end of the DVD talks about how various religions predict that the world will end, and many quotes from holy texts are shown illustrating this. At the very end of this section, there's a quote from Osama bin Laden, which went something along the lines of "The acquisition of nuclear weapons in defense of Muslims is a religious duty." (I couldn't remember the quote exactly; I'm fairly sure there was more to the quote, but it did at least mention nuclear weapons specifically in the DVD; the Internet seems to disagree on whether or not 'nuclear' was mentioned, but.)
I think many Muslims would probably be outraged to see that sort of thing on this DVD apparently representing Islam, and I was kind of saddened to see it there, especially as it was obviously placed to make it seem as if Osama was speaking for the whole of Islam on the topic of the end of the world. :/
And since I know that both Stacy and Becky will be reading this, I should say that I am happy that you put it on to watch; I try to be very open-minded about these things and it was good to see another's point of view! So please don't take any of this as a criticism of you or the decision to put it on; my criticisms are purely aimed at the film itself. :)