On Maher’s Religulous
Jacques Berlinerblau says : “How to describe Bill Maher’s new documentary, Religulous? Let’s see. How about this: like screaming “suicide bomber!” in a movie theater.” He adds that Maher’s worldview and politics is decidedly New Atheist. What he means by this is that Maher focuses “obsessively on religious extremists and oddballs.” He says that this is counter-productive and makes atheists irrelevant during election seasons. Read here.
A Humanist, Tom Bishop, responds to Berlinerblau:
Maher and the so called “New Atheists” do not represent the whole nonbeliever movement any more than literal Bible readers represent the whole of Christianity. So when we wonder why separation of church and state and science curricula have been marginalized, we cannot blame it on Maher, who doesn’t spend any amount of time on these issues anywhere in this movie. The fact is that the nonbeliever movement was going to be irrelevant in this election anyway because nobody pays any attention to us when we do play nice. Look at any article on the two issues above. The nonbeliever argument has gone out of its way to point out that you can still be a Christian if my kid doesn’t get encouraged to say his country is “under God” by someone that I tell him is an authority figure, and if a literal Biblical interpretation is kept out of science textbooks. Those positions are alliance building and not at all Maher-like. So what is the real reason we get ignored?
The default position of even liberal religious people is to treat the so called atheist with at least suspicion, at most hate. So-called atheism is more likely to get you laughed out of a political race than any other minority status that I like (even GLBT has twice as many congressmen as nonbelievers do). How many of those other minorities advanced their statuses without ever doing anything to upset the opposition? Maher cannot hurt the movement any more than complacency and status quo already are.
Those who oppose nonbelievers are drawn to the so-called new atheist for the same reason the new atheist is drawn to the literal interpreter: they are either hilarious or provocative, depending on your mood, and they reinforce your stereotypes. Most of the rest of the nonbeliever movement has gotten over this obsession and has moved on to thinking about what our own community, culture, and yes even belief structure should look like. But even though Maher isn’t really our guy, we have a hard time denouncing new Atheists because at least they get the rest of the population to confront their tacit feelings about us. They get them to say out loud “I hate atheists” and then someone more moderate has an opening to respond, “Really? That’s weird, because I don’t hate you at all.”
Filed under: Books and Movies