Religulous?

Can I be the only one with this love/hate thing for Bill Maher? Millions of us must tune intoon Friday nights -- martini or doobie in hand -- for the pleasure of watching Bill eviscerate all those Right Wing boobs.
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Can I be the only one with this love/hate thing for Bill Maher? Millions of us must tune into Real Time on Friday nights -- martini or doobie in hand -- for the pleasure of watching Bill eviscerate all those Right Wing boobs (most congressmen from the Bible Belt, and EVERY Fox News reporter). I cheer him on as he trashes GMOs or jokes about prices for organic veggies at WHOLE PAYCHECK. Wincing begins with his adolescent enthusiasm for Cannabis, but it's when Bill inevitably morphs into the Village Atheist that cringing takes over.

Maher's particular animus is directed at Christianity (in both its Evangelical and Catholic varieties) -- e.g. the idiocy of believing in stories about talking snakes and virgin births, trusting televangelist shysters or pedophiliac priests, and, since 9/11, lambasting the evils of Islam, whose 1.6 billion adherents he treats with all the subtlety of a Donald Trump or Sacha Baron Cohen. Relishing his role as one of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism (riding with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late, lamented Chris Hitchens), Maher wrote and starred in Religulous (2008), a mocumentary on the bizarre sideshows of contemporary religion: Jews for Jesus, Mormon apostates, Cannabis ministries, and alhamdulillahi: a Muslim gay bar (in Amsterdam, of course). Maher even manages to "preach" from some of L. Ron Hubbard's Scientological fantasies at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park, London.

Grant him this: Maher's take on religion has a distinguished pedigree. The sages of the enlightenment: Rousseau, Voltaire, Hume, Paine, all agreed that organized religion was a con designed by crooks to bamboozle rubes. As the Father of the Encyclopedia Denis Diderot declared, "Man will never be free till the last king is strangled by the guts of the last priest." Nor were these sentiments peculiar to godless Europe. They were widely shared by the American "Founding Fathers" of inaccurately pious legend. Consider the lament of John Adams, "This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it." Or Ben Franklin's practical observation, "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches." But certainly the most famous (and oddly compassionate) critique was made by (gasp) that hoary atheist Karl Marx: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature... the opium of the people... The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."

Opium? Surely Marx named the wrong drug. Speed or ecstasy would have been a more accurate choice. For all the acuity of his social analyses, Marx misunderstood the ecstatic power of religion. It has not withered away with the advance of Science and Social Democracy. This cannot be because its doctrines and rituals have grown more rational. Scientologists still track alien Thetans. The Virgin Mary still leaves her imprint on burritos in East L.A. Plaster statues of Ganesh the Hindu Elephant God still lap up saucers of milk. Nor are there fewer charlatans who now hold religious office or are revered as seers and prophets. Consider L. Ron Hubbard and his Dianetics, Oral Roberts and his 900-foot Jesus, or Abu Bakr al-Baghdad, the self-declared Caliph of Raquaa, and spiritual leader of ISIS.

Religions then do not persist because of their silly myths or weird rituals. Nor do they necessarily promote moral behavior, or even the worship of "God" (talk to the Dalai Lama about that one). What then brings Jihadis to Raquaa or Evangelicals to a Ted Cruz rally? It was Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) the father of modern Sociology, who best explained these perplexing tropisms by redefining their subject: "Religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things which unite all those who adhere to them into a single moral community."

Such sacred things may include god or gods, but also space ships, waterfalls, moving planets, stars and stripes, sickles and hammers, Kemal Ataturk, Chairman Mao, bald eagles, movie stars, ad infinitum. And "moral communities" framed themselves around these sacred things because they embody their collectivity; promise their immortality (individuals will die, but future generations perdure), and inspire their deliriums. Regarding the last, if you seek explanations for recent acts of "holy terror" at Parisian restaurants, Istanbul tourist sites, or Planned Parenthood clinics, you might ponder Durkheim's diagnosis, "it may be said that religion is not without a certain delirium [but] it must be added that this delirium is well founded. The images out of which it is made are not pure illusions, the mental agitation they cause bear witness to their reality."

In so redefining religion, Durkheim overturned the first premise of the Enlightenment, "In reality there are no religions which are false. All are true in their own fashion; all answer... to the given conditions of human existence." If religions were simply or only "religulous" they would indeed have withered away. Yet, despite the often accurate mockeries of the Enlightenment savants and the New Atheists, religions at the beginning of the 21st century hold a greater sway over world events than they did in the 19th. If we want to understand the dynamics of what's looking like a very troubling new century, we'd do well to wonder why.

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