Thread: Religulous - Bill Maher

Originally Posted by really

It was just a play on words, holding the notion of "lens" as "ego".

But can't the ego be a point of focus?

Originally Posted by really

The truth is before the lens.

Touche

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

But can't the ego be a point of focus?

Yes, but only because of itself.

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

But can't the ego be a point of focus?

Originally Posted by really

Yes, but only because of itself.

The bucket we each carry before us is filled with perspectives murky water

The word "ego" cannot convey the total contents of the bucket

Nor be inclusive of the bucket itself

It is all reflection

In ways, a mirror image of that which is Seeing the bucket

Yet even the reflection and its source are not separate

A play of "energy"

Deep "energy"

Where does one "thing" stop and "another" begin?

Seeing cannot see

Feeling can

Originally Posted by The Enterer

Mind is the only lens there is to percieve anything with. You just have to make sure you wipe all the 'isms' off it if you want to see clearly.



Just as soon as all sentient creatures have obtained enlightenment.

Feeble frog, gasping for the truth in your little pond.

But how big do you think the lens outside of your puddle really is?

Originally Posted by Grod

Feeble frog, gasping for the truth in your little pond.

But how big do you think the lens outside of your puddle really is?

Define "frog".

I am you. As you are he. The frog is but the reflection of ourSELVES. We are ourSELVES. OurSELF is not what it is, but a distinction between the TRUTH and being asleep.

Step 2: Smoke some drugs and report back in.

I'm glad this thread has gone so far off topic that there can't possibly be any spoilers here.

Originally Posted by Xaqaria

I'm glad this thread has gone so far off topic that there can't possibly be any spoilers here.

LOL.

It isn't like there is a "plot" anyway, it is just a growing theme, religion is silly and has a possibility to blow up the world.

But then again, all irrational people with power have that potential.

So how about we talk about the film, yes?

I'm yet to see a copy of it circulating. And its still not showing in my city.

Originally Posted by Alextanium

So how about we talk about the film, yes?

Ok but for Xaq's sake I'll put what I remember in spoilers.

Spoiler for Religulous:

Ok so. Memorable moments. When he speaks with his mother who died after filming about what they believe. Essentially they say the don't know all the answers. Then he goes to a traveling church on wheeles thing and talks with them there and you get the silly little responses yo usually get from apologetics. "What if your wrong, I just can't see there not being a God, blah blah blah." Then he goes to this thing in Florida where he watches the Jesus crucification reinactment and then speaks with the Jesus character. He asks him about the holy trinity and the Jesus guy says "well just like water there are three different kinds, ice, (and he uses some word for gas that is lame), and water." Bill later on responds to it in the car about how at first glance it throws you off but then after about 2 minutes of thinking about it you realize it is all total bull shit. However, he makes note, that the religious onlookers who heard him say it were like "Oh I'm sold" and then no longer care to listen to the rest of the conversation. He visits the sacred rock, and the movie ends and begins at the spot in which many relgious people think the end of the world will begin.

Also

He also is ran out of the mormon grounds by the black suits. He also gets kicked out of another place but I forget where it was.

Here are some reviews from imdb.

Spoiler for reviews:

Religulous (2008)
107 out of 159 people found the following comment useful :-
Definitely worth seeing or demonstrating against!, 19 September 2008




I watched Bill Maher's new movie, Religulous at it's world premiere at the Traverse City Film Festival. It was one of the first films to sell out at the festival, selling out in just the first couple days of sales.

Okay... now for the movie review: for those of you who thought that Dawkin's "Root of all evil" or "Jesus Camp" were powerful statements, then you might want to wear diapers because you might just crap yourself. Religulous doesn't take prisoners. It addresses Christianity, Scientology, Mormonism,Islam, and other religions. Bill Maher travels around the word, visiting the Wailing Wall, USA Bible Belt, Salt Lake City, and other locations while interviewing a wide range of religious leaders and followers.

Throughout the interviews, Bill throws out zingers and the joke timing is impeccable. Like the pro-creationist movie "Expelled", Religulous cuts to a variety of old film stock when making jokes. Although it fails at times, I would say the vast majority of the cuts connect and generates hearty laughs.

The first third of the film deals with Christianity and several offshoots of it. Here, the movie shines. It is hilarious! Poking jab after jab into insane ideas by asking simple questions.

Unfortunately, the move starts to slow down after he lampoons Scientology. Dressed as a vagrant, he appears in Hyde Park's Speaker's Corner and runs through Scientology's belief structure... appearing as a raving lunatic while accurately describing what that religion teaches.

By the time it deals with Islam, a lot of inertia has been lost. Although it still delivers some funny bits, the movie is much more subdued. Granted, anytime you are dealing with a subject so inflammatory that people have been killed over it, you tread lightly, but I think Christians will criticize the movie for being softer on Islam than on Christianity. The sad thing is that it's true. Being the more dangerous religion, people seem to be treating Islam with kid gloves. I wonder how long before other religions start adopting that tactic as they become threatened by critics? The ending is a fiery call to action for freethinkers. Rousing music & inflammatory speech hammer the dangers of religion into the audience. Propaganda techniques? Yes. Pretty heavy-handed about it too. However, I think it's needed. The flow of the movie needed something to bring things together and although thick with images and rhetoric... it is a solid ending.

Is it worth seeing? Hell yes! Will people be offended? Most definitely. Will there be protesters? There should be, this is far more blasphemous than "Dogma", "Passion of the Christ", or "The DeVinci Code".

Comparing "Expelled" to "Religulous", it's pretty quickly apparent that Religulous is the better movie. Bill Maher, with his previous experience doing standup and conducting interviews shames Ben Stein. Nicely done Bill!

Religulous


/ / / October 2, 2008

Cast & CreditsLionsgate presents a film directed by Larry Charles. Written by Bill Maher. Running time: 101 minutes. Rated R (for some language and sexual material). Opening today at local theaters.


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By Roger Ebert

I'm going to try to review Bill Maher's "Religulous" without getting into religion. Is that OK with everybody? Good. I don't want to fan the flames of a holy war. The movie is about organized religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, TV evangelism and even Scientology, with detours into pagan cults and ancient Egypt. Bill Maher, host, writer and debater, believes they are all crazy. He fears they could lead us prayerfully into mutual nuclear doom. He doesn't get around to Hinduism or Buddhism, but he probably doesn't approve of them, either.

This review is going to depend on one of my own deeply held beliefs: It's not what the movie is about, it's how it's about it. This movie is about Bill Maher's opinion of religion. He's very smart, quick and funny, and I found the movie entertaining, although sometimes he's a little mean to his targets. He visits holy places in Italy, Israel, Great Britain, Florida, Missouri and Utah, and talks with adherents of the religions he finds there, and others.

Or maybe "talks with" is not quite the right phrase. It's more that he lines them up and shoots them down. He interrupts, talks over, slaps on subtitles, edits in movie and TV clips, and doesn't play fair. Reader, I took a guilty pleasure in his misbehavior. The people he interviews are astonishingly forbearing, even most of the truckers in a chapel at a truck stop. I expected somebody to take a swing at Maher, but nobody did, although one trucker walked out on him. Elsewhere in the film, Maher walks out on a rabbi who approvingly attended a Holocaust denial conference in Iran.

Maher had a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, and was raised as a Catholic until he was 13, when his father stopped attending services. He speaks with his elderly mother, who tells him, "I don't know why he did that. We never discussed it." He asks her what the family believed, before and after that event. "I don't know what we believed," she says. No, she's not confused. She just doesn't know.

Most everybody else in the film knows what they believe. If they don't, Maher does. He impersonates a Scientologist at the Speakers' Corner in London's Hyde Park, and says Scientology teaches that there was a race of Thetans several trillion years old (older than the universe, which is only 13.73 billion years) and that we are born with Thetans inside us, which can be detected by an E-Meter, on sale at your local Scientology center, and driven out by "auditing," which takes a long time and unfortunately costs money.

Many of Maher's confrontations involve logical questions about holy books. For example, did Jonah really live for three days in the belly of a large fish? There are people who believe it. Is the End of Days at hand? A U.S. senator says he thinks so. Will the Rapture occur in our lifetimes? Widespread agreement. Mormons believe Missouri will be the paradise ("Branson, I hope," says Maher). There are even some people who believe Alaska has been chosen as a refuge for the Saved After Armageddon. In Kentucky, Maher visits the Creation Museum, which features a diorama of human children playing at the feet of dinosaurs.

His two most delightful guests, oddly enough, are priests stationed in the Vatican. Between them, they cheerfully dismiss wide swaths of what are widely thought to be Catholic teachings, including the existence of Hell. One of these priests almost dissolves in laughter as he mentions various beliefs that I, as a child, solemnly absorbed in Catholic schools. The other observes that when Italians were polled to discover who was the first person they would pray to in a crisis, Jesus placed sixth.

Maher meets two representations of Jesus. One is an actor at the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando. He stars in a re-enactment of the Passion, complete with crown of thorns, wounds, a crucifix, and Roman soldiers with whips. I suppose I understand why Florida tourists would take snapshots of this ordeal, but when Jesus stumbles, falls and is whipped by soldiers, I was a little puzzled why they applauded. The other Jesus, Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda, believes he actually is the Second Coming -- i.e., Jesus made flesh in our time. He explains how the bloodline traveled from the Holy Land through France to Spain to Puerto Rico. He has 100,000 followers.

Why have I focused on the Christians? Maher also has interesting debates with Muslims about whether the Koran calls for the death of infidels. And he interviews an Israeli manufacturer who invents devices to sidestep the bans on Sabbath activity. Since the laws prohibit you from operating machines, for example, they've invented a "negative telephone." Here's how it works: All the numbers on the touchpad are constantly engaged. All you do is insert little sticks into holes beside the numbers you don't want to work.

I have done my job and described the movie. I report faithfully that I laughed frequently. You may very well hate it, but at least you've been informed. Perhaps you could enjoy the material about other religions, and tune out when yours is being discussed. That's only human nature.


Religulous - A movie review by James Berardinelli

Religulous is the much-anticipated collaboration between one of the guys responsible for Borat and Curb Your Enthusiasm (Larry Charles) and the Politically Incorrect stand-up comedian (Bill Maher). The problem with the movie, whose title compresses "religious" and "ridiculous" into a single word, isn't that it milks more than one sacred cow but that it does so with minimal subtlety and intelligence. Being snarky and smug doesn't equate to providing insight, and there's more than one occasion when the filmmakers lose sight of this in their zeal to spread the Gospel According to Maher.

The success of the film may be tethered to expectations. If you are a deeply religious person, this is guaranteed to offend, and Maher doesn't care. According to him, you're part of the problem. If you're neither especially religious or irreligious, you'll probably get a few good laughs. However, if you're a member of the choir to which Maher is preaching, you may find this to be an especially shallow and uninteresting motion picture. It doesn't do anything stimulating. It's a 90-minute, comically-tinged rant against religion that offers selectively edited interviews with ringers. Maher's thesis is that religion is irrational and dangerous, and that's not exactly groundbreaking material. I happen to agree with a lot of what he says, but I was not at all impressed by the way he goes about saying it. Those who are offended by this film have a right to feel that way - the movie cheats and, by cheating, it trivializes the very message it attempts to promote. Ultimately, the question isn't whether Maher is right but whether he's interesting, provocative, or perceptive. I can't answer in the affirmative.

Religulous combines short monologues by Maher with interviews to illustrate nearly every conceivable negative associated with religion and to highlight the inconsistencies that believers ignore (which typically do not appear as inconsistencies to them). There are no meaningful dialogues on potentially thought-provoking topics such as faith, the separation of Church and State in the United States, and how religions view one another. More than 50% of the movie ridicules Christianity, leaving scant time for Judaism and Islam. Relatively minor sects/cults like Mormonism and Scientology are addressed while major religions like Hinduism and Buddhism are completely ignored.

In picking his interview subjects, Maher has largely elected to go with fringe figures rather than those who might engage him in a thoughtful and spirited debate. His talk with the Christian head of the Human Genome Project is brief and unenlightening. Mark Pryor, a Democrat Senator from Arkansas, might rank as the dumbest member of the U.S. government based on his interview. The host also enters into dialogues with a man who plays Jesus at a theme park, the Vatican's astronomer, an ex-Jew for Jesus, a maverick priest whose doctrine would give the Pope indigestion, a "reformed" homosexual who believes "gayness" is a condition that can be "cured," and a man whose religion is tied to cannibas. The fact is, however, that Maher follows in the footsteps of Michael Moore and Ben Stein by editing interviews in ways that serve his thesis. Many viewers of Religulous will be aware that what they're viewing has been sanitized and scrubbed to Maher's specifications. He doesn't do a lot to hide this, and that speaks to a level of arrogance and condescension that pervades the entire production. Maher is speaking down to us, like a teacher scolding kindergarten pupils. This is especially evident during the closing argument, when Maher drops all pretext of being funny and delivers a serious summation.

While the film is an utter failure as a documentary (it's more of a visual op-ed piece), it has moments of genuinely funny comedy. There are times when the inserted movie and video clips are inspired choices and some of Maher's tongue-in-cheek sarcasm is effective. On the whole, however, the occasional chuckles provoked by the movie don't make up for its sloppy, less-than-rigorous examination of an issue that deserves something more exhaustive. If the subject of religion is as important to Maher as he claims during his end comments, then he should have followed those words with actions and made a movie that's more than a sum of inauthentic interviews, ranting attacks, and obvious observations. The choir may hum along with Maher but the rest of those watching this movie will be singing the blues.

In other news, pirated copies of Expelled started showing up on the internet yesterday. The DVD was released a few days ago.

Time to go enrage myself.

Originally Posted by Alextanium

In other news, pirated copies of Expelled started showing up on the internet yesterday. The DVD was released a few days ago.

Time to go enrage myself.

Oh shizzle for real? I want one. If only I could say send me a link without violating rules...

I've been trying like mad to find this movie on a website I can watch. None of my movie sites have it loaded. Same with Expelled. Is it really worth the 8 bucks?

Originally Posted by Jeff777

I've been trying like mad to find this movie on a website I can watch. None of my movie sites have it loaded. Same with Expelled. Is it really worth the 8 bucks?

I found Expelled today online, it wasn't really anything. I was expecting a lot more, but since they were working with lies they had to tred softly.

Religulous on the other hand was able to cover all areas they felt like, except the ones like how the mormons slinced him and that one time in italy, and in Florida...Anyway, Religulous was worth it imo, but expelled would not have been.

Expelled pretty much goes, these people got fired for trying to support ID (which they forget to mention all the other things they did, like for example skipping all the necessary reviewing that every paper has to go through to include a paper that tried to say things that insist upon ID being the only way things can happen) and now they are bitching that it isn't fair, which it wouldn't be of course, but read the wiki and you'll see that for Sternberg, it wasn't the case at all. Caroline apparently not online tried to teach ID in her cellular biology classroom, but also tried to say that the Nazi agenda was based on Darwins ideology.

Etc.

double post

The "Expelled Challenge"
In order to promote the film, the website "GetExpelled.com"[143] launched "The Expelled Challenge"[144] which offers to pay schools up to $10,000 to send students to see the movie. The program offers between $5 and $10 for every ticket stub submitted by the school within the first two weeks of the release of the film.[145]

The program also recommends a "school-wide mandatory field trip" as "the best way to maximize your school's earning potential."[145][146] Wesley Elsberry criticized the promotion as a call to "take children away from classrooms, fill their heads with obnoxiously delivered misinformation, and profit off of it."[147]

A similar program called the "Adopt-A-Theater Campaign" was announced in March 2008. The goal was to produce a competition among church groups and other organizations to see which could generate the largest group sale of movie theater tickets to see the film. The five largest groups to register and attend a screening were to be awarded $1,000.[148]


And it is STILL considered a flop based on how many theatres offered it.

THEY COULDN"T PAY PEOPLE TO WATCH IT! lol.

What's the expelled online link?

I'm sad to say that I couldn't watch this movie... I live in ohio