Mr. Maher's Movie

Mr. Maher's Movie
Míceál Ledwith.

What happens when a man whose ambition is to own nothing at all comes face to face with one of the most powerful conquerors in all of history?

Such a meeting took place in 336 BC in a suburb of the city of Corinth. Alexander the Great had just been sworn in as supreme general of the Greek armies for the war against the Persians. All the notables of the city had gone to congratulate him; all except one; the man who after Aristotle was probably the most famous living philosopher in all of Greece, Diogenes of Sinope. Alexander fancied himself as somewhat of a philosopher; after all Aristotle had been his tutor, and he was intrigued that Diogenes did not consider it worth his while to come and honor him. He was put out enough to go to the trouble of finding Diogenes.

Diogenes lived in a suburb of the city called the Cranium and his home was a large barrel. Alexander found him sunbathing beside it. Whatever dialogue they had obviously impressed the Emperor and when he prepared to take his leave he asked Diogenes if there was any favor he could grant him. "Yes," Diogenes replied. "You are blocking the sunlight; could you step to one side."

Alexander was not offended, and when one of his aides joked about Diogenes on the way home Alexander thoughtfully remarked that if he had not been Alexander he would like to have been Diogenes. Thirteen years later, although separated by many thousands of miles, they at least shared the destiny of dying on the same day.

Diogenes had been the son of a wealthy banker but was disgusted by the hypocrisies of the society in which he grew up, particularly the double standards of those who considered themselves the elite. He moved to Athens where he lived on the streets as a beggar and despite being brutally rebuffed at the start became a student of Antisthenes who had been a disciple of Socrates.

Living in a large tub was just the most permanent symptom of his eccentric behavior. Everything he did was deliberately designed to reject by example the crippling social values and institutions that made up the society in which he lived. His debating skills were unusual; he urinated on people who disagreed with him. He defecated before the audience in the open-air theatre after he had given a lecture, ate in public, which was a no-no in Greece of the day, gave people the middle finger regularly and even masturbated in the public forum. It has been well said that you can never entirely relax in the company of a wizard, but no pretence at all was safe in the presence of Diogenes; vanity, hypocrisy, social climbing, self-promotion, popularity seeking by the city rulers, brown-nosing, self-delusion and all artificiality in human conduct were his constant targets. He used to walk about in broad daylight with a lamp, announcing to all who cared to listen that he was looking for one real human being in the city of Corinth.

His great model was the dog. Dogs perform bodily functions in public without embarrassment, live in the moment without worry, and have no ability at all for pretense.

Diogenes is regarded as one of the founding fathers of the Cynic School of philosophy. In fact the very word 'cynic' originally comes form the Greek term "kynikos" meaning 'doglike." Despite his harassment of them the Greeks retained a sense of affection for him, tinged with humor. After he died they decided to erect a monument to his memory; a dog on top of a pillar; which presumably was judged to steer comfortably clear of all pretence.

Every age needs somebody to rescue it by ridiculing its forms of pretense, and every century has produced them, albeit not always in as colorful a form as this original. It's never been a popular role, not even a very safe role; for nothing hurts more than the puncturing of an inflated ego. Many bards and satirists down the ages came to a sticky end because they wandered over some line that lay nobody quite knew where.

The less sure any group happens to be about its own basic presumptions, beliefs and assumptions, the more vehemently it is likely to react against mockery and satire. Without a doubt over the long term the group that has been most sensitive of all to criticism has been organized religion, even when the criticism is positive and well intended. Indeed the standard reaction has often been murderous intolerance of difference. So it is that certain self-proclaimed righteous people eventually find themselves in the rather curious position of preaching and practicing hatred in the name of the God of love. The wide range of attitudes, faults and failings lambasted by Diogenes have a common thread running through them: he considered them all to be enormously destructive of any true human development. Unfortunately some of the attitudes most savagely assailed by Diogenes are precisely the same attitudes that are central to the basic program of many forms of religion today.

Certain groups have always had their own calculation of when the creation of the world had occurred, the Hebrews for instance believed that everything began in the year 3,761 BC. It's one thing to believe that the world was created by God during a particularly busy week six thousand years ago. Its another matter to know that nobody put forth that idea with any vigor until in 1650 that well-known Dubliner, Archbishop James Ussher, diligently added up the ages of all the notable people the bible mentions between Adam and Jesus, and calculated to his own satisfaction that God created the world in the night preceding 21 September 4004 BC, in our Gregorian Calendar. That would be a mere thousand years after the Sumerians had discovered glue!

John Lightfoot a decade before had made a similar calculation but Ussher's book ensured he got most of the 'credit.' I used to keep an original copy of that volume on a shelf above my desk to remind me of how easily religious industry can go mad.

None of the great Fathers of the Patristic period, none of the great medieval theologians such as Augustine, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, or Aquinas, none of the great Protestant Reformers such as Martin Luther, Zwingli or John Calvin ever made much of a fuss about what age the world was, much less spent a lot of time on its precise calculation. Where did the present day incessant clamor come from that the world being six thousand years old is an essential touchstone of Christian orthodoxy? An alarming number of people in the western world today believe that this date was handed down by God from time immemorial, instead of being something an Irishman worked out in his study a mere three centuries ago. How did we ever get into such a situation and where were the successors of Diogenes when we needed them?

What is even more alarming because of its implications for world peace today is a partner belief to this six thousand year old universe conviction. This is the belief that at the end of time Jesus is going to return to judge the world and that before he does things are going to have to go terribly wrong here. Many believe today that this time is imminent. If the return of Jesus is going to be such a wonderful thing there is always the temptation to nudge things along a little to expedite matters. In this perspective any disaster whether natural or man made, or any catastrophic event of human suffering, is liable to be trivialized and written off as God's will because it will serve the greater good of the earlier return of Jesus. It can encourage a moral recklessness of the sort that down the centuries has started so many conflicts in which countless thousands were killed or maimed - apparently all to no avail as Jesus still has not returned.

These are very dangerous stars by which to steer our course and what is even more dangerous is the extent to which these beliefs of certain Christian groups are shared in their own way and in their own terms by extreme Muslim fundamentalism. An old Latin saying: "The sooner the worse the better" apparently captures the mood on both sides.

What if we never had a conviction that the world was six thousand years old, and all the consequences that come with that belief? What would our attitude be to many discoveries in the scientific and medical field which the six thousand year old universe idea has branded as taboo? Would the greatness of the creator not be even more manifest in a universe billions of years old, and in the myriad processes by which its diversity unfolded, and in the mysterious physical complexities which we continue to discover every day? Who is really on God's side?; those who would over-simplify and trivialize the creation to a sub-human level of understanding, or those who want to regard with wonder the true vastness of what the Creator really set in motion? Where would we be if John Lightfoot and James Ussher had never penned those calculations three centuries ago, and if they had never crept into the margins of the King James Bible? How have we always found it so fatally easy to let peripheral matters dominate center stage?

Just as there is no shred of evidence that any of the great figures of the sixteen centuries of Christian tradition before Ussher ever worried too much about when the world began, much less whether it began in 4004 BC on 24th. October, at nine o'clock in the morning, likewise it would be very difficult to show from the ancient Christian sources that the return of Jesus was expected to occur in our present generation. There is a lot of evidence that the early Christians expected it might happen in their own time, - but in our time, no. That calculation comes only from the specious interpretation of a cluster of medieval prophecies that could be interpreted to suit almost any situation or time and place under the sun. Unfortunately that belief is the motive behind another lot of extremely dangerous religious activism that we may come to deeply regret soon if we are not careful.

Bill Maher's movie "Religulous" will come out in DVD in February. Certainly if "Religulous" had appeared in the heyday of the Inquisition Maher would long ago have stopped making any public appearances!

Over the years I've often enjoyed seeing that razor sharp mind at work and hearing the probing insights that penetrate far beneath the surface of things. Religion, or at least the form of religion that has become more familiar today, has been consistently his chief target, and within religion, just like Diogenes, the hypocrisies of pretense, in all their varied forms, and the very real dangers they pose nowadays for world stability and peace.

It is the desire for approval and praise that has grown so far out of all proportion that has made us willing slaves to many of the outrageous conventions and lack of personal integrity that have apparently become accepted as the warp and woof of our civilization. So it is we've very effectively carved out our own Winter of Discontent and abandoned any real chance of attaining the personal autonomy and power which all the great teachers of history have identified as the very foundation stone of spiritual development.

If there was ever a time we needed a Diogenes to burst the bubble of pretence and call us back to common sense, sanity, and the middle ground, it is now.

I sat through the movie within the first few days of its release at a late night showing in a sparsely populated theatre. The audience laughed a lot, and it would be hard not to, because the humor was not barbed or mean, and Maher remained good natured throughout, never degenerating into becoming disagreeable, even if he did equate all religious beliefs with the most absurd fundamentalist versions of them.

Maher contends that religious people dodge the tough questions by retreating into the fortresses such as that we cannot understand God's mind, or God's plan and purpose, because they are so far beyond the abilities of human understanding.

I was not surprised that the religious reactions to the film in the main have branded Maher as a religion hater or dangerous heretic at one extreme. At the other extreme those believers who have a sense of humor about their own faith, and what thinking person cannot, may find a lot of humor in it, and find reason for self-examination and reform by their churches - at least while rival religions are being criticized, and before their own brand comes under scrutiny.

Maher's technique is mockery, not scolding, and seems to want to make those interviewed appear foolish as they try to give some very inadequate and floundering responses to his well-prepared questions about some of the most contentious aspects of religious belief. It ought to make thoughtful people ponder about what they actually do believe and what relevance it has to their journey here on earth and what lies beyond, if they have not already done so. Anyone who is concerned knows, for a wide variety of reasons, that many already have, while nevertheless remaining devoted members of their own particular franchise on the surface. Maher wonders what could have been accomplished in this world if religion had never existed. He believes it has been consistently self-absorbed, intolerant and judgmental and that if it does not go through a major transformation it will disappear like many other ancient movements that no longer exist, just as alchemy became chemistry and astrology became astronomy.

When I was first a student of theology, Harvey Cox, then and now one of the pre-eminent American theologians, Professor at the Harvard Divinity School, forecast that religion was going to fall into rapid decline. That was forty five years ago. I felt then that that would not happen, not because of any disagreement with his analysis, but because so much of what the contemporary form of religion offers panders precisely to the fundamental core weaknesses we have as spiritual beings. It responds to the weakest link in our make-up so religion will always be there while weak humans are here, and to a greater or lesser degree, we are all weak. Religion has been so successful and enduring because it panders to the very weaknesses that it ought to be its business to eliminate from our make up, We want to be taken care of, we want to be assured that all is well, and to be told that if I subscribe to some relatively simple formula, which does not make too many demands on me in practical terms, then all will be well. That of course is not true, but by the time we discover that it is too late. None of us really wants to hear about the need for accepting personal responsibility, and the abandonment of blame, for to know that there is nobody out there to cast blame on for my own present situation except myself, is what constitutes the very abyss of the dark night of the soul.

But if this is the abyss of spiritual depression it is also the first moment of my liberation, for I must know that if I created all of this mess through my own ignorance, in the light of knowledge I now know that I can un-create it and move on to more glorious destinies than I ever imagined before. We all crave protection; that is understandable. Our delusion is to look for it outside ourselves even though for countless generations that is what we have been indoctrinated to believe and we never realized it could not be further from the truth. But few are ready to open sufficiently to realize that, and to undertake the burden of creating our own reality in the light of what we have learned. That is why there will always be more people wanting to be taken care of than people wanting to be shown a path to personal empowerment and glory through shark infested waters. And that is why even though Harvey Cox's analysis was spot on, his forecast was off and probably always will be.

I expect that there will be complaints from some quarters (who of course will never look at the movie) that people who were interviewed were tricked into participating. My own impression is that they all were, and Bill Maher and Larry Charles have admitted as much. Nevertheless it did bring out some raw and honest answers from those interviewed. Even if they did not realize in advance that Bill Maher was doing the interviews, and even if they originally did have a fake title for the project, (which steers uncomfortably close to 'the end justifies the means,´ philosophy which the movie criticizes), nevertheless the interviewees sat through the interviews when they did know it was Bill Maher who was facing them. The Mormons however did not give them that chance.

Having interviewed the Mel Gibson style "bleeding Jesus" at the Orlando theme Park who said that God was soon coming to punish the world, Maher and his crew were apparently thrown out of the Park, as they also were from the Vatican. At least they remained long enough in the Vatican to interview a priest who, laughingly uproariously, dismissed wide swaths of Catholic teaching. Those same teachings must have formed most of the core of what was solemnly administered for decades as the heart of Catholic doctrine for American school children not so long ago. I found it interesting that two of Bill Maher's most engaging interviewees were Catholic priests; the other being the former Director of the Vatican Observatory, Father George Coyne. The Observatory is now wrestling with astronomers' findings that as far as is known at present there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the universe, and some hypothesize more than one universe. Hard to reconcile with the conviction that the creation was all about "us"?

Maher's contention is that the real way to garner influence (and make money) is to create a fake problem and then sell people the answers. He says the religions have been doing it for eons. In this regard I think it was Christopher Hitchens who memorably said "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence," but the Churches are a while from seeing that.

Maher remains very good natured in evoking some raw and honest answers from the interviewees throughout the film, and his interview style was brilliant. This is his strength, but towards the very end he lapses into a 'preachy' style that I felt was what most of the movie was been condemning, and in this he lost the full power of what his previous methodology was yielding. His point is that religion is not just an archaic survival but is actually dangerous today precisely because it deprives people of the ability to ponder, analyze and question, and instead encourages them to accept what are obviously the wrong answers for the world's problems, and their own.

It would be a good sign of some Churches if they felt able to take on Bill Maher's challenge by internal debate within their organizations, while also including some disbelieving outsiders. One has to admit that this is unlikely to happen and the reason usually is that behind the scenes churches fear that their religious beliefs are little more than a house of cards they are afraid might be blown away by any breath of scrutiny.

My own conviction is that most of the so-called agnostics and atheists we hear about a lot today are not so much dismissive of the notion of a creator of the universe but instead are dismissive and agnostic about a second-hand version of a second-hand God. If we dismiss the reality of the divine within every human person it is not to the disadvantage of God envisaged as some type of human being enlarged, despotic and insecure, but entirely to our own disadvantage, and geared to the abdication of our hopes of power and sovereignty.

Is it not much better to change our point of view in response to new discoveries about the nature of reality than to insist reality has got it wrong because it doesn't share our limited point of view?

Maybe conveying that central insight will be the best lesson of Bill Maher's Movie. Many of the barbs Diogenes delivered were dismissed and rendered ineffective because of the eccentricities of the person who delivered them. That cannot happen with Bill Maher. John Hodgman plays PC in the Apple ads and wrote that wonderful book "More Information than you Require." If he could be recently dubbed by TIME Magazine "the reigning Geek of our time" I think the least we can do is dutifully dub Bill Maher "our reigning Diogenes."

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