Find a trailer for Bill Maher's movie Religulous here, as long as it lasts. Otherwise, find it in the used bin at the video store in a few months.
Bill Maher tours the underbelly of American religiosity with the intent of showing how stupid and vulgar and insane religious belief of any kind is. "We. just. don't. know.", he keeps saying, over and over: "so how can we keep killing people over what we don't really know?" Of course, the american religiousness he shows us is for the most part completely absurd and insane (I did like the Vatican astronomer, though— one had the impression that Maher couldn't handle him, he didn't fit in to what he'd already decided). And that kind of american religion is very sobering, even if Maher's peroration against all religion at the end— delivered against a backdrop of atomic bombs— seems a bit preachy. (And am i mistaken in thinking we may know just a little more than he lets on?) But there is indeed a kind of Christianity that's a deluded fantasy, and he flushes it out. After the past 30 years, no thinking person can fail to see how it's manipulated by the Ronald Reagans and Lee Atwaters and Karl Roves and Sarah Palins who give us all these wars.
But like I say, the one guy who stood out positively amid the nonsense was the Vatican astronomer Jesuit, who emphatically said that the Bible is not science and never was intended as such, that it was written long before modern science as such was ever practiced, and that it has its own integrity, which has to be respected. Maher did his best, I think, to frame the guy's discourse as yet another example of double-talk & craziness— and the sad thing is, in true Catholic style, he pointed to the pope's athority for his view that "evolution is not just a theory"— like we needed a pope to tell us this— but he was actually quite lucid— more so than the one or two other "believer" scientists he interviewed, who obviously hadn't thought as deeply about the nature of the Bible as such.
But it's the task of a good reporter to identify good interviewees, and by picking only those he did interview, Maher showed that he's either too ignorant or too timid to ask— and be asked— good questions.
I'm not sure what Maher would make of the fact that this month, a Vatican-backed conference on evolution rejected the Discovery Institute, the main organization supporting intelligent design research, saying, "We think that it's not a scientific perspective, nor a theological or philosophical one." (Poor Discovery Institute!— that had to hurt!)
The problem-religion Maher was investigating actually appeared most clearly when he was talking to his believing scientists, even if, as I say, Maher himself couldn't recognize it. He acts the smart-aleck by asking (for instance) whether manuscripts written within a century of Jesus' death are "historically reliable"— but he's not bright enough or deep enough to ask the much more interesting question of whether "historicity", in the sense that he and most of his interlocutors require it, is even the right frame in which even to view the gospels (or the rest of the Bible, for that matter). If we could get a clear discussion of that, then the whole discourse of "belief" might come crashing to the ground, or at least take a turn for the better. Of course, that's a discussion, alas, that we won't ever have on american tv, which is why i don't waste time with it.
Both Maher and his interviewees assume that the gospels were "biographies of Jesus". They are not "biographies"— not, at least, if we take their writers' own aims seriously— they are kerygma— a "proclamation" of "good news" (euangelion)— four distinct writers' four distinct proclamations of what we might call an 'event of spirit'— a movement of spirit that passed through Jesus into his disciples (I am taking this language from Erich Voegelin, who is worth reading in this vein). Each of the four gospel writers shows this movement— shows it, in the senses both of describing and of demonstrating it— each in his own unique way, by telling his own unique story of Jesus. Thus their four books are themselves part of that movement of spirit, means by which it extends into the space and time of subsequent humanity. They aren't interested in relating a "biography of Jesus", but in communicating the movement of spirit that they had experienced, which took its beginning in Jesus. They want us to feel its transforming force. They want to communicate not that there was once a powerful dude named Jesus who lived in the past and worked miracles so you'd better do what he says or he'll send you to hell where you'll burn forever— but the very power itself of this Jesus, whose career so transformed them, and whose 'spirit' continues to transform men and women of truth in the present. About the specifics of his "biography", they're relatively unconcerned and say almost nothing.
Oh, to be sure, there's a very narrow base of recoverable historical fact that scholars have been interested for a couple centuries now in teasing out from the "proclamation" as such— as far as they can do so, from documents that do not easily lend themselves to such procedures, since they weren't ever intended for them. This is called historical-critical work. But we can't glimpse much of the historical biographical information, because providing it was simply never the purpose or the interest of the gospels, nor in fact their force, to begin with.
At one point Maher attacks the existence of Jesus. Why? Because his loony fundamentalist interviewee is using some notion that "it's been proven that Jesus did exist" as a reason for believing the crap they believe. That is (the assumption goes), if someone can "prove" that a guy named Jesus lived in the past and did miracles etc, then this means I have to believe in the Vatican, or some creationist Disneyland theme park, or Mormonism. Sheer crackpottery, dredged from the murky bottom that religious discourse in our country scrapes along and feeds on. But arguing whether Jesus "existed" or not won't help with that!
But let's even pretend Jesus didn't exist— we'd still have to explain, from that very place it began, the whole experience of the saints. You'd have to posit a "Jesus" or somebody exactly like him, in whom and through whom the movement of spirit first happened. His significance is not his mere existence, as if an external proof of that would somehow validate my "belief" in miracles, face-of-jesus tacos, UFOs, etc. How bizarre.
A related sample of (anti)religious bottom-feeding can be found in Peter Joseph's Zeitgeist, another movie here.
i looked at it, for a few minutes anyway— at least, i clicked on one of the links at that page and got a google movie called "Zeitgeist, the movie - remastered / final edition", and looked at that.
You know, there was a lot of speculation about a century ago that christianity was an outgrowth of "Gnosticism" and/or of Hellenistic mystery religion. It all seemed very plausible at the time and, except for a few loose ends, lots of scholars took as somewhat proven that we could safely explain away the christian religion as an amnesiac exercise in a charming, although outmoded, kind of mythology. However, the loose ends proved fatal, and the whole story unraveled and was laid to rest after a few years of further research. See Louis Bouyer, Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Maurice Blondel, etc— this is stuff i read in Catholic high school for pete's sake! Indeed, "Gnosticism" (the very term is problematic) now seems to owe more to Christianity than vice versa— but of course the theory looked plausible at the time, and scholars were obligated to try it out, until it failed. But while scholars were reining in their chastened speculations, the meme escaped somewhat from the debates of learned journals into popular culture— especially into the kinds of popular religious culture championed by Madame Blavatsky or "Linda Goodman's Sun Signs" or "National Enquirer" or "Starhawk" or some coffee-table book on "Wicca" &c.— and in one form or another, it still gets recycled from time to time even now as "the truth behind the jesus myth". I count both Religulous and Zeitgeist" as current reincarnations of the same.
But i've got some terrible news: if students want to know more about religion— any religion, including christianity— they're going to have to dig a little deeper than "Zeitgeist" or Bill Maher, Peter Joseph (or even Joseph Campbell, for that matter)— and in particular they're going to have to get over George Carlin's picture of God an "invisible man living in the sky" with a "special list of things you have to do or not do" lest you "go to a place of fire where you burn and suffer till the end of time", and who "needs money". What silliness! Such a god is manufactured only to ignore— and serious persons have been doing just that, long before the Old Testament came to an end. However, I'll even grant that some people may have had to suffer such ideas as kids, but (here's where knowledge of the actual Christian tradition is helpful) even if everyone were being taught that way today (which they manifestly are not)— such stupid ideas simply never were part of the Christianity of the gospels or of the church. Seriously, they're just going to have to get over it! Movies like Zeitgeist may provide some encouragement for lazy persons to throw off the yoke of bad, half-understood 3rd grade sunday school teachings, but they can't do much for mature and serious persons who want to know the depths of anything, much less of the Gospels.
Zeitgeist and Religulous (despite Mr Joseph's pretentions of igniting a "Zeitgeist Movement", both articles of trivia are almost forgotten already, like that other piece of sadistic trash by Mel Gibson a couple years ago) seem to share a number of ideas, of which one is an equation of Christ with Osiris. Maher doesn't say much, but Zeitgeist goes into a little more detail and lots of "parallels" which are, um, "factually incorrect" (at best). In fact i ought just to say the guy is lying, knowing that most people are not equipped to question or debate what he says, and building with lies his real agenda. I take it that real agenda has something to do with 911 government conspiracy theories, but i didn't watch the whole movie. So I guess what i missed is why the notion that 911 was a government plot requires disproving Jesus in order to work!
On the question of 911, readers may be interested in two better treatments, which can be found at ironweedfilms. Scroll down and see the listings for September 2008:
HIJACKING CATASTROPHE: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of American Empire (Jeremy Earp & Sut Jhally, 64 minutes): This fast-paced, explosive film makes the compelling case that the catastrophe of 9/11 was skillfully hijacked to carry out a neo-conservative agenda planned decades in advance, awaiting only a catalyzing national event to come to fruition.
9/11 PRESS FOR TRUTH (Ray Nowosielski, 85 minutes): Based in part on The Terror Timeline by Paul Thompson, this riveting, emotional film tells the story of the Jersey Girls, four widowed mothers whose relentless search for answers eventually compelled a reluctant and ultimately uncooperative administration into launching an independent investigation.
I recommend them.
But on to Zeitgeist's "facts" (which it simply asserts, but never backs up, because it cannot). Some are pretty egregious. For instance, Sirius (the famous "dog star") is a fixed star, not a planet, and so does NOT move in the sky—- thus it NEVER aligns with the 3 stars in Orion's belt! Does this guy know *anything* about astronomy or even astrology??! The "Dog Star" is Orion's obedient hunting dog, ever at Orion's heel, always in the same spot.
Or again, the name 'Bethlehem' may *look* like 'house of bread' in Hebrew, but that's not actually what it means (scholars tell us it's Bit-Lahmi, Lahmi being either a Canaanite goddess, or the name of a person (now unknown) associated with its founding— e.g., one 'Lahmi' appears in 1Chr 20.5 as Goliath's brother).
The Southern Cross, upon which the movie claims the sun is crucified at the solstice, does not in fact appear in the northern hemisphere and would not have been known to the ancient Middle Easterners and
[A classicist friend has corrected me about the Southern Cross:]
I noticed the movie's total lack of astronomical understanding, and did a bit of brief checking on some things. Really brief - I mean wikipedia. Here is what that eminent source had to say about the Southern Cross:
"Crux was visible to the Ancient Greeks, who regarded it as part of the constellation Centaurus. At the latitude of Athens in 1000 BC, Crux was clearly visible, though low in the sky. However, the precession of the equinoxes gradually lowered its stars below the European horizon, and they were eventually forgotten by the inhabitants of northern latitudes. By AD 400, most of the constellation never rose above the horizon for Athenians."
But even if that's right, and even if the Cross was still visible to Mediterranean peoples in the first and second centuries AD, it doesn't make the film's theory tenable. The mistake about Sirius is embarrassing (assuming the guy who made the film would be capable of embarrassment).
—for in any case it is not zodiacal: it has nothing to do with the movement of the sun, or vice versa.
The assertion that half the mythical figures of the world have the identical structure (Dec 25 birth, virgin mother, death and 3d-day resurrection, etc) would certainly be a marvel if there were any truth to it. Did the movie's writers ever bother to do any fact-checking, though?
And finally— the whole attempt to give the birth of Christ a solstitial-zodiacal-Osirian meaning is nonsense from the git-go. To begin with, astrology itself is nowhere near as old as the Osiris myth, and the Osiris myth has no zodiacal connection. The birth of Christ is related in two 1st-century documents (Matthew and Luke), but its celebration as 'Christmas' did not develop until 300 years later— and is still not celebrated in the ancient 'Oriental Orthodox' churches of Armenia, Egypt, Ethiopia, East Syria, or India. In other words, the story of Christ long predated any solstice association that may have been connected (although this theme is actually largely absent from Christian hymnography); and the solstice was never part of the New Testament story.
"Christmas" developed as an extension of the March 25th liturgical celebration of the good news of the incarnation. It was rather *accidentally* placed near the winter solstice, because Dec 25 is 9 months after Mar 25th. The latter was nothing special in apostolic times, but was eventually settled upon in the 4th century when the early church's annual all-in-one celebration of Christ's incarnation-birth-death-resurrection, which took place at the time of Passover every year, was unpacked into its several components as the Quartodecimian Controversy (over when to celebrate Easter) was settled. All of the solar-astral stuff in the movie is sheer hallucination— one that misplaced the focus and renders its subjects completely unable to understand any actual Biblical or Christian use of solar imagery, such as we find in the Christmas troparion:
Your birth, O Christ our God, has dawned on the world as the light of wisdom. For by it, those who worshipped the stars were taught by a star to adore you, the Sun of Justice [cf. Mal 4.2], and to acknowledge you as the Dawn from on high. O Lord, glory to you!
So vast are the errors of Zeitgeist that it's impossible to think the writer/narrator or somebody on the team didn't know at least something more than the narrator lets on— even if he's not yet uninformed about Talley's derivation of the date of Christmas from Annunciation, which is accepted by all liturgical scholars.
In fact, Zeitgeist's narrator more or less begins with a pun on the 'sun' of god and the 'son' of god. It's a cute pun and we've all noticed it. But from that very moment we can pretty much tell his whole story has already gone south. What follows generally has about as much truth to it as the claim— almost actually suggested— that 'sun' and 'son' are etymologically related.
Attacks of this sort on Christianity respond to the shallow, narrow Christianity of american Bible-belt, televangelistic culture. As such, they are understandable, and we might even even be sympathetic with the desire to cast off the shackles of nonsense which pass for Christianity in our culture. Indeed, insofar as George Carlin's picture is an accurate depiction of Christianity, may the effort to throw it off be blessed! But as we sit in the darkness of Maher's "not knowing", listening to Chögyam Trungpa Rimpoche (whose signature is on my BA certificate, by the way) talking about "theism" at the beginning of the movie, let's recall that he was not giving an "enlightened" description of Christianity, but a Buddhist teaching, part straw-man and part serious, that applied to the way his students were adopting Buddhism as much as it did to any other religion— as he himself makes abundantly clear in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and other books. The actual faith— or rather, experience— of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, or James— and the actual Judaism of Moses and the Prophets for that matter— are a lot more challenging and profound than such trivial bêtes noires as Maher and Joseph manage to roust from the Bible Belt. I hope people will somehow be motivated to find out about what the Bible is actually about, but i'm not too sanguine they will, alas. Indeed, these movies are just two more excuses for laziness.
Maher begins his movie saying he gave up religion when he was 13 or 14. If God had given him approval for masturbation, he says, and for his fantasies about girls and so forth, he "would have believed", but since such approval was not forthcoming, he was just relieved when his Catholic dad stopped making him go to church. A believer can tsk tsk about the fact that, like many in our culture, he seems not to have been exposed to anything, or himself grown any deeper, than that. But underlying his shallowness is a serious issue, which Maher clearly recognizes: If a religion is going to deny something that seems perfectly natural and good, then it had better have a pretty compelling reason— and not just some abstract ethical nonsense addressed to a teenager's head, or emotional nonsense addressed to her heart. Offering that reason is, of course, the work not only of real thinkers, but also of saints.
So— see these movies if you like. If you're in any way impressed, you are either 13 years old or less, or you have my deep condolences on having gotten as far as you have without ever venturing any deeper. It would probably not help you to read some of the more serious articles available at the NT Wright page, so i won't even recommend them, but i'll leave that much of a pointer, in the outside chance you might find them interesting.
