Review - Religulous

Religulous = a Portmanteau of two words, Religion and Ridiculous.
Its interesting to see the reaction of a person as the thing that they find most precious in this world is satirized and questioned by bill maher, a man whose face screams of condescension.
I watched Religulous with two of my friends from church (great crowd to watch it with, right?) And I made note of their every reaction to the subjects in question. At the end, after hearing everything that we heard, I immediately jumped to the forefront of the discussion I wanted to have by offering the suggestion that this movie was “great.” One of the guys looked at me like I had lost all faith in the lord jesus Christ, LOL. The other paused to hear my opinion.
You see Bill Maher takes a stance where he simply offers questions based on his perspective of world religions. Many times we take our faith to a level where we feel like it is above questioning. What I would like to understand is why we feel like we have to have all of the answers to questions about our religion? Why do we feel as if our belief is void if we question our faith…as if we sin by doubting certain things about our faith? And if somebody offers the same questions that we once had or continue having, why do we get offended?
To doubt and question is human. If you ask a person what they would say to God if they met him,99% of the time they will ask God a question based on something about life or their faith that they don’t understand. So why do we get angry when people ask the tough questions about our faith? Are we insecure? Does it make us feel stupid? Striking out and acting in an angry manner against the person that asks the questions only makes matter worse.
So here’s a thought. Why don’t we actually LEARN our religion, faith or belief…WELL!? Why not try to find an answer to the tough questions, that way when somebody comes with a tough question we won’t look like complete morons. We want to get away with the minimal amount of study of a belief that supposedly saved our lives or at the very least changed it.
When Maher asked the tough questions, I welcomed them. Answering the ones that I could and taking note of the difficult ones to study. Nothing that he asked came as a surprise to me because I’ve asked those and many more myself. I’m not afraid to say that I don’t know everything about my faith, but I am trying to find out as much as possible about the belief that changed my life. I do have questions about my faith but I’m trying to answer those questions, not only for others but also for myself. To keep the people from asking questions about their own belief is to keep them ignorant and naive about the answers which in turn makes us all look like idiots, which we are not.