The very fate of our human species, yes, and your state too — as well as this country and the earth — may well depend on a compromise between science and religion.
Yes, you read that correctly. Not that I ever wanted to admit it before.
This will be a precarious journey with no guarantee of success like the fate of all life itself, from the beginning into the infinite future.
A top American scientist from Alabama writes that religion and science “are the two most powerful forces in the world today, including especially the United States.” That is from Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson’s book The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, which he wrote to Southern Baptist preachers who hold sway over millions of votes that could have a positive, or negative, impact on all kinds of government policies.
A Review of Michael Moore’s ‘Capitalism: A Love Story’
Michael Moore trying to gain entry at GM headquarters in the film Capitalism.
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
If Michael Moore had arrived on the film scene as a conservative Republican activist in 1989, he might be heralded by Fox News today as a major American hero, and he might even be able to get a fair review in the so-called “liberal” New York Times.
Unfortunately for him and his message, he started making movies during the late 1980s, when the presidencies of Republicans Ronald Reagan and then George Herbert Walker Bush made them the target of his outsourcing ire. Moore first became famous for his 1989 film “Roger and Me,” a documentary about what happened to his home town of Flint, Michigan, after General Motors closed its automobile factories and moved to Mexico, where workers made much less.
Since then Moore has been known as a critic of the “neoliberal” view of globalization, according to Wikipedia, although that term goes right over the heads of most of the working people in the U.S. who should be watching his movies and learning something from them. That is the sad state of political dialogue in the good old US of A.
I mean here’s a regular Joe who could be comfortable drinking a beer with George W. Bush, who should be fighting side-by-side with the conservatives who oppose the big government bailout of Wall Street banks.
But because 20 percent of the country still believes somehow that Bush was an OK president, the audience that needs to see this movie the most, average working people struggling to make a living, especially in the South, will not see it because they already dismiss Moore as a “liberal” Democrat “propagandist.”
Although I did find some hope after screening “Capitalism: A Love Story” Friday night in a theater located in a Wal-mart parking lot. That’s an irony considering how Moore takes on the retail giant in his film. (See the After Matter in the end for the hope).
In the film, Moore is his usual bumbling self, just an average “everyman” trying one more time to get into the General Motors headquarters in Michigan, where he is predictably turned away yet again. His now familiar shtick also inspires him to lease an armored truck and make a futile attempt to get the $700 billion in Bush bailout money back from Citibank, AIG and other recipients to transfer it back into the U.S. Treasury.
The best gag for me came near the end, when he stretches yellow crime scene tape around Goldman Sachs on Wall Street, tying it off on the Wall Street Bull (see the photo below).
Beware the people with the biggest Bibles marching in the streets against health care for the poor. Surely they are confused about what Jesus would do. Twitter that…
For controversial comedian Bill Maher, formerly of Politically Incorrect and now with Real Time on HBO, the comedic documentary Religulous is his career memoir. It’s his ultimate search for the key question that drives his life and work.
And after all the years of watching him on TV, we find out why he is the heir apparent to George Carlin on the subject of religion in American life. In this autobiographical story, he intersperses interviews with his mother, who raised him as a Catholic until the age of 13, when he found out his father was a Jew. The family stopped going to church about the time the issue of birth control became such a political sin in this country after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision.
Is that not a background with the makings for some serious religious-psychological baggage? It’s no wonder the subject figures so prominently in his art.
The title of the film is a literary device known as a portmanteau, a new word derived from two other words, in this case “religion” and “ridiculous.” The film examines and satirizes organized religion and religious belief, in a host of successful venues.
Maher’s story begins in Megiddo, Israel, where according to Biblical prophecy, the world will end when Jesus Christ is supposed to return to Earth. Of course Maher refers to the Bible, especially the Old Testament, as “that book of Jewish fairy tales.”
Director Larry Charles, who is known for the comedy hit Borat, mixes stock footage from movies, religious television programming and other documentaries to connect the dots and hammer home Maher’s points.
Maher travels to interview scholars at the holiest Jerusalem sites, and visits a Raleigh, North Carolina, truck stop church, a converted trailer, where he engages some of the South’s most mixed up Christians on the philosophical subject of whether God exists.
He managed to get into a mosque in the Middle East, where the head Muslim has him run out because “he is not a funny Jew.”
In Orlando, Florida, Maher interviews an actor who plays Jesus at one of the most ridiculous capitalist abuses of religion in the U.S., the Holy Land theme park. It’s the Disney World for Christians, and Maher has more fun engaging the people there than anywhere in his travels, with the possible exception of Amsterdam, where he shares a joint with a believer of legalization of marijuana on the basis of religious freedom.
Also in Florida, Maher meets up with a Latino named Jesus who claims angels visited him and proclaimed him as Christ reincarnate, a rare pastor who does not believe there is a such thing as sin and is certainly not apologetic for all the money he’s made in the name of God.
He has a long exchange with John Westcott of Exchange Ministries, a converted gay man who tries to convert other gays for Jesus.
Then the most obnoxious creature encountered in the film is a wild-eyed Jew who believes Israel does not deserve to remain in Jerusalem, who is shown in newsreel footage embracing Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Maher stepped on the dialogue with him more than any other interviewee in the film and cut his visit short.
Maher has quite a bit of fun with a devout evangelical U.S. Senator from Arkansas, Mark Pryor, who is unable to answer questions about evolution and faith, but admits, “You don’t have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate.” (Nevermind that there’s no such thing as pass/fail on an IQ test. It’s a measure of basic intelligence with a score of 100 as average. On second thought, this guy fails : )
Then after all the comedy is done, after he is kicked out of the Vatican and visits the Holiest site in Isreal and pokes fun at Mormons, Scientologists, Southern Baptists, radical Jews and gay Muslims, Maher makes the point he wants to make.
“Religion must die if mankind is to live.”
Now can we stop voting in churches please?
He points out that at least 16 percent of the American population agree with him on religion. He calls them “rationalists,” not atheists.
Then of course there are at least 48 million pot smokers in the U.S., a point he fails to make explicitly, although it’s there. Both groups are larger than any other minority or special interest group in this country. If only they would get together in a political movement, imagine how they could continue to change America now that Obama has been elected president?
Henry Rosenbush of RosenbushCafe.com contributed reporting for this review.
Religulous Movie Trailer
Bill Maher On CNN’s Larry King Live Talking About Religulous
1 And he told them a parable, to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.
2 He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor regarded man;
3 and there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, `Vindicate me against my adversary.’
4 For a while he refused; but afterward he said to himself, “Though I neither fear God nor regard man,
5 yet because this widow bothers me, I will vindicate her, or she will wear me out by her continual coming.”
6 And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says.
7 And will not God vindicate his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them?
8 I tell you, he will vindicate them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
Meditation: Persistence pays off, and that’s especially true for those who trust in God. Jesus tells a story that is all too true – a defenseless widow is taken advantaged of and refused her rights. Through sheer persistence she wears down an unscrupulous judge until he gives her justice. Jesus illustrates how God as our Judge is much quicker to bring us his justice, blessing, and help when we need it. But we can easily loose heart and forget to ask our Heavenly Father for his grace and help.
Jesus told this parable to give fresh hope and confidence to his disciples. In this present life we can expect adversity and trials, but we are not without hope in God’s provident care and justice. When trials come your way and setbacks disappoint you, where do you turn for help? Do you pray with expectant faith and confidence in God’s merciful care and providence for you?
“Lord, give me faith to believe your promises and give me perseverance and hope to withstand trials and adversities. Help me to trust in your unfailing love and to find joy and contentment in you alone.”
I have often said to my devout Christian friends that they should not just read the King James version of the Bible, but explore other books about the Bible from scholars. As we approach the Christmas season, perhaps this book would make a great Christmas gift for Christians.
As I was listening to National Public Radio on this rainy Wednesday afternoon, Fresh Air’s Terry Gross conducts a compelling interview with scholar Bart Ehrman, who has a new book out exploring how scribes – through both omission and intention – changed the Bible that is read today.
Ehrman says the modern Bible was shaped by mistakes and intentional alterations that were made by early scribes who copied the texts. In the introduction to Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman writes that when he came to understand this process 30 years ago, it shifted his way of thinking about the Bible. He had been raised as an Evangelical Christian.
Ehrman is also the author of Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, which chronicles the period before Christianity as we know it, when conflicting ideas about the religion were fighting for prominence in the second and third centuries.
The chairman of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Ehrman also edited a collection of the early non-canonical texts from the first centuries after Christ, called Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament.
Read it and weep. This book proves that the Bible is not the divine word of God, but the work of men promoting the new religion of Christianity. So much for Judge Roy Moore’s interpretation, eh?
Friedman says the federal government, in the form of the State Department, should “produce a quarterly War of Ideas Report,” to “focus on those religious leaders and writers who are inciting violence against others.” He also wants the government to include “excuse makers,” which, according to FAIR, includes “a majority of Americans, according to recent polls.”
I must say I used to love reading The New York Times and admit that I have reported and written for that once great newspaper. Perhaps this entire episode can be chalked up to post-9/11/Jayson Blair stress syndrome, but I stopped reading Mr. Friedman’s columns a couple of years ago when he flip-flopped on the war in Iraq. You see he was for it and against it, sort of like Sen. John Kerry on the funding for the war, about the time I was trying to tell the national desk that something was fishy in Bush’s D.C.
The Times plans to start charging for editorial columns in September, so Mr. Friedman’s audience will no doubt shrink considerably at that time. Somehow I doubt the FAIR action alert will do any good anyway, since all the activist’s e-mails will just go unread by the management at the paper. And besides, the State Department will ignore Friedman. Why shouldn’t we?
I’m sure there were newspaper columnists all over the land who stood with McCarthy and his blacklist during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Luckily, they are long forgotten.
I say these so-called Christian conservative Republicans wouldn’t know Jesus if he did show back up on earth. They would find a way to crucify him again.
So, in the absence of divine providence, what should we do with Tom Delay?
As I recently e-mailed a reporter friend in D.C., I say someone should take him back to Texas, hang him in a barn, and burn it.
He should go straight to hell without collecting another $20 million in unethical campaign contributions.
If this guy gets to heaven after all the damage he’s caused, trust me, you don’t want anything to do with the place.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
Connecting the Dots
