Actor Zach Galifianaki was recently spotted smoking weed on Bill Maher’s show Real Time on Home Box Office, you know, that cable channel where they get away with saying the word “fuck.” It didn’t take long for somebody to post it to YouTube.

The debate was over Tuesday’s ballot initiative in California to legalize the use of marijuana.

Legalizing marijuana appears to have broad support in the state, with some 56 percent of Californians saying they favor making it legal for social use and taxing the sales proceeds in a state with major budget problems. In October, Gallup found 44 percent of Americans favored legalization.

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It looks as though comedian Bill Maher has been reading this Website. Or perhaps as they say, great minds think alike : )

I’ve been advocating this position for years to eliminate the Bush deficit. In our recent review of Religulous, the hit movie that came out of an offshoot of one of his big routines over the years, we made it explicit. He didn’t in the movie. But he did on his HBO show Real Time on Nov. 14.

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

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