Bill Maher - Religulous

The trailer



The MoJo Interview

MJ: How about your own religious evolution. When did you stop seeing the light?

BM: I don't want people to think that I was someone who was born rational. Because I don't think any of us are. There's a section in the movie, in the beginning, where I go back to the church that I attended as a child, and my mother, who was alive at the time, and my sister came with me, and I interviewed them there and asked them some important questions I had never really talked with them about, like we never had a family discussion about why mom never came to church with my sister and father and me. I didn't really realize that my mother was Jewish until I was a teenager. I just always accepted that she didn't go to church and the three of us did. After we quit going to church I certainly never became a Christian or Catholic again. But I did believe that there was something. I was constantly, like lots of people do, making deals with God; usually when you are in trouble in some way, you bargain. I was bargaining for quite a bit of my life, and that's a form of belief.

MJ: What do you do in those moments now, when you used to bargain?

BM: I'm f*ck out of luck, lady. I'm telling you. I've got nothing. I've cast my lot in with this movie and this idea and in a way, I've painted myself into a corner.

MJ: Is there a difference between Catholicism or Judaism and Scientology?

BM: It's interesting you raise that point. There's a section in the film where I go into Hyde Park in London. There's a section called Speakers Corner, where what I would consider nuts stand on little soap boxes and rave and rant and people can do it about anything, but a fair number of them are religious. So they put me into a disguise. I looked like a homeless nut, and I went into Hyde Park and I ranted and raved the tenets of Scientology, and Mormonism, and I believe it was Jehovah's Witness. Which most people are not familiar with, and they do sound like the rantings of a complete maniac. We were trying to make the point that when you take the tenets of religion and put them in mouth of street barker, you see how crazy they are. And then that they are not that different, certainly not that much crazier, than Christianity, mainstream Christianity. It's just that we're used to mainstream Christianity. We are used to the story of a man living inside of a well for three days, we're used to the idea that a space god impregnated a virgin and had a child who was really him, and sent him on a suicide mission to earth, which he survived. If Christianity were the new religion, we would consider it just as crazy as Scientology.

MJ: Even though you think religion is bunk, are you okay with people whose religious principles help them be better people, i.e., not violent jerks? In other words, do you have a problem with the Golden Rule just because it has a religious origin?

BM: No ethicist has a problem with the Golden Rule, of course, but we don't know why it has to be attached to ancient myths and superstitions. It's fabulous on its own; it didn't have to come down via a burning bush from a god who, if you actually read the Bible, wipes people out randomly and should not serve as anyone's ethic role model.