![]() ![]() Whereas, the hermetic conditions of the Carthusian monks removes illicit prurient temptations from the equation, the Cistercian order who had occupied the Tibhirine Monastery before their violent deaths in 1996, lived among their Algerian neighbors seemingly without any transgressive incidents. ![]() For sure, the Catholic church could use some good PR, amid all the countless scandals that have come to light involving pedophilic priests with their seeming lack of remorse and arrogance. True enough, "religion detrimental to the progress of humanity" with all the gross ideological differences that give rise to wars, but the stand-up comic's wiseacre rhetoric, when juxtaposed against the static images featuring the monks of La Grande Chartreuse, contemplating God from the cramped space of their cells in "Into Deep Silence", can't help but come off as pedagogically cruel, because what if, as the agnostic narrator asks in "Religulous", they're wrong? Correspondingly, if Christianity is indeed a knockoff of Mediterranean religions, primarily the Egyptians' Book of the Dead, then the nine Trappist monks who cast caution to the wind and refused to back down from Algerian Islamic fundamentalists in "Of Gods and Men", died by their assassins' bullets for an ages-old fabrication, which is, as Cee-Lo wails soulfully, indeed, "crazy". But try telling a Carthusian monk that his faith, the God he devoted his entire life to, has the erudite heft of a faerie tale, whose stories, in Maher's estimation, are on equal footing and interchangeable with "Jack & the Beanstalk". Somebody who believes that mankind and dinosaurs coexisted in prehistoric times, of course, is going to be no match for the quick-witted and acid-tongued host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher", not to mention, the United States senator who makes up a word("indigously"), and confuses the usage for "legitimacy" with "literacy" in reference to his claim that Jesus' teachings were a factual discourse. The neuroscientist and Maher are in agreement that "if a billion people can believe in something, it can still be ridiculous." It's one thing, however, to poke fun at the Truckers Chapel, or the Creation Museum, or a ministry run by a former member of Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, but it's another thing to exercise that same officious manner and condescending tone to a formidable opponent. ![]() On one hand, you see Bill Maher's point in "Religulous" when he describes religion in terms of having a "neurological disorder" while he walks through Grand Central Station with Andrew Newberg, an eminent researcher in the field of nuclear brain imaging. This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. ![]()
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