A new index of forbidden ideas?

The satirical documentary is not a genre known to be friendly to religious faith.  See, for example, my posts on Bill Maher’s Religulous (here and here).  Michael Moore pioneered this type of documentary—NOVA meets Saturday Night Live—with Roger & Me in 1989.  The genre relies heavily on ironic juxtapositions and gotcha moments.

While I have nothing against a little satire, the style and technique of such documentaries limit how deeply they can engage an issue.  These limitations apply to Ben Stein’s Expelled:  No Intelligence Allowed (2008), though Stein’s perspective is antithetical to Maher’s:  it’s secular orthodoxy he’s skewering.

The point of departure for the documentary is the dismissal of several faculty members from various universities across the country (George Mason, SUNY Stony Brook, Baylor, and Iowa State, as well as the Smithsonian Institute).  These professors were allegedly too sympathetic to “intelligent design”.  The film doesn’t do much to help us judge the merits of intelligent design theories, but Stein’s point is not so much about the validity of the theory itself as it is about academic freedom.

Humility & Domineering Doubt, Part II

Last week I posted some reflections on Bill Maher’s anti-religious satire Religulous.  While I thought the movie itself tiring and tired, I found Maher’s elevation of Doubt to the level of high religious virtue too ironic to pass up.  I half-thought Maher was going to recommend building a statue of Doubt and lighting candles at her feet.

I decided to take Maher’s statements about Doubt seriously because I think he makes a mistake that a lot of people make when thinking about religion—namely confusing doubt with humility.

As a more thoughtful example of such confusion I referred to a section of President Obama’s speech at Notre Dame—not the part about abortion that everybody talked about at the time, but a lesser-noticed part when the President spoke of doubt as “the ultimate irony of faith.”

Both President Obama and Maher praised doubt because, in the President’s words, “it should humble us.”  If you think about it, that’s a fairly strange claim.

Crusading Doubt

To shorten my time in Purgatory I recently watched Bill Maher’s silly little anti-religious “documentary” Religulous.  The documentary contains an interview with Fr. George Coyne, SJ, a Jesuit astronomer at the Vatican Observatory.  Fr. Coyne does the Society proud in the film, proving himself both more intelligent and funnier than Maher.

Unfortunately, Fr. Coyne is only on screen for a few minutes because Maher, like the other “neo-atheists,” is interested only in religion’s most absurd expressions.  Their strategy is something like attempting to discredit democracy as a system of government by interviewing only members of the Blagojevich administration.