Foreign Policy Blogs

The New Religulous

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As you may already know (or have seen it), Bill Maher – with director Larry Charles (from ‘Borat’) – has made the new movie Religulous. It came out on October 3. In an interview, Maher described his approach to the movie as confronting people of faith. He said, “In America, every politician gets on the stage and as many times as he can, he reassures every audience that he is a person of faith, that faith guides his decision-making, that faith is the most important thing in his life. The more he says this, the more applause he gets. And I just wanted to ask, why is this good? why is faith, which I define as suspending critical thinking, a good thing, especially in your job?” According to John Leland, “Mr. Maher said he intended the movie as a call to action, not to convince religious people to join his camp but to stir the nonreligious to unite,” while the director approached the movie as non-fiction comedy rather than as a documentary. Interestingly, Bill Maher has also said, “anyone who's religious is extremist.”

 

Author

Karin Esposito

Karin Esposito is blogging on religion and politics from her base in Central Asia. Currently, she is the Project Manager for the Tajikistan Dialogue Project in Dushanbe. The Project is run through the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies with the support of PDIV of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs. The aim of the project is to establish practical mechanisms for co-existence and peaceful conflict resolution between Islamic and secular representatives in Tajikistan. After receiving a Juris Doctorate from Boston University School of Law in 2007, she worked in Tajikistan for the Bureau of Human Rights and later as a Visting Professor of Politics and Law at the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, Economics, and Strategic Research (KIMEP). Ms. Esposito also holds a Master's in Contemporary Iranian Politics (2007) from the School of International Relations of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Iran and a Master's in International Relations (2003) from the Geneva Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (GIIDS) in Switzerland.

Areas of Focus:
Islam; Christianity; Secularism;

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