Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists

I’ve been asked to plug an event held by the Muslim Student Association. The event is called “Islam and Darwinism: Is there a conflict?” It’s held tomorrow, Thursday, May 28^th from 7:00-10:00 PM in Royce Hall 190. The speaker is Imam Mustafa Umar. Refreshments will be served. RSVP on Facebook.

The following took place on Friday, May 22nd.

Meeting discussion

At this meeting, we had a copy of Religulous, a comedy-documentary by Bill Maher on religion. We started by watching the end of the movie, where Bill Maher gives a full on rant against religion over a montage of explosions and stuff. While some people enjoyed the ending, several people did not. Spencer felt that since the audience mostly consists of non-religious already, the ending only serves to further stratify the debate. Robin felt that the ending caricatures religious people. Joe pointed out that some of the clips in the montage had nothing to do with religion, like a clip of the Challenger space shuttle. Though to be fair, that clip appears at a moment when Maher is talking about human fallibility.

Who do you think this movie is targeting? Anna thought it was targeting moderate believers, but others felt that it was targeting a more niche audience. Some people compared it to Sicko, by Michael Moore—who was Moore’s target audience?

Someone posed the question: if we removed religion, would there simply be something else, like pseudoscience, to take its place? Would we then be worse off? Joe had a nice analogy: why cut our fingernails if they’re just going to grow back again? We discussed some real world examples, like Japan, New Zealand and China. Robin said that because China tried to remove religion, they now have the worst forms of it, like a lot of prosperity gospel. Andrew said that we don’t want to force out religion like China did.

Then we discussed Maher’s interview style throughout the movie. A lot of it is heavily edited to make the interviewees look silly. Is this unfair? We watched a bunch of clips in the movie as examples.