They are:

Burn after Reading and Religulous.

Burn After Reading” by the Coen brothers is an excellent movie.

I think it is accurate to say that the movie is basically about human stupidity, and some people’s exaggerated sense of self-importance

A few days later I went to Bill Maher’s movie “Religulous.”

It is also excellent, and it too is a take on stupidity, from Maher’s point-of-view. The movie is a documentary that follows Maher on his journey to dismantle what he believes to be people’s pathetically simplistic belief systems around God or whatever they are calling their religion.

I still believe in God, and my spirituality remains intact following the movie. But I like it when people ask good questions about things I consider important. And the movie was funny.

So I have no ill will toward Maher. I think he is a funny guy. And he asks really good questions.

And the fact is, he is right about most of the things he calls into question. Or at least I think he is.

But I make this distinction. My take on religion is that it is (my experience with it, anyway) a set of beliefs constructed by men as a vehicle to a kind of ultimate explanation- God, if you will. Maher takes that vehicle and drives it into the ditch, laughing while he does it.

Oh yeah, back to the distinction. You don’t really need religion to help with believing in a higher power. So while Maher wants to laugh and make fun of religion, I am able to laugh along with him. But that deconstruction doesn’t disprove God, it just points out the silly stories folks have in their religion.

I look around at the world and see things and ask where it all came from. I don’t believe it just ‘poof,’ appeared. There had to be a creation event. And something was responsible for that. Or at least I think so.

Because if Maher thinks it just appeared magically, absent a creator/creative event…then he ironically is left with an explanation as silly as the stories he is making fun of.

I think you could call that ‘hoisted on his own petard.’

Burn after Reading is delicious dark humor, served on a Coen Brothers bar. It is both subtle and outrageous at the same time. The character played by John Malkovich is hilarious. All in all, it is very…Coenesque.

I predict two things about these two movies:

1) the extreme religious right will go bonkers over the Maher movie

2) both movies will be marginal in box office receipts

Why? Because criticizing religion and subtle humor about human stupidity are not themes that probably have a lot of traction in a culture that apparently has to hear the words ‘god bless america’ (see earlier post ‘things that make you go hmmm’) at the end of every political speech and where ignorance in a candidate is viewed as a virtue by roughly half the voting population.