The final word on the financial crisis in the US

If you owe your bank 100 dollars, it is your problem. If you owe your bank 100 million, it is the bank’s problem. Enough said!

Religulous – Review

Religulous is a movie/documentary on religion by Larry Charles who was the director of one of the worst movies ever made in my opinion, namely, Borat. For this very reason, I was a little apprehensive about watching this movie. However, the fact that it starred one of my comedy heroes, Bill Maher and that it took a negative look at one of my pet peeves, religion was enough for me to give it a try. And I am very glad I did, the movie was excellent. I had expected the movie to be very funny, irreverant and vitriolic about religions. Suprisingly it is much more respectful than I had imagined it would be. Interestingly enough, this works in the favor of the movie. And the reason it works is that you don’t need to do anything special with the religious nuts to generate laughter, they tend to say stupid things on their own. And the movie is full of such moments.

Bill Maher goes around the country talking to “religious folks” and trying to create doubt if possible. Maher looks at threeof the major world religions, Christanity, Judaism and Islam and the goal is to convince people of the absurdity of religious practices and texts. The goal of the movie is to try and convince people that doubt is OK. Not knowing all the answers about God, about our life, after-life is also OK. What is dangerous is following religions that claim to have these answers and that too with certanity when it is obvious that they don’t.

Now I have watched Bill Maher for years now and agree with pretty much everything he says. But a few things really caught my attention in the movie.

1. When he says that not having faith is a luxury not everyone can afford. This is something every atheist needs to keep in mind when we ridicule organized religion.
2. When he equates orgainized religion with mass hysteria.
3. The bit about how using religion as a crutch allows us to ignore our duties and responsibilities as world citizens. Let us not worry about oil, global warming, war, terror because some GOD somewhere is taking care of it for us.

I will not give away any more of the movie than I already have but I would HIGHLY recommend it. 5 stars.

A little bit of light reading

I happened to read an article by John Updike during my flight to the bay area recently. Joh Updike is an American novelist, poet, short story writer and literary critic. I quite liked it. Here it is, word-for-word. I have hilited the parts I was particularly impressed by.

1. My Mother I grew up watching my mother, a Cornell graduate, clacking away at her Remington typewriter. She sent short stories off to magazines, then got them back in a couple of weeks, so that routine of becoming a writer was familiar to me. I owe my career to her example of trying to make a go of it in this strange trade.

2. Everyday Ethics Those of us who were born during the Great Depression, as I was, were born on the low end of the population demographic. We learned to make much of what we had and to make do. Children got the idea, too, that the good life was to be found in working hard. It’s worth remembering that today.

3. The simple Life I’ve always wanted to honor normal life, full as it is of magic and surprises, in literature. I grew up in a small Pennsylvania town, living with one set of parents and one set of grandparents. One of my first impressions was, “This is life. Life as it is lived by most people is worthy of artistic attention.” I didn’t need to go to war or climb mountains to have something to say.

4. Laugh Lines The nice thing about fiction is it develops our ability to empathize. How easily the mind takes you to the mind of a young girl in 19th-century Russia, for example. But humor is every bit as noble as drama and just as honest. To sit and hold a page and laugh out loud struck me as a remarkable enactment of the immaterial upon the material. The ability to get a reader to laugh doesn’t do any harm, as far as I can tell.