On Monday, the perilously liberal Huffington Post put the following headline on its front page:
6 Famous Documentaries That Were Shockingly Full Of Sh*t
Unbelievably, one of the films totally lambasted in the piece was - wait for it! - Bill Maher's "Religulous" from 2008 (serious vulgarity alert):
Now in fairness to the Post, the link goes to an article by the website Cracked.
But Cracked's headline said "crap" instead of "sh*t." And the folks at the Post likely knowing its contents not only chose to link to it, but also upped the vulgarity.
This is even odder given Cracked's proclivity for profanity:
All this "Jesus was copied from earlier religions" stuff has been going around the Internet for a while, and it will make you look awesome if you post it on a Halo message board, but none of it is true. The Egyptian links have been debunked by actual Egyptologists.
Let's start with the "virgin births" part: You've gotta make some pretty big logical jumps to claim that any of those earlier gods were born from virgins, having come from a mother seven times over (Krishna), some freaky necrophilia (Horus), and a fucking rock (Mithras).
Then there's the resurrection thing. Contrary to Maher's claims, Mithras was never resurrected, and the older versions of the guy's story don't have any of the Jesus similarities -- those came about in the first or second century A.D. (that is, after Jesus was born). Horus, like Mithras, was also never resurrected, didn't have 12 apostles, and didn't raise Asar from the dead (which doesn't translate to "Lazarus" even a little bit). There isn't even any record of a figure call Anup the Baptizer; the closest we come is Anubis, the god of embalming, which astute readers will note is a leeeeeetle different from baptism.
Oh, by the way, original sin is totally in the Bible, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a scholar who disagrees with the overwhelming evidence that a person (not necessarily a divine being) matching Jesus' description existed during his purported lifetime. So where did Maher get all this crap? Probably from the viral "documentary" Zeitgeist (which doesn't cite any sources) or, and this is a serious possibility, the fucking Da Vinci Code (which is about as historically accurate as the movie Splash).
None of this means the Christian Bible is right or that it represents the one true religion. But if you think something is bullshit, the answer is not more bullshit.
For the record, the other films Cracked debunked were "Super Size Me," "Waiting for Superman," "Searching for Sugar Man," "Winged Migration," and "Nanook of the North."
If only one of Michael Moore's schlockumentaries had been included.
I would have felt I died and went to heaven.
For more on "Religulous," please see Brent Bozell's "Mighty Maher Strikes Out."
