Bill Maher should have taken a course in firing full-auto weapons at Front Sight before he made his anti-religion documentary Religulous, because his method of shooting is what the military likes to call “spray and pray.”

Maher points his weapon — in this case a movie camera instead of an M-16 — in the general direction he thinks the enemy is then fires wildly. The problem is that as a documentarian Bill Maher ignores both weapons safety procedures and military rules of engagement. Bill Maher fails to correctly identify his targets before he puts his finger on the trigger and fires. So while he can be scored for some direct hits, he both creates a lot of collateral damage and leaves half the real enemy unscathed.

The premise of Religulous — defined by conflation of the two words for his title — is that religion is ridiculous. Maher has found no evidence that the existence of God is consistent with a rational perception of human existence; therefore he proceeds on the premise that religion is nothing but fraud and fanatical irrationalism used to promote war and man’s inhumanity to man.

If Bill Maher had made a documentary on that subject — fraud and fanatical irrationalism used to promote war and man’s inhumanity to man — much of what he shows us in Religulous would have been excellent evidence for it. Like many religious critics before him — including Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken — Bill Maher finds in religious circles no shortage of confidence men and country boobs to expose with harsh light.

But after a Twentieth Century in which megamurders were committed by atheists such as Stalin and Mao — and in which arguably the greatest enemy of his own family’s Judeo-Christian traditions was Hitler — his blaming the belief in God as the cause of war and genocide is just as ridiculous as anything Bill Maher shows in his movie.

Nor does Bill Maher show us in his section on end-of-the-worlders how the nuclear Doomsday Clock, the Zero-Population-Growth movement, and Al Gore’s Global Warming scenarios are every bit as apocalyptic as Christianity’s Book of Revelation … and just as faith-based.

Toward the end of Religulous Bill Maher addresses the camera and declares as an affirmation of his own belief: “Since I don’t know that life after death exists, you can’t either.”

Really? Does Bill Maher truly think that no human ability exists in another human being that he doesn’t have in full?

Would Bill Maher pick up a violin and play the Paganini Violin Concerto for me then?

Can Bill Maher solve a quadratic equation?

Pilot a Bell helicopter?

Hold his breath underwater for seventeen minutes as David Blaine did on Oprah?

Or – while asleep in California — astral travel over a department store next to a freeway sign and the next morning — using Yahoo Yellow Pages and Google Maps — locate that store in an area of downtown St. Louis he’d never visited … as I once did?

Shakespeare wrote, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

I have no problem with Bill Maher demanding reason and being skeptical when he doesn’t find it. But I do have a problem with Bill Maher being unable to imagine anyone being less of a blockhead than he is.

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J. Neil Schulman is the author of the classic novel of agorist revolution, Alongside Night. In the audiobook I MET GOD, he reveals the depth of life-changing, challenging, confronting, weird, funny, frightening, paranormal, Kabbalistic, spiritual, inspirational, ecstatic, and otherwise extraordinary events that have led him from being an utterly skeptical atheist to a believer in God, although a believer who still regards himself as not being a member of any religion.