Bill Maher has built a career at the nexus of Hollywood and D.C. (or Hollywood for ugly people, as Rush Limbaugh famously calls it) by convincing an audience that quick-witted retorts about contentious and complex debates are somehow indicative of high-level discourse. But you could say the same of most cable-news shows these days, so in some respects it’s hard to hate Maher as a player any more than the game.

Still, it’s never taken much to scratch the surface of Maher’s glib opinions to expose the underlying dermatitis of vanity, egoism, and even outright hostility. Maher apparently thinks he doesn’t show enough of these unflattering traits when he discusses politics; that’s just about the only conceivable reason someone of his temperament would make a documentary about religion.

And thus was born Religulous. It’s hard to pin down where Maher falls along the atheist-to-agnostic spectrum, except to say he’s an avowed opponent of organized religion, which he has described as a “neurological disorder.” (Maher serves on the board of Sam Harris’s Reason Project with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, which directly links him with the three biggest atheist intellectuals in the world.)

Of course, Bill Maher is also on the board of PETA, thinks milk is poisonous, and has stated that he doesn’t believe in vaccination or that Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease is correct. So while he may not believe in God, the idea that Bill Maher is somehow in a position to judge whose beliefs are reasonable is kind of laughable.

Particularly when Maher thinks he knows so much more about the target of his opprobrium than he actually does. He makes his first mistake in the first line of the movie by referring to the “Book of Revelations” — it’s not plural — and it just snowballs from there.

Within a few minutes Maher is denying not just the divinity of Jesus Christ but his actual historical existence, a question disputed by almost no credible scholar. You can argue that it is difficult to believe in Jesus’s existence considering that primary records for his existence are recorded by only a precious few devoted disciples who recorded his allegorical teachings in detail as well as the social unrest they inspired. Then again, if that’s the standard – you probably don’t believe Socrates either.

Still, Maher isn’t exactly on solid ground in questioning what he sees as the more fantastical elements of Christianity. Maher asserts that there are a slew of uncanny similarities between Mithraism and the worship of the Egyptian god Horus, on one hand, and Christianity, on the other, and that these beliefs, which predate Christianity, were bastardized to make up the foundations of the new religion. Here too he falls flat on his face; at best there are some commonalities (present among nearly all religions), and most of the specific similarities asserted in the film, e.g., that Jesus, Mithras, and Horus were all the product of virgin births, come from dubious sources.

The example of the virgin birth is particularly telling because Maher makes much hay of the fact that only two of the four Gospels mention the circumstances of Jesus’s birth. That others would omit this important fact is somehow proof that they were making it up. Well, Mithras was born out of rock (and the earliest known account of his origins seems to postdate the writing of the Gospels), and Horus was conceived by his mother Isis with a golden penis which may make her not quite a virgin? For the Gospel writers to ignore the virgin birth is no more strange than for a comedian to ignore the existence of the penis and all of the potential for hilarity it presents. Unfortunately, Maher ignores it because it doesn’t make his case. And again, we’re just getting started dissecting the facts in Maher’s documentary.

Fortunately for Maher, he doesn’t spend the bulk of the documentary making a factual case against Christianity. He spends a lot of the time traveling and interviewing various religious believers. These interactions are at times amusing and revealing, but say absolutely nothing about the film’s central contention — religion is bad.

That’s because Maher doesn’t confront one serious theologian or apologetics expert in the entire film. Not one. Faith is by its very nature something that’s intangible — difficult to explain or justify rationally — and as such, there is plenty of fertile ground for disagreement and argumentation for a nonbeliever like Maher.

And yet, Christian apologetics is perhaps the most studied subject in human history and because Maher’s critique seems to rest solely on sarcasm and snappy comebacks, it’s hard not to imagine that just about any serious scholar of Christianity would have eaten his lunch.

Instead, the film is a seemingly endless parade of believers who are from marginal sects, easily mocked, radical in their beliefs, just plain crazy, or some combination thereof. And it’s true that many featured in the film, such as a former soul singer turned prosperity-gospel preacher, an anti-Zionist Orthodox Jew who supports Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda (a crazy cultist who claims he actually is Jesus), don’t come off well. But it’s far from clear that Maher’s examples are representative of anything important: Using Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda to discredit religion is like citing John Wayne Gacy to prove that all children’s entertainers are sinister.

But oddly, Maher can’t even be fair to those believers who are obviously crazy. The editing of interviews is awfully suspect and punctuated with sarcastic subtitles and cutaways to various pop-culture references to make snide points. The film was directed by Larry Charles of Borat fame; that’s about all you need to know in determining whether the film was ultimately fair to its subjects. (At one point the film presents a cartoon about Mormon beliefs almost as if it’s Sunday-school material — when it is in fact from a notorious anti-Mormon film.) The film closes with a (literally) apocalyptic montage to make its point about where religion is leading us.

Of course, Maher never pauses to consider what heading in the direction of an irreligious society might mean. If you apply Maher’s logic, one could note that Stalin, Mao, and Hitler were far and away the most murderous tyrants in history and their societies were correspondingly totalitarian and hostile to religion. Nor does he contemplate or address in any meaningful way the societal good religion is responsible for, as anyone who has ever had need of a hospital can testify to.

I’m sure Maher would agree that the fact that Stalin was a fellow anti-religionist says little about his own beliefs. It’s a simple concession, but one that would seriously undermine the whole premise of Religulous. In the end, the only religious views that the viewer comes to understand are Bill Maher’s. And whatever Maher does believe, fairness and shared understanding are not a part of it.

– Mark Hemingway is an NRO staff reporter.