Making fun of religion, particularly the Abrahamic ones, is like shooting fish in a barrel.
I mean, after 4,000 years of theological heritage, the three major Western religions believe that God/Yahweh/The Trinity allowed 18,000 people to die in the recent Japanese earthquake because a woman who never existed was induced by a talking snake to eat an apple.
What’s up with that?
It’s silly if it weren’t so tragic, but alas, it is both silly and tragic, which is why everyone likes to laugh when people make fun of religion because a) it stimulates endorphins or whatever d b) it needs to be done as long as religious sociopaths want to impose their medieval will on law-abiding, consenting adults in our constitutionally secular republic.
Which is why we’re excited about “American Heretic,” on Friday, September 16, 2011 at 7:30 PM at the HMML.
Which “American Heretic” would that be, specifically, you ask?
Is it, say, Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Father, author if the Declaration of Independence, and rabid Deist/atheist who doubted Jesus’ divinity*?
Or perhaps that madman Abe Lincoln, who once famously declared, “The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession?”
No. Close, though. It’s MAD Magazine’s Joe Raiola, a dynamic comedic force and one of the country’s most passionate defenders of free speech. In the outspoken and irreverent tradition of George Carlin, his new show, American Heretic, is a powerful evening of provocative comic theater.
“My goal is to tear false things down,” Raiola says unapologetically, “so God and country seem like a good place to start.”
But Raiola is probably at his best when riffing on religion. His outrageous “Theory of Holy Books,” which postulates that you can’t trust a Holy Book with more than 200 pages or weighing more than a half pound, is not to be missed.
I, personally, hope that Joe tackles head-on the wild thematic divergences between the Synoptic gospels and Paul’s near-silence on transubstantiation juxtaposed with his fervent misogyny and anti-Semitism.
One can dream, eh?
* TJ’s quote: “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.”
