Thank GOD for Religulous
I could tell why Mr. Pleats was ansy...there were two registers open but we were all in one line. There was plenty room for two lines, but it appeared no one else was aware of this but me and Mr. Pleats. The group in line ahead of us wasn't paying attention. Pleats knew it; I knew it.
I couldn't make the dash to form line number 2, but Pleats could. Especially with me backing him up. If everything worked out just right, no one else would notice, and me and Pleats would scoot up and be next in line.
Pleats looks at his watch and then his ticket. He makes a slight move towards the open register, but then pauses. He taps the person in front of him on the shoulder and points out the open register.
The queue was not broken.
One thing that I noticed when Mr. Pleats was looking at his ticket was that he was going to see the same movie I was: Bill Maher's "Religulous". It opened the night before and Winter Park Village is the only place in town showing it (which is why I had broken my promise to God).
"Religulous" is a documentary...more of a commentary, about religion. Not just any religion, but ALL religion. At times it is reminiscent of "Borat", which makes sense because it was directed by Larry Charles who also directed "Borat", among other things (including writing, producing and directing for "Seinfeld", "Curb Your Enthusiasm", "Entourage" and a host of others). But Borat is just a character.
The star of "Religulous" is the very real Bill Maher (of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher", and previously host of "Politically Correct"). "Religulous" takes a humorous and irreverent look at some of the hypocrisy, intolerance and just plain silliness of religion in our culture and asks questions like "Did Jesus have a Jew-Fro?"
Maher takes cameras into a Muslim mosque, to the Temple in Salt Lake City and to the Vatican and just asks simple questions. He talks to a Rabbi who doesn't believe Israel should exist. He connects with the actor who plays Jesus at the Holy Land Experience right here in Orlando. He doesn't bash or hate, most of the religious folks do that on their own. He's just a regular agnostic Jew, raised as a Catholic.
And I think it's his truly agnostic viewpoint that really drives his point home. He's not really trying to "debunk" anything. If nothing else, he just lets religion debunk itself and he had the cameras there to capture it. And it's damn funny. It's smart like Mythbusters without being corny like Penn and Teller's "BullSh*t" is sometimes.
Of course, "Religulous" didn't have to sell me, because I'm already agnostic...I'm a border-line atheist but I'll concede to the point that I really just don't know. I can't prove that God doesn't exist any more than anyone can prove that he does. But I do know that a lot of crappy things have happened in this world because of people clinging to bronze-age-old mysticisms.
I came to the conclusion that Mr. Pleats was probably agnostic or atheist as well...this isn't exactly the kind of movie you run out and see if you're a die-hard Scientologist. And I thought about his rather Jesus-like maneuver of pointing out the open register to the folks in front of him. Where did this miraculous act kindness come from?
Certainly not from his faith. That's because you don't need to believe in God or follow the words written on stone tablets to be kind to your fellow man. It just makes sense.
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