You get the picture: Maher is in search of weak opponents that he can embarrass. Still, it’s remarkable how many of them get the better of him. On one occasion Maher interviews a Jesus actor at a Holy Land Experience who seems like a carefully selected dummy. But when Maher asks him to explain the Trinity, the actor says it can be understood in the same way that water appears in three quite different forms: in a solid form, as ice; in liquid form, as water; and in the gaseous form of water vapor. Maher is completely stumped by this and rendered speechless.

In another segment, Maher talks to some blue collar guys worshipping at a Trucker’s Chapel in Raleigh, North Carolina. They are overweight and poorly dressed and they cannot answer all his questions, but one says that he used to be a drug addict and “I gave all that up when I got saved.” At the end of the discussion, just before Maher’s triumphant exit, the truckers hold hands and pray for Maher. This is the sole moving moment in the film, and in a way that Maher doesn’t realize, it raises these simple people entirely above his snide sophistication.

The only intelligent believers who are interviewed are geneticist Francis Collins and Father George Coyne, former head of the Vatican Observatory. Both of them are given only a few seconds, for fear that they might undermine Maher’s big theme that religious people are suffering from a kind of mental illness. Actually Maher’s points—that there is no historical evidence for Jesus, that the main themes of Christianity are all derived from other ancient religions, that miracles are impossible, that religion is responsible for the mass murders of history—are all highly debatable. Maher simply ignores the good evidence on the other side.

I would love to debate him on his show, and can easily show that Maher’s self-image as an intellectual is largely bogus. It is only in the company of obvious charlatans and simpletons that Maher comes off as the bright guy. And because he cannot stand up to real opposition, I doubt that Maher has the guts to take me up on this offer. Ultimately he is an intellectual coward who relies on the argumentum ad ignorantium—the argument that relies on the ignorance of the audience.

So should you see “Religulous”? Certainly, if you want to put a few dollars in Bill Maher’s pocket. (Very few others are doing so.) I found “Religulous” good for some chuckles, even though most of the time I was laughing not with Maher, but at him.