This is the teaser poster for Religulous, the new movie from Bill Maher and Larry Charles in which Maher investigates religion. Here’s a spoiler: he’s no fan of religion. The poster’s sort of weird… am I the only person who think Maher looks like George Washington there? This looks like an image from a stoner comedy predicated on Washington’s hemp farming.

The movie’s gonna be controversial, which seems so insane in the year 2008. We have put men on the moon and people still get upset when we question the sanity of believing in Invisible Sky Daddy? I wish science would invent a time machine so we could send these schmucks back to a time more suiting their level of intellect, like the Dark Ages. Anyway, here’s Larry Charles’ statement about the movie:

Ok. An old God, a very buff old God that lives in space decides to create the first man from earth dust, then makes a woman from that man’s rib. They get to live forever if they don’t eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, but the woman is tricked into eating a piece by a talking snake and all future humanity is cursed. Or, how bout this one? This same space God who lives in the sky and has power over everything decides he wants a son, so he impregnates a woman but she remains a virgin. And, the child can walk on water and raise the dead. But his father, the sky God, sends him on a suicide mission to save humanity. After he dies, he rises from the dead and flies into space to be with his father (who is also him.)

Greek myths? The latest installment of the “Lord of the Rings”? Disney’s new animated movie? No! These are the foundations of Western religion. The tenuous shaky belief systems that our entire civilization rests upon.

What do you believe, why do you believe it, and why do you need to believe it? Can we be good without God? Is religion a calling or a mental illness? Were Jesus, Moses and Mohammed prophets and visionaries, or crackpot nut cases who today would be put away? Is religion an obsessive-compulsive disorder?

Comedian, acerbic commentator, raconteur, skeptic, seeker Bill Maher and I set off in search of answers to these questions in a raunchy, rude, irreverent, outrageous, and shocking nonfiction film about the greatest fiction ever told.

Set to the rhythms of “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Jesus Walks,” from the Western Wall to the Vatican, from self-professed messiahs to self professed Pariahs, we will not only expose the hypocrisy and corruption in organized religion but the absurdly hilarious logic that holds it together.

We will talk to clergy, extremists, scholars, politicians, ex-cons, the man on the street and even the man upstairs (that’s right, we interview God.)

The funny will be scary, the scary wildly funny. The crazy will seem sane and the sane absolutely and undeniably crazy. All lines are blurred. All bets are off. We will get inside, on top of, behind, and in front of religion.

–Larry Charles