I’ve been thinking a bit about the movie Religulous since I saw it last night and I wanted to post my thoughts on it in case anyone comes out of it confused. Religulous is not designed to be a religious conversion movie. If you expect to drag your Christian friends to a showing and have the scales fall from their eyes, you will be sorely disappointed. Make no mistake about it, Religulous was not designed to make Christians uncomfortable, it was designed to make Atheists uncomfortable.

Round and round the Atheist blogs, the message is the same. Maher is smug, smarmy and wholly incompentent. He doesn’t have a competent grasp of the key arguments of atheism, he isn’t a particularly good debater. In fact, his arguments are riddled with fallacies and flaws. In short, he’s not good enough to be an atheist.

But the simple question the movie asks is why do we need brilliant, educated, calm, charming people to spearhead atheism? Why do we set the bar so high? Why do we seek out ever increasingly sophisticated arguments and argue with so much patience and cede so much respect to the religious? Why can’t it be just some schmuck going “A talking snake? Really?”

Because when Atheists stop ceding religious beliefs the respect they give to no other form of belief, that’s what it boils down to. What the movie was trying to say was that it’s you who are the problem. You, the ones that say such an ignorant smarmy bastard isn’t allowed to be the face of atheism. That the atheist agenda has to be run like a high priesthood managed by a slick PR team.

Maher showed the world what the other face of atheism could be. To stop arguing religion on their terms and to start arguing it on ours. To stop battling their strongest arguments as if that had any hope of converting them but to resort to simple ridicule because such beliefs are not even worth thinking of a smart argument against. When the other side is bringing to the table big fishes and bushes and talking snakes, do you really need to bone up on the intricacies of carbon dating in order to defeat them?

Personally, I disliked the movie. I thought the Michael Moore style editing was odious and Maher, like most non-religious people, seriously underestimates the profound impact of a genuine religious experience. But that doesn’t stop me from appreciating what they were trying to do. Religulous was designed to be uncomfortable to atheists because it’s completely non-threatening to religious people.

One of the increasingly dismaying things I see in the world today is an increase in political cynicism. A sense that not only are the rich/powerful/republicans/liberals out to get you, that their entire purpose in life is to out to get you. I have a hard time taking on this world view because, inevitably, at every level of society I meet, most people genuinely believe that they are doing good. They’re aware that other people might hold different views of them but they believe that they’ve been misunderstood and they’re doing the best job they can.

I believe the fundamental difference is one of access. There’s a feeling of powerlessness and alienation when you view a group that you oppose as “the other”, a society in which you will never gain access. To many people, it’s simply become inconcievable that they could have anything to do with a investment banker or a neo-conservative power broker. These levels of society are locked out to them. On the other hand, the belief that you could gain access to any level of society radically changes how you view the forces of power. This is not to say that I could pick up the phone and call the sultan of brunei or anything but that I’ve met the people who have met the people who are reputed to hold the reins of power in many fields and the consistent message is that there is no conspiracy. It’s simply a tragedy of good men trying to do the best to uphold what they believe.

It’s so easy to blame societies problems on evil forces lurking in the hearts of powerful men. The solution then becomes simple, remove the powerful men, destroy the evil and the world will be a better place. It’s much harder to understand how people who think of themselves as good could end up doing what you think of as evil.

Why don’t we apply the collaborative filtering approach to finding the right job candidate?

Here’s a simple model of how it could work for say, a network engineer:

Any and every potential candidate is invited to submit potential questions to ask which they think could seperate out a good network engineer from a bad network engineer over the course of a 24 hour period.

Once these questions are accumulated, all candidates are split into two groups and given one hour to use a collaborative voting system to determine which questions they feel are the best ones.

Each group gives the top n questions to the other group and they both have 3 hours to complete the test.

Each group now collaboratively marks the other group. A right answer is one which concurs with the answers of those who got the most right answers. In the end, the top 5 people with the highest score from each group are selected for a in depth interview.

Is this approach better than the typical HR keyword search based weeding approach? Is it robust enough to efficiently weed out the poor candidates while pushing the good ones to be great? It seems like an interesting experiment to me.