The end credits were rolling on Bill Maher’s sort-of documentary on religion, Religulous, and audience members were quietly shuffling towards the exits. One woman was disturbed by this.

“Come on, we should be applauding!” she said. A smattering of clapping followed. Then, Jeremy, who was sitting next to me, shouted, “Boo!” Several heads turned in our direction, some with shocked expressions.

At this point, I lost it and burst out laughing, which only seemed to disturb them even more. Apparently the end of a comedian’s satirical film promoting atheism is no place for laughter. Who knew?

“I wished I’d booed louder,” Jeremy said after realizing the scene we had caused.

The woman’s reaction was telling, I thought. It wasn’t enough that the audience had come out and paid to see this odd little film. It wasn’t enough that we sat through the entire film, with nobody exiting or taking issue with it. It wasn’t enough that we laughed throughout what was primarily a comedy.

No, she wanted us to cheer and applaud the film and take its message of political activism on behalf of unbelief to heart. And if we didn’t, well, then something was wrong. There was a tinge of insecurity in her request. The same thing can be said of Religulous itself.

If you haven’t seen it, the film is a rambling travelogue of sorts where the HBO talk show host meets with various religious types and chats with them about why they believe in a higher power.

I say “chats” loosely. Although he starts off in a journalistic mode, interviewing a group of born-again truckers and engaging in a fairly spirited discussion, he quickly drops even a pretense of objectivity. His interviews are clearly ambushes. At several points, the subjects say something along the lines of: “I don’t know what kind of film you are making here.”

He mocks and ridicules people, often rolling his eyes during interviews. Frequently they are cut off before they can answer. Throughout the film, he intercuts scenes from old movies, and adds subtitles and sound effects to scenes. Occasionally it is funny. Mostly though he is clearly just trying to punch up dull material.

Maher professes to speak for doubt, but I never bought this. He is as certain that he is right as the wackiest fundamentalist. This might not have been a problem if the film was truly as outrageous as the hype would make you believe. Instead Maher harps on things like the improbability of the virgin birth or the differences between the four gospels, as if nobody had ever noticed that before.

The film isn’t helped by his choice of interview subjects. It almost exclusively features people from the fringes: Creationists, “ex-gays”, Jews for Jesus, televangelists, anti-Zionist Jews, gay Muslims, etc. They are so obviously daft that most of Maher’s work is done for him. It is as if a person did a documentary on environmentalism and only talked to eco-terrorists and radical animal rights activists.

Occasionally he does interview somebody who isn’t an obvious kook, like Francis Collins, the scientist who decoded the human genome who also happens to be a committed Christian, but those moments are fleeting. One suspects there is a lot of stuff lying on the cutting room floor where Maher is not getting the upper hand on his interview subjects. (Collins claims that is precisely the case.)

If anything, I came out of the film with a new respect for Mormons, who — apparently alone among the faith groups that Maher sought to interview — recognized early on what he was up to and shut him out. Maher is ushered off of church grounds and is forced to do his Mormon bit from what appears to be a hotel room.

I should also point out that film deals almost exclusively with the three Abrahamic faiths. Buddhism, Hinduism and other faiths are out of the picture.

Maher’s main beef is that religion inevitably leads to violence and other strife. Clips of Middle East bombings and such are deployed to buttress this argument, but this only underlines the point that most of the Christian types he interviews — the vast bulk of his film — are essentially harmless. He also neglects to point out that Middle East bombings are as political as they are religious.

There are some funny bits and a few fascinating interviews. I did laugh several times, especially during a scene where he talks to a guy in Amsterdam who has created a religion based on smoking pot, mostly because both of them were so obviously baked. Another time, Senator Mark Pryor, D-Ark., helpfully observes that you don’t need to pass an IQ test to serve in Congress. Duly noted.

Maher is often a jerk throughout the film, but he is consciously being one in an attempt to provoke people and at times it provided the effect he wanted.

In the end though I was disappointed. I wanted something that was more powerful, that would genuinely jar me. Instead I got a cinematic version of the same arguments I get into anytime I discuss religion with an atheist. I kept thinking, “Why am I paying money for this when I could get the same experience talking to a random stranger in a bar across the street?”

Early on, he notes that nonbelievers account for 16% of the U.S. population. (This figure conflates atheists, agnostics and people who just don’t bother with church, but that’s another column.) The point is it unnerves him that his fellow unbelievers aren’t organized into some kind of voting block or political force to counter the other side.

As if it isn’t clear enough by the end of the film, Maher says flat-out in a closing monologue that religion must die if the earth is to survive nuclear annihilation. Seriously. Those are the thoughts of a pretty paranoid dude.

For Maher, it is not enough for him to be an atheist, to profess it openly and to be free from any repercussions from that to continue to live his wealthy, successful life. No, he must spread his word, lest he lose out to the wingnuts. In an attempt to bring the one real truth to the people, he comes to the conclusion that any false gods that might distract them must be destroyed. Gee, who does it sound like he is imitating?

P.S. Mollie Ziegler-Hemingway wrote a funny column about some of Maher’s other beliefs. Check it out here.