Cornell grad and TV personality Bill Maher has been making fun of organized religion for as long as he’s been making people laugh. Now, Maher is releasing a documentary film called Religulous which will highlight the more ludicrous assumptions of religion. As he told the International Herald Tribune, “When you're talking about a man living to 900 years old, and drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old god, and that Creation Museum where they put a saddle on the dinosaur because people rode dinosaurs. It's just a pile of comedy that was waiting for someone to exploit."

According to the paper:

Raised in a Roman Catholic household by a Catholic father and Jewish mother, Maher decided at an early age that the trappings and mythology of the world's religions were preposterous, outdated and even dangerous.

"Religulous," directed by fellow doubter Larry Charles ("Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan"), is intended to inspire similar skepticism in others — and perhaps get nonbelievers to talk more openly about their lack of faith.

"I'm not looking to form an anti-religion religion. That would defeat the purpose," Maher said in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, where "Religulous" played in advance of its theatrical release Friday. "It's the nature of the people who are not believers that they're individuals, they're individualistic. They don't join and all lock arms and say, 'We all believe this and so it must be true because we have strength in numbers.'"

… Charles shot 400 to 500 hours of material around the world as Maher visited a Christian chapel for truckers in North Carolina, a gay Muslim bar in the Netherlands, the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, and Christian, Muslim and Jewish holy places in Israel.

Maher meets with priests at the Vatican, chats with rabbis and Muslim scholars in Jerusalem, encounters street preachers in London, and hangs out with the performer who plays Christ in a crucifixion enactment at the Holy Land Experience theme park in Florida.

Religulous will open this Friday to the ire of religious conservatives across the country. I am praying (something I rarely do) for Sarah Palin to make public commentary about the film and reiterate her belief that dinosaurs and human beings coexisted on earth 6,000 years ago, since the only thing left to do is laugh at this point.