In ‘‘Religulous,’’ Bill Maher, left, and Larry Charles attack organized religion.

By JOHN LELAND

The director Larry Charles was talking recently about Hollywood and taboos. His new movie, “Religulous,” which stars the HBO talk-show host Bill Maher, is a sometimes funny, sometimes simplistic attack on organized religion.
“One would say it’s the most taboo subject to deal with,” said Mr. Charles. But if a major film company like Lionsgate backs the movie, how taboo could it be?
Mr. Charles, whose credits include the television comedies “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” as well as the movie “Borat,” is not afraid of a little nuance.
“If it’s profitable,” he said, “it’s not taboo. If they think it’s marketable, then maybe the tabooishness doesn’t matter so much.”
“Religulous,” which opened October 3 in the United States and is scheduled to open across Europe in November and December, shows Mr. Maher on a world tour of interviews in Israel, Denmark, Vatican City and Monsey, New York, the home of Orthodox Jews United Against Zionism, whose leaders participated in a convention of Holocaust deniers in Iran.
The movie is trying to tap the same spirit that has made best-sellers out of books crusading against religion, like Richard Dawkins’s “God Delusion,” Sam Harris’s “End of Faith” and Christopher Hitchens’s “God Is Not Great.” Atheist groups now even have their own dating Web sites, glossy magazines, paid lobbyists and annual cruise outings.
Mr. Charles and Mr. Maher carry their evangelism to a broad swath of targets: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Mormonism, Scientology, even Cantheism, a marijuana-centric belief system that is often overlooked in theological debate. At the end of the movie Mr. Maher calls on “antireligionists” to “come out of the closet and assert themselves” in the face of religious extremism. “Grow up or die,” he says.
Mr. Maher said he intended the movie as a call to action, not to convince religious people to join his camp but to stir the nonreligious to unite.
“This is a very religious country,” he said of the United States. “I would at least like them” - meaning the 16 percent of Americans who in a recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life described themselves as “unaffiliated” with any religion - “to stand up and say we’re not the crazy ones. Don’t we deserve at least that?”
Mr. Maher was just warming up.
“I truly believe that unless we shed this skin, mankind is playing with real fire here,” he said. “Because there’s nuclear weapons in the world and because there are suicide bombers and there are so many people who are anxious to get to that next world. They don’t look at the end of the world as a bad thing. That’s pretty scary. Until rationality is enshrined again and this magical thinking is marginalized, I’m a little nervous.”
“Religulous” casts its protagonist as a seeker among strange peoples, and gets its laughs by showing them in a silly light. While Borat was more clueless than the people he encountered, Mr. Maher is always the smartest one on the screen.
Mr. Charles said they had hoped to interview major religious figures . Instead they got members of the Truckers Chapel in Raleigh, North Carolina, the guy who plays Jesus at the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando, Florida, and an Islamic rapper named Propa-Gandhi.
Mr. Charles, raised by liberal Jewish parents, said he became attracted to Judaism during preparation for his bar mitzvah, announcing to his parents that he wanted to become a rabbi. Even after this passion passed, the ontological questions raised “plague me to this day,” he said. “Judaism is deeply ingrained in me, but I’m definitely not a believer in the Bible. I can’t accept that.”
Mr. Maher was raised by a Catholic father and Jewish mother . Describing his beliefs now, Mr. Maher said: “I believe in ‘I don’t know.’ I’m not troubled by the giant questions I know I will never find out the answer to as long as I’m alive.”