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Is "Life of Brian" blasphemous? Yup, and damn proud of it, it would seem to me (John Cleese's weenie-ish post-hoc comments excepted, of course.)
It's not simply an evisceration of organized religion and the True Believer, generally speaking, it's very specifically an evisceration of Christianity and Christians. And, honestly, anyone else within range (hello Romans, Jews, assorted revolutionaries, spineless bureaucrats, etc.).
But if you don't equate Brian with Jesus, B's followers with those of JC, and the whole enterprise from script to editing as very specifically a satire of Christianity--the Gospel, the organized church, the whole ball-of-wax--then you're simply rationalizing a means by which you can fundamentally miss the point.
Yes, yes, alot of stuff about false idols and celebrity-obsession, liberal activism and Marxist revolutionaries, some prep-school lampooning and generously scatalogical humor thrown into the mix... but it's a satire of Christianity. And it fairly well calls into question the whole enterprise. How are we defining blasphemy anyway?
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