Stumble It!
Sep 12 2008
Articles of Faith: Bill Maher on Religion and Politics and the Politics of Religion
Bill Maher discusses God with “Jesus” In Holyland in Florida
Bill Maher is one of my favorite intellectuals and also an Agnostic and a political satirist. He recently talked to Larry King about disillusionment with the political process, why religion gets in the way, and why Rick Warren is a big improvement from the religious right extremists such as Jerry Falwell an Pat Robertson. Maher further asks why religion has to be forced upon our system and why evangelicals seem oppose rational thought.
Maher’s comical documentary Religulous which opens October 3 in the U.S. asks jarring questions about why God can’t defeat the Devil and why so many religious are so leery to give evolution a chance. He questions why the Judeo-Christian God is a “jealous” God noting that jealousy is a human sin and tells why he believes most religious people care more about their own salvation than they do about their fellow man.
My rebuttal: While I see Maher as a brilliant mind and fully rational. I see that he may have fallen into the “God is magic fallacy” Clearly if you believe a single “man” answers all prayers makes all the weather and all life in general and that the Devil is literally a red guy with horns who opposes all that God wants… and that he, the Devil was created by God for good but chose evil, well then I fully agree with Maher that the notion sounds a bit more like Mother Goose then Father God. However, my beliefs are not all that literal. I am not a Biblical literalist but I am a believing rationalist in that I fully believe that good and evil are at war in the choices people may or may not make. God and Devil are in the choices I or any other person engage so to speak. God is Conscience and the Devil a lack thereof. The idea God is jealous is therefore only calling attention to the reality that goodness calls itself to itself. Simply, like things will mostly attract other like things.
Be well and be waxful!
I love Maher and can’t wait for this film. I’m not sure if your views on good and evil are so much religious as they are philosophical personification.
What a wonderful mental spa moment this was… Thank you so much for the Maher clip; it beautifully illuminates this entire discussion. I can not wait for this movie either! To a larger point, that your post along with Maher have raised with me: Obviously I “look, listen, and think” about language; and how it makes manifest our co-constituted lived experience. Before reading your post, I would have readily joined you as “believing Rationalist”. Following this post, I am ready to dig into what I believe may be a core issue within Evangelism that I had failed to grasp: “Rational” and “Believer” have morphed & now form a polemic. Nothing in my background, religious training, or experience on staff of three United Methodist churches has ever placed these two concepts as antithetical… Amazing. To that point, your thesis that good and evil reside at the heart of all choices mankind makes on a moment to moment basis is brilliant in that, if we were to follow that doctrine, we would not have to worry about anything else. Ah, but that would be the “high Methodist” speaking…Evangleicalism is the most compelling socio-political issue of this day. Thank you so much for this post. If there are more on this issue, I would love to read. ~k