On February 18, World Net Daily posted an interview with Bill Maher that is a classic illustration of the secular arrogance Americans are dealing with in their Old Media.
Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” thinks that religion “stops people from thinking.” He goes a step further and brands religion as “a neurological disorder.”
This “lack of enlightenment of so many Americans,” Maher intones solemnly, “means the nation actually has more in common with its enemies than one might think.”
This is heavy stuff. I'll need some time to absorb the profundity of it all. I mean, when you check back, it sure looks like most of the great minds in history believed in God. Did Augustine and Aquinas suffer from a neurological disorder? Were Shakespeare and Michelangelo unenlightened? Was DaVinci unthinking? Was Mother Teresa, and is John Paul II, “weak-minded people who need strength in numbers”? (On this last example, Bill quotes Jesse Ventura, that great modern thinker, to backup his position.)
Thank heaven—oops, I mean, thankfully, we have the towering intellect of Bill Maher to save us from the ignorance of religious simpletons.
Bill claims to be “embarrassed” that America “has been taken over by people…who do not believe in science and rationality.” He then proceeds to compare fairy tales to Bible stories, claiming that a child would never know the difference.
Hmm. I happen to think that children are much smarter than they get credit for, certainly much smarter than your average garden variety secular elitist media snob. For example, by the age of five, my kids were asking me quite probing, involved, and persistent questions about life, death, and God. Notice the triangulation here, Bill. My kids got the connection at a very early age. They never showed quite such sustained intensity of interest in Goldilocks or Hansel and Gretel. But then, religion was “drilled into” their heads at a young age.
Well, as a parent of faith, that was my job. As you so astutely observe, the children “can’t be responsible…for what adults put in your head.” But adults are very much responsible for putting good values and sound principles into their children’s heads. Maher thinks that suicide terrorists flying planeloads of innocent people into buildings full of equally innocent workers was a “faith-based initiative.” Compare that to the Western world’s religious organizations donating on-going tsunami relief. Do these two activities have much in common to a thinking person? If the scientific and rational Maher can’t see the difference between good and evil applications of faith, if he can’t see how very different we are from our enemies, then nothing I can write here is going to help him to figure it out.
But I do think it’s kind of humorous that someone who compares the tales of the Brothers Grimm to the Bible considers “science and rationality” to be his trump card. Fictional children’s stories, written a scant few hundred years ago, compared to holy and historical scriptures that have been recorded and handed down through several millenniums, along the way serving as the foundation of major and enduring world religions.
Think about it, Bill. Religious people, for the most part, view human intellect as a gift from our Creator—you know, the same One who endowed us with “certain unalienable rights,” according to the Declaration of Independence. From his statements, it appears that Maher believes that rationality is just another neat idea human beings dreamed up for themselves.
The Founders knew that our rights come from God. So, too, does reason. Maher and the liberal elites like him prefer to think that mankind is the last word in its own accountability. That way, they can make up their own rules with impunity, and do so while feeling smugly superior to all the little religious “crazies” who work hard to walk the steep and narrow path of faith.
So Bill, who fed you that fairy tale about how “enlightened” you are? Who got you to “stop thinking” long enough to believe the U.S. is like Syria and Iran? It sounds to me as though you’re suffering from more than one neurological disorder.
