I spend Saturday mornings in front of my computer drinking coffee and catching up on TV from Friday night. One of the shows I watch is Real Time with Bill Maher. Sure, some guests are funnier and/or more enlightening than others, but there's always some great discussion and it's probably the only television show on a major network/channel hosted by a godless heathen who gives religion no quarter.
This past Friday Andrew Sullivan was one of the panelists. I find myself in agreement with much of what he says and he did link to this very blog once so I want to find him likable. However, he was a total hypocrite the other night and it really pissed me off.
Maher had made a comment about how religious people claim to have certainty about an afterlife and then got snarky and described Christianity as being about Yahweh sending his son on a suicide mission only for people to find out Yahweh and Jesus were the same guy. Exasperated, Sullivan told Maher, "Don't describe my faith to me."
These words drew a goodly amount of applause yet they were uttered by the same mouth that earlier had said, "The problem is not religion, it's dumb religion. That's the problem, Bill. And there is a distinction." When Maher describes his religion, Sullivan gets all defensive yet he has no problem describing the religion of others and vehemently labeling it "dumb".
2 comments:
I respect Maher a great deal, but I've too often heard him express, with a straight face, an understanding of religion that sounds like something an 8-year-old would say -- that for Christians, all Christians, God is an old guy up in the sky who tells them what to do, that sort of thing. I recognize that there's a rhetorical instrumentality to that kind of talk, but it's reductive. Likewise what you report about his comment that religious people have certainty about the afterlife. Many religious people doubtless do find certainties in their faith, but some religious perspectives -- strains of perfectly mainstream Christian mysticism I've encountered, for example -- are about embracing uncertainty.
I certainly wouldn't accuse Maher of expressing an overabundance of nuiance on his show when it comes to religion. Whether his generalizations are for TV or not, I don't know.
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