The Hypocrisy of Bill Maher

A commenter left some remarks at my post about Andrew Sullivan's hypocrisy that was on display last week during his appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher. The comments related to Maher's criticism of religion and lack of nuance when doing so.

This was a helpful reminder for me of a Wall Street Journal opinion piece called "Look Who's Irrational Now" which I'd meant to write about last week. In it, Mollie Ziegler Hemingway takes Maher to task for his extremely irrational views regarding modern medicine and nutrition. This surfaced briefly during the episode with Sullivan when Maher said, "And don't get me started on doctors" or something similar.

Hemingway:

But it turns out that the late-night comic is no icon of rationality himself. In fact, he is a fervent advocate of pseudoscience. The night before his performance on Conan O'Brien, Mr. Maher told David Letterman -- a quintuple bypass survivor -- to stop taking the pills that his doctor had prescribed for him. He proudly stated that he didn't accept Western medicine. On his HBO show in 2005, Mr. Maher said: "I don't believe in vaccination. . . . Another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur [germ] theory." He has told CNN's Larry King that he won't take aspirin because he believes it is lethal and that he doesn't even believe the Salk vaccine eradicated polio.

If anything, I was disappointed that Hemingway didn't go further and really lay into Maher for his views on medicine. When it comes to the medical realm, Maher is not an advocate of pseudoscience, he is an advocate of pure bullshit.

He said: "That's another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur theory, even though Louis Pasteur renounced it on his own deathbed and said that Beauchamp(s) was right". There is no evidence that Pasteur ever renounced his own theory on his deathbed. Surely Maher would take Christians to task for claiming Darwin recanted on his deathbed or for spreading false quotes by the Founding Fathers to bolster their case for America being a "Christian nation", yet he gleefully spreads his own bullshit.

Another quote: "people get sick because of an aggregate toxicity". When someone on his show uses a nebulous and undefined term like "aggregate toxicity", Maher is all over that person like white on rice. But, again, he has no problem with such bullshit if it fosters his own delusions.

Unfortunately, Hemingway ends her piece rather stupidly.

Anti-religionists such as Mr. Maher bring to mind the assertion of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown character that all atheists, secularists, humanists and rationalists are susceptible to superstition: "It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can't see things as they are."

A lot of people who think Maher's views on medicine are idiotic are atheists, secularists, humanists and rationalists. In addition, many who believe in a god subscribe to the same bullshit that Maher does and march alongside the likes of Jenny McCarthy in her harmful crusade against vaccination.