Posted on 10/25/2004 5:37:38 AM PDT by jaydubya2
In person, Bill Maher the man is just like Bill Maher the TV character. Just as snarky, just as opinionated, just as curmudgeonly. Perpetually perturbed.
Few things, though, seem to get his dander up like religious folks.
"One of the many things that annoys me about religion is that it's arrogance masquerading as humility," he says. It's a sentiment he'll repeat on his HBO show a few weeks later. "How arrogant to think you know what happens to you after you die? You don't. That's your guess.
"It's arrogant to think that, if there is a force in the universe, this force, whom most people refer to as 'Him,' has the time and inclination to listen to your stupid, petty laundry list of what you want in this life. Prayer. That's another, silly Santa Claus notion. Pray to Santa, and he'll give you what you want. It's so silly. It's so childish. And so much of the world is getting over this," he says, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
Maher pauses and produces a stack of those blue TV note cards, like the kind Dave Letterman reads his top 10 list off of each night. Maher's blue cards contain factoids and statistics about religious beliefs and practices. He's searching for one particular statistic and, after a few moments of shuffling and flipping, he finds it.
In 1990, about 7 percent of the American population said they had "no religion," and in 2000, that number had doubled to 14 percent, he says.
"So, in 10 years, we've doubled the amount of people who say they don't have a religion," he says. "I find that incredibly encouraging."
The world would be much more "sane" without religion, Maher argues.
"So many of these born-agains, these evangelicals, when you hear them speaking, no matter what the question is, they can't leave Jesus out of it for two seconds," he says, his voice rising. "It's OK when you're a child. Children have an imaginary friend. When you get to be an adult, no more imaginary friends. But Jesus is their imaginary friend. Everywhere they go, everything they do, Jesus is along. Oh, Christ."
It's odd that there are people who find him to be funny, when all he really seems to be is dismal.
Check out Maher's diatribe against religion - typical liberal atheistic hatred of God. Confirms what we've been discussing.
"A little man gaining speed on the down side of the curve."
Well said, well said. And funny. And sad as well, so many think like him.
Just because he's ignorant about what happens after death (and everything that happens beforehand, obviously) he arrogantly assumes everyone else is as benighted as himself. He looks in the mirror and thinks everyone is like him.
IOW, he thinks he's god.
I have found that atheists hate all theists. In this country there are far more Christians than other theists. Buddhists aren't theists, though. And since Muslims seem to have all gone insane - at least the ones who call the shots - liberals have great fellow feeling for them. Muslims, for instance, have happily killed and tortured with equal abandon Christians, Jews and Hindus since about 650-700 AD.
Is it arrogant when you travel to look at a road map to see where you are and where you are going?
Is is arrogant to look at the map that was sent by God to direct us to the final destination.(the Word of God/Bible)?
Bill is lost and the sad thing is, he has access to a map but refuses to look at it. In our "arrogance" we should be praying for him.
Thomas Hardy once wrote a poem called Hap in which he talked about how he wished God would reveal just enough of himself so that he could believe that things weren't just happening by chance.
But I have long suspected that God could have come to him in clouds of glory, showing him the wounded hands and side, with lightning flashes and choirs of Angels, and Hardy would have thought he just had a hallucination.
Many people believe this way because they want to believe this way, and are pathetic in their desire to make the world fit their conception of it being a dark and dismal place...and usually they see themselves as heroically standing up for something in the darkness, like a character in a Wagnerian opera, who at his peak is so noble to look at, but in the end will die a tragic death.
Or else they have bought into "Life's a B**** and then you die" and they want you to be as miserable as them.
Whatever is motivating them, be sure they have an agenda - and they are out to strip you of your faith.
They need our prayers. They don't know how pathetic it is to ask people to trade happiness knowing God for misery.
I agree. And the common streak throughout is their arrogance - refusing to humbly submit to God through prayer - that "I'm lost, helpless, and I need You".
I'd be careful about making Einstein your standard.
After all, Einstein was Jewish. He believed in God, but he didn't believe in Jesus.
There is nothing so blind as those who will not see. No one expends a wealth of emotion, and obsessive emotion at that, on something that doesn't exist. To do so would be.....well....insane.
Mahr's obsessive hatred, along with that of every other secular atheist who obsesses over God, proves God's existence.
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