bill maher on the daily show

Now, let me be clear. I respect religion as much as I oppose it. Is there value in religion? Of course there is, and if it brings comfort to people, so be it. My problem with religion is passive ignorance and when religion becomes someone's ruling ideology. For example, to say that all homosexuals are immoral and hell-bound because it's written in a book is incredibly restrictive and denies homosexuals an existence. But I digress. Religion has value. I'm an agnostic, not an atheist, and I have the exact same thoughts that Bill Maher does, shown here promoting his movie Religulous on The Daily Show. It's almost as though he read my thoughts (although I'm certainly not okay with fake piety)... and I put this later clip first as not to turn anyone off. Maher's not criticizing so much as questioning, and why is questioning ever a bad thing?


Some highlights:

"In your introduction, I heard you say that Bill Maher will say there is no god. I don't say there is no god; I'm not an atheist because I find atheism to be a mirror of the certainty of religion, and I don't like certainty about the next world because we can't know."

"I'm just asking questions. And it's amazing that these are questions that people are never confronted with because "faith" is such a magic word in this country. When you say "that's my faith," then all bets are off. You can't go there. Well, I went there. But I'm just asking questions, like why is faith good, why doesn't God just defeat the devil, [...] what's the difference between the devil and the Anti-Christ. [...] What we found out is that religious people know so little about religion."

"Our boy needs to be a little more forceful, don't you think? Don't you think he needs to jab a little more? He seems a little too professorial. I'd like him to be a little, you know, 'Honky, please.' Some catchphrase." Also -- "There you go again, grandpa!"

And Maher's whole "Jesus-is-God" thing is hilarious, not so much in what he says but how he says it.