Religion
Related: About this forumBill Maher, American hero: Laughing at religion is exactly what the world needs
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The proper response to religion, riddled as it is with absurdities, is, thus, laughter, either of the belly-slapping, table-pounding kind or the pitying, head-shaking sort. Laughter, but also outrage. After all, those who take such absurdities as manifestations of the Godhead have, especially since the Reagan years, hogged the moral high ground and commandeered American politics, polluting public discourse with their reactionary cant and halting progress in reproductive rights, science (think the Bush-era ban on stem cell research) and education (to wit: stubborn attempts to have oxymoronic “Intelligent Design” rubbish taught in schools). Look abroad, and the panorama of savagery religion must answer for curdles the blood. No rationalist could contemplate all this entirely unnecessary faith-driven regress and backsliding with anything but anger, tempered with despair. If we want to do true and lasting good in this world, we are morally obligated to fight faith in the open, and root it out from every nook and cranny in which it hides.
Facing such a task, a desire for comic relief is only natural. Bill Maher is where anger, outrage and religion meet – in humor. (This essay will address only his stance on religion.) There is nothing un-American about his faith-bashing – far from it. Thomas Jefferson, who denied the divinity of Jesus, wrote that, “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions” – and what is religion but a jumble of unintelligible propositions about our cosmos and its origins? Yet Maher has incited no small amount of ire among both the faith-addled masses (fully two-thirds of Americans believe Jesus actually rose from the dead, and almost half expect him to return in the coming decades) and their muddleheaded sympathizers for his brutal broadsides against religion, and Islam in particular. Bigot! Racist! Islamophobe! they cry, at times bemoaning the “offense” they purport to have suffered from his words, and illustrating how far the cognitive capacities of so many of us have deteriorated since Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority began meddling in politics. (This can be no coincidence.) Their real message to Maher: Shut up!
Name-calling is the last resort of losers — in this case, losers waging an unwinnable war against the spread of godlessness. And “shut up!” is the last command of which the Greats of the Enlightenment and their heirs would have approved. The 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty, put it best, referring to suppressed speech: “If the opinion is right, [the shutter-uppers] are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” If Maher is really so wrong, why not let him hoist himself by his own petard?
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JEFFREY TAYLER Salon.
http://www.salon.com/2015/04/26/bill_maher_american_hero_laughing_at_religion_is_exactly_what_the_world_needs/
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Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)Their soul reason for doing it is to mask their evil.
calimary
(81,466 posts)to ayn rand.
I have yet to see any of the big televangelists and other snake-oil salesmen and phony religionistas and "Christianists" quote the Beatitudes in any of their speechifying.
NOT ONE of them ever reminds any of their listeners about the Gospel story of Jesus and the rich young man (who went away sadly because he didn't like what Jesus told him to do when he asked how he could follow Him. Jesus said "sell everything you have, give it to the poor, and come follow Me." And the rich young man didn't like what he'd been told, and was reported to have gone away, sadly.)
NOT ONE of them points out that one of the only times Christ ever had a temper tantrum was when He drove the money-changers out of the Temple. It wasn't the poor and needy and lepers and all those "other" "icky" people. It was the merchants and money-changers He ran outta there.
NOT ONE of them mentions Christ's parable about the rich dude and the poor widow in church at pass-the-plate time. The rich guy sashays down the center aisle with this big bag of money and sets it down in front where everybody can see, and Jesus taught that this guy got his reward in everybody's looking at him and paying so much attention to him and being so impressed by his "generosity" but did not win God's favor. By contrast, Jesus taught that the poor widow hid in the shadows, ashamed that all she had was a couple of pennies to donate. Jesus taught that HER contribution was by far the most pleasing to God.
NOT ONE of those. NOT ONE of those stories ever gets mentioned by the sanctimonious pontificating snots and holier-than-thou fucksticks like huckabee and santorum and pat robertson and all those who wrap themselves around the Cross of Christ - and blaspheme, and frankly, SHIT upon the message of Christ (in my opinion).
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)been highly conservative, aligned with and supporting the ruling elites for the last 1800 years or so.
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)That was a buy-in deal.
Republicans think it still works that way only they have it ass backwards.
Instead of rich families competing for them they're competing for rich families.
rug
(82,333 posts)blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)
mountain grammy
(26,648 posts)Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)
beam me up scottie
(57,349 posts)It should go without saying that in the constitutionally secular United States, neither Maher nor anyone else should feel obliged to show deference to Islam — or any other faith. The First Amendment inseparably links the right to free speech with the right to practice the religion of one’s choosing, or not to practice any religion at all. Since faith has historically caused so much strife and led to so much repression, unfettered discourse about it is precisely what must be allowed, no matter what people feel, if they are to be free. Put another way, in a truly civil society the right to free expression trumps the desire of religious folks not to have their feelings hurt. The “offense” argument is, therefore, no argument at all; it is tantamount to a selfish, adolescent insistence on conformity, nothing more. The “offended” just have to grin and bear it. We left high school long ago. It’s time to grow up.
It should be obvious to the observant that demands that Maher respect faith, whether issued from Muslims or the Catholic League’s president, Bill Donohue, all stem from a single, flagrant insecurity – that once people begin mocking religion, begin meeting its gaga assertions and goofy proclamations with guffaws instead of genuflection, with ridicule instead of reverence, then religion stands naked, puny and shriveled before its peering “flock,” the members of which will soon start wondering, “maybe my whole life as a Muslim or Catholic (or whatever) is built on a lie? Maybe I’m a fool to believe all these crazy scriptures? Now that I think about it, I really have so many doubts about them. Maybe I should dump my holy book and read something for grown-ups? Maybe I should check out Bertrand Russell’s “Skeptical Essays” or Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade”? Maybe, after all, as Larkin wrote, religion is just a “vast, moth-eaten musical brocade/Created to pretend we never die?” Maybe I should just start thinking for myself? After all, I’m no child!”
Just as the brilliant satirists of Charlie Hebdo skewer the institutions, precepts and potentates of Islam and Christianity, so Maher devastatingly unloads on religion, and with consummate mordancy, even stridency – as is his right. At this stage in the fight against unreason, against this pernicious attachment we have to wicked old myths in gilt volumes, stridency is necessary, if not sufficient. Nonbelievers are finally making their voices heard in a society programmed to hum along with the numbing cords of faith. Make no mistake about it: This stridency, this anger, flows from a deep wellspring of offense — offense at the utterly groundless pretensions the Abrahamic faiths espouse, chief among which are: I am saved and you are not; I have a hotline to the divine and you do not; I know what the Almighty wants and you do not; I walk with God, and you do not.
nil desperandum
(654 posts)it why?
What about a delusion deserves respect? What about a lie deserves respect?
No one respects fraudsters or con men and religion offers the biggest con game of all...wear a yoke for your church and be forever bound to a system of belief based on nothing. A system of control that promises to right the wrongs of this life with no effort from you other than belief. That's why it sells so well to so many there's little effort involved to be a part of it. Just say you believe and go through the motions and accept the church's idiotic rules and you're part of something, something bigger than yourself.
If more people realized that god was created by man, for man, to make sense of what the average ignorant masses can't understand religion would dissipate even more quickly than it is currently.
I piss people off who make claims about how great things were "before" with respect to religion by asking when that was? When there were no civil rights for blacks? No civil rights for LGBT community? Twice as many murders as there are today? When was this supposedly magical time for religion?
We are living in the best of times today, they could always be better but we live longer, kill each other a lot less than we did just 40 years ago and we are starting to understand that discrimination is wrong against any American, regardless of their sexuality...and all this has taken place as people have moved away from the church...quite amazing really.
beam me up scottie
(57,349 posts)I think they really believe that it was better before uppity women, poc and lgbt people stood up and demanded equal rights.
Things were better then for the privileged, they didn't have to share their status with second class citizens.
Leontius
(2,270 posts)Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)Leontius
(2,270 posts)Again
trotsky
(49,533 posts)It is truly something to see the love of Jesus shine in all your posts. Keep showing the world what a true Christian looks like. You'll do far more harm to your religion than any atheist ever could. Thanks!
cleanhippie
(19,705 posts)Especially when you reaction is contrary to reality.
trotsky
(49,533 posts)Forbidding the mocking of any idea, threatening physical violence in return - these are unacceptable in a free society.
edhopper
(33,615 posts)can we examine the ideas of Islam and see which are good and which are bad?
If we see a number of bad ideas, do we have to still respect them?
trotsky
(49,533 posts)Because as you should know by now, there are NO bad ideas in ANY religion. None at all. It's all wonderful and filled with puppy farts and rainbows.
Bad people (probably atheists!) take their own personal bad ideas and politics and patriarchy and force them ON to religion, duh. 
Starboard Tack
(11,181 posts) Now that is funny edhopper
(33,615 posts)Chris Kyle.
