The Unreasonable Man

Bill Maher, on Larry King Live yesterday, referred to the Bible as “a collection of Jewish fairytales” that should be kept fully separate from the State. Right on! And last week on Conan, while discussing the list of candidates seeking the GOP nomination, he referred to the ridiculousness of “being a rational person six days a week… and on one day of the week, go(ing) to a building and think(ing) you’re drinking the blood of a 2,000 year-old space god”. He defends the right of anyone to believe this stuff - and his right to call it bullshit.

I’m with him. It is always unexpected and wonderful to hear an American speak rationally about the emperor’s lack of clothes. Can we have more of this please, and more Bill Maher? He may have been kicked off network television (he dared suggest the 9/11 hijackers we not cowards) but he still has a cable show, he does stand-up in Vegas, and he appears on many shows as a guest.

Here’s why I think this needs saying. My life, and yours, is being ruled according to a morality that is religious code invented by desert nomads thousands of years ago, and we, who should know better, defer to this - instead of calling it nonsense. And the religious influence is pervasive - we are a Christian-based society. So our police have a morality squad. (This usually means religious inspired morality, like “sex is bad and must be feared”). We are against euthanasia. We defend the sacrosanct nature of irrational beliefs.

Enough already! Just as we do not need to defer to the idiotic ideas of the Scientologists and their Lord Xenu dropping enemies into Hawaiian volcanoes who now surface as Body Thetans, or the Mormon angel who showed a carpenter Golden Tablets with Seer Stones,I see no reason to defer to any other religious beliefs. What, Tom Cruise believing in Body Thetans is crazy, but the Holy Ghost or Jesus walking on water isn’t? And we have to defer to these fairytale-believers’ morality?

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 11:34 am and is filed under Science and superstition.