Bill Maher: the Anti-Christ

My sister and I began the long, painful walk toward agnosticism quite some time ago, I suppose. But when you're raised in a fundamentalist church that tells you that you're right and everyone else (Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Protestants and certainly those pesky Catholics) are going to Hell, well, you tend to believe what you have been spoon fed.

One of the last times my mother tried to have a religious conversation with me, I told her that the only difference between her fundamentalist church and radical Muslims who fly planes in to buildings is one of degree. She didn't like that. I told her that if she were born in rural Pakistan with the name Fatima, she wouldn't be professing her love of Jesus Christ. She didn't like that either. Religion--like sports team loyalties--is usually established by the place you exit the womb.

In a philosophy of religion class I took, we read a great book called The Two Sources of Morality and Religion by Henri Bergson. The main point I remember from the book is that Bergson thinks religion was necessary in human history because it kept us from killing one another. I suppose people could argue all day about whether we really inherently "know" that killing, for example, is "wrong" or whether we are taught that, but for the sake of argument, let's say we do not know that upon birth. Now throw a man in the sky into the picture. He's watching. Always. He's judging. Constantly. And all of the sudden, people shape up a bit. You may never get caught and prosecuted for that murder... but the man in the sky will get you when you die. Ooooh. Scary.

Bill Maher's documentary Religulous recently came to DVD. And what I like so much about it is that if Henri Bergson provided one of the bookends to the argument, Bill Maher now provided the other. Maher argues that (1) because we now have the capacity to kill each other with the press of a nuclear button, (2) that some religious people want to bring about the rapture so Christ can return, (3) that other religious people want to kill anyone who is an infidel and/or won't convert, and (4) we're all so blissfully certain that our religion is right and everyone else is wrong, our imaginary beliefs may very well bring about our own demise. After all, it's ordained, right? The Book of Revelations and all that jazz.

Thus, Bergson argued that in our more primitive years we needed religion to keep us from killing one another, while Maher argues that in our more advanced nuclear era we must abandon religion or we will kill one another.

It's scary to think that Maher is probably closer to the truth than we know. A nuclear war prompted by religious extremists is frighteningly likely. And wouldn't that just be a lovely way to bring about The End of Days? Killing each other because we wanted an imaginary god to return to take us to a Heaven that doesn't exist? Ending the world for nothing more than a well written Grimm's fairytale?

Maher, like myself, is not an atheist; he's agnostic. Atheists not only do not believe in a god, they believe there cannot be a god. Agnostics just simply say: I don't know... and neither do you. But as Maher points out, it's that very doubt that is humble. Does not Christianity preach humility? When I see a radical Christian preacher saying Islam is the greatest threat to humanity and when I see a radical Muslim preaching death and destruction to the West, I see the same thing: certainty. We. Are. Right.

I see the same thing in the faces of the brainwashed children in the documentary Jesus Camp. There's a particularly obnoxious young girl under the age of 10 who said she was so shocked and sad when she learned that the rest of the world wasn't all Christian. She walks up to strangers and gives them pamphlets--at her parents' urging--trying to save their souls. How is this not a form of child abuse? (The only time I want small children approaching me with paperwork is if they're taking my Girl Scout Cookie order.) Instilling such certainty in a child is a violation of parental duties when the responsible thing to do would be to teach her as much as possible but remind her that no one really knows who--if anyone--is up in the clouds. Oh, and by extension, if we don't really know, we probably shouldn't be killing each other in a worldwide pissing contest to prove that my god is better than your god.

Faith sustains some people. And I "get" that. But there's a fine line between leaning on your beliefs and being swallowed by them. I think most of us would agree that it's child abuse when extremist Christian parents deny their children medicine or life-saving operations because they think that praying will cure their sick child. But lower the stakes a bit. What about the person who encounters a problem in his life--big or small--and just... prays. Put it in God's hands, right? So instead of researching, learning, and most importantly trying to fix the problem, the person just throws their hands up in faith-sustaining prayer (despair?) and lets the big man upstairs handle it. If this person is a believer, he will feel better. He thinks it will get taken care of. And that lack of stress alone may convince him that someone--somewhere--is fixing things. But if there's no one there... that person has just wasted plenty of time that he could have been using to fix it... without metaphysical help. Multiply this scenario over the span of a lifetime, and you have one very unfortunate person with lots of wasted time.

"Please, God, make my husband stop beating me!" Sadly, the woman who utters those words is going to feel the back of a hand again long before she feels the hand of God lifting her from her home. Picking up the phone and dialing "911" and saying, "Please, officer, make my husband stop beating me," would have been a far more effective tactic. Isn't this, instead, what we should be teaching our children?

Bill Maher focuses on the big picture: our staunch beliefs will bring about the end of the world in a sick self-fulfilling prophecy. But the problem trickles down into places as unfortunately common as everyday domestic abuse. What a better world this might be if we put down our Bibles, stopped waiting for unanswered prayers to be heard, and started changing the world on our own.