Bill Maher on Evil

[godless_hobbit]

Here is a transcript of Bill Maher's excellent monologue from the September 16 episode of Real Time. It made me applaud, and I finally managed to track it down online:

And finally, New Rule: For Christ's sake, no more devil movies. "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" opened huge last week, and it surprised a lot of people, mostly because Owen Wilson

Comments

[rosepurr]

Are you familar with the Christian ficiton writer Frank E. Peretti? He was really popular a few years back, and he kind of heralded the Christian fiction in the "Left Behind" series and all of that.

I *hate* his work, and Bill Maher has neatly summed up why. His first two books blamed all of our vices (and some of the things that I consider virtues) on demons. There were demons for fear and hate and anger and lust. Literally, little demons that lived within people.

The books were supposed to be fiction, but a lot of people really bought his hype- that demons are real and ultimately that we are possessed by them.

Really, that's one of the scarier aspects of Christianity anyway- that human beings are incapable of goodness without Christ, and therefore are inherently evil. If it is our nature to be evil, regardless of whether it is "human nature" or "demons" than our actions are excusable. It's a not a pretty conclusion nor are the consequences of living our life as if that is true.

[godless_hobbit]

Ahh my goodness, how you unearth memories I thought were dead and buried. Yes, I read Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness when I was 15 or 16 on the recommendation of my youth pastor. Actually, you haven't been reading me long so you may not know that I was a Christian until about 2000, when I began to start doubting. But at the time, I loved those books, sigh =(

I can say that I never really believed there were literal demons and angels fighting in and around me, but the conceit and conceptualization was neat, I thought at the time

[rosepurr]

I think some Christians have genuine faith and believe that they have a relationship with a loving, paternalistic god.

They have faith in that god, and not in a fear of hell and a reward of heaven. Some of them don't even believe in heaven and hell, actually.

Having said that, I firmly think that Christianity is an inherently flawed system that rewards false piety and teaches us to repress much that is good about humanity.

[rosepurr]

Oh, I also meant to recommend some other books:

Why Christianity Should Change or Die
by Bishop Shelby Spong

anything written by Bertrand Russell. :)

[lilgeorgiawhore]

The religious population has a habit of deferring blame for their actions. The mythology of the Christian religion says that Jesus died for their sins so that Christians could be saved and cleansed. What else is side-stepping guilt than to have someone else die for your own choices and actions? "Satan" (the way Christians have invented him as a single being that can be easily identified and, yes, lives outside of us) is manipulated in the same way -- whenever a person makes a choice that leaves them feeling guilty or that they regret or hurts other people, they simply point to this hellish being of their own making and blame it all on him: Satan made me do it, Satan tempted me. Sure, I may have killed a man, but I was possessed at the time and it was his hand that fired the gun. It's all an easy and simple way to live life scot-free because nothing is your fault it's always Satan's, and even then, any sins you do commit will be cleansed away in a yearly ritual.

[randellwolff]

I was just reading yesterday an article about the Chronicles of Narnia film that came out this weekend that was blasting the film because it was personifying evil in the form of the Witch, etc. Seems like this is an un-Christian idea. Since God is all good and created everything, then he would have to have created the devil. He couldn't have, so the devil therefore doesn't exist. All evil flows from human action and sin, and God makes out with a clean record. Heh. Interesting way of getting around the problem of evil, but of course the author used it to blast Lewis and Tolkien, since they created fantasy worlds where evil was personified.

Anyway. You can find the article over at Salon.com if you want to read it.