Thank God for Bill Maher
If I really want to get upset, or listen to some really stupid people, I watch Real Time with Bill Maher. My wife can’t even be in the same room when it is on. I feel her pain as she retreats to a Hallmark movie, but there is something so salvific about it - that means it has a redemptive quality. I am very curious as to how the world has gone mad and why they can believe such dangerous propaganda which doesn’t match reality. They believe in an evolutionary based progress of human beings into enlightened souls that eventually will end war, famine, and pestilence. People like Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, and Jeffery Epstein are flying to private islands with under-age girls on the Lolita Express. They believe there are a different set of rules for the elite and powerful than there are for the rest of us. That is the reason they cover up for each other, while at the same time preach that no one is above the law.
Yes, Bill Maher is at the same time very smart, articulate, and well-informed and twisted, closed off, living in his leftist bubble, and determined to convert others to his cause. Of course, he is a hypocrite. We all are; it is part of being human. Any guy who is on a crusade against global climate change, too much meat in one’s diet, soda pop, and deserts is a real monastic. At the same time, he is an advocate for smoking pot and legalizing it. He also doesn’t think it does any real harm and will not contribute to making America, who he believes is dumb, even dumber. You can see how he is inconsistent. Watching his show is not the way to get smarter but it does help you learn to think - sometimes.
Bill has trouble getting smart articulate conservatives on his show, because they know it’s not a fair fight. It will be three, sometimes four, against one, plus the studio audience. Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, and some other quality conservatives appear from time to time. Mostly, it is retired or back benchers who go on, but the best and the brightest stay away. Additionally, there is the mockery and ridicule. These are not only the condescending heritage of the left. They actually have permission to do all the things they accuse the right of doing but with impunity - it is all very Freudian, projecting onto others what they do themselves. They accuse Donald Trump of being racist, and at the same time they show themselves to be naïve Western Imperialists by arguing that people of color in other nations who have politically incorrect ideology would come around, if only we could reason with them. For example, Islam was founded on the sword. Violence and oppression against women and gays are part of their teachings. They really do hold these views and democracy is not in sync with their teachings. Yet the left won’t give them credit for having their own beliefs. This is the same racist arrogance that led to colonialism.
I think Bill Maher truly believes he is smarter than most and is fair in his political assessment. I would tell him he is fair like Sean Hannity is fair. He also is somewhat an atheist; I do believe he has hedged his bet on this a time or two in keeping open to the idea that there might be something out there. I don’t blame him. He, like any human, would like to live forever; not as a pot head, but in a perfect environment with a perfect body in a perfect society. I would love to see Bernie Sanders in heaven because finally he would have to shut up about the environment and everything will be free. He might miss his comrades like Trotsky, Stalin, Lenin, Marx, and the Marque de Sade. Maybe Larry David would be a good replacement since his SNL impersonation of Bernie is so spot on and he wouldn’t even need to curb his enthusiasm.
Ok, what was this column about? Oh yeah, now I remember - hypocrisy. We evangelicals are hypocrites, too. I think a good quote from my new book, written with Brandon Cook, The Cost of Cheap Grace would be good here. It’s always fun to quote our friend Friedrich Nietzsche, who went mad at the end of his life, but he had a few things sort of right. Here is one of them.:
“The Christians have never practiced the actions Jesus prescribed to them; and the impudent garrulous talk about ‘justification by faith’ and its supreme and sole significance is only the consequence of the Church’s lack of courage and will to profess the works Jesus demanded.”
It is a bit like the Grand Inquisitor said to Jesus in the story from Dostoevsky’s famous novel, The Brothers Karamazov. He had arrested Jesus and went to his cell to give Jesus this advice, “The church is no longer yours to run. It has taken us fifteen hundred years to reduce the burdensome and unrealistic demands you left behind. We can’t have you coming back and undoing all that good work … Go now and do not come back …ever. You must never, never come again!”
Jesus will come again, and I hope he touches down in Bill Maher’s studio during a live session of Real Time with Bill Maher. My wife might even watch that. Finally, that studio audience will shut up, but I still think Bill might try to finish his bit.