My column from Sunday's DMN will sound familiar to many of you, as we discussed this here last week. Excerpt:
One of the "silly gods" denounced by Maher said that, and his words were recorded in a silly book upon which Western civilization was built. That book has a lot to say about the God of Money, none of it good. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul? And: You cannot serve both God and Money.Nor will you find in the Bible's pages a brief for the God of Hedonism. "I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure," mourned the writer of Ecclesiastes, "and behold all was vanity and striving after wind." In the New Testament, St. James warns rather more darkly, "You have lived luxuriously on the earth and led a life of wanton pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter."
That harshes my mellow. Truth to tell, we'd all rather party with Bill Maher than St. James. (Then again, St. James wouldn't drink all your beer and hit on your girlfriend.) But if we're honest with ourselves, we have to confess that for a long time, we've had rather too much Bill Maher and not enough St. James.
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Nicely done. All too often, the "Christian" response to atheists is ham-handed and misses the mark. Yours is spot on.
This is not spot on. Bill Maher doesn't claim atheism; he claims agnosticism. And he regularly rails on the vanity of American culture... in fact he did so at the end of his show Friday night.
Bill Maher viewers know that he's not into beer; he's into marijuana. Holy Rollers don't seem to be curbing drug demand in the country with Jesus, so I agree with Maher: the drug war is a complete joke.
Yeah, you may have been offended by 'Religulous'; but you're missing the mark completely on Maher. I'm telling you this and I'm somebody that believes in God, reads the Bible, reads Augustine and Acquinas, and tries to commit acts of charity and love.
Maher is not the enemy, it's the charlatins with whom he takes issue that are destroying conservatism and Christianity. Maher is like the court jester in Heaven.
It may be possible to have too much of Bill Maher, but it is impossible to have to little of St. James. It was in the honor of such saints that the whoopee cushion was invented.
And with that, Charles Cosanimo loses all credibility.
"A double-minded man is unsteady in all his ways." Got too much of that, CC?
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