I didn’t realize Huckabee had a new show on — take a guess — FOX News, but I found this mini-debate with Bill Maher pretty entertaining:
I like when Maher asks Huckabee if God talks directly to him, and Huckabee says that God speaks even clearer than audibly. What could be clearer than that, you ask? Perhaps God appearing in the flesh in a verifiable way? No, silly — through friends and life experience, of course!
Unfortunately that’s about as subjective as you can get! How can that be considered clearer than talking directly to someone? I guess that means God has spoken to me, too, through friends and my experience, and he clearly says that he doesn’t exist.
It would be like me insisting I was married, but nobody ever seeing my wife (including me), and insisting it’s better this way, because she speaks to me through my friends and my life and through love notes written thousands of years ago by other people. Sheesh.
(via)
I did have a great revelation about Huckabee, he is the best kind of fundamentalist. He is a person who believes, however illogically in a literal Bible, and probably believe religious moderates like me and atheists like you are idiots. However, he obviously is open to dialogue, and is not particularly interested in building up unneccesary barriers. After watching that interview I talked with my dad, and my dad said that in his examination of Huckabee he sees a populist side interested in things fundamentalists don’t normally interest themselves in in politics. This is why I like Maher as well, not a guy interested in demonizing or building barriers. I think that if we are going to have polarized opinions these guys are both examples of how to do it.
That said, you will find me watching Bill Maher weekly. I have no intention of watching Hucakbee again.
God Bless,
Gerald
I am not terribly familiar with Bill Maher. I did hear about his movie, and I meant to watch it, but it must have slipped my mind.
Now that I have seen this clip, I have a great deal of respect for Bill Maher. As he said, humans are tribal by nature, so I guess I’m drawn to him almost entirely because of his religious and political views, which are almost identical to mine (Atheist Libertarians FTW!), but at the same time, he just seems like such a good guy… He’s just so polite and respectful, yet strong, and ready to defend his beliefs.
Huckabee has an interesting way to look at the problem of free will.
If God forced himself on us, Huck reasons, then he’d be like a rapist.
Okay. So by freely choosing to accept him into our soul-vaginas, we are saved. But, the flip side of that coin is that, should we spurn God’s advances, he will toss us into Hell for all eternity to burn in a Lake of Fire.
Now that’s some serious sour grapes. No means no, Jesus!
So if God makes us love him, that’s rape. But if allows us to go to hell instead, it isn’t.
So if I muscle a woman into having intercourse, that’s rape. But if I allow her to choose torture and death, then it isn’t.
Glad we cleared that up.
AH! I still haven’t seen his movie.
I like Maher, and I feel he could be a good debater, but he always comes off as such a pompous ass, and that could alienate a lot of potential listeners to what he has to say.
But I guess Maher wouldn’t be Maher if he wasn’t sarcastic and a know it all.
“So if I muscle a woman into having intercourse, that’s rape. But if I allow her to choose torture and death, then it isn’t.”
I love that. I am totally stealing it.
Baka beat me to it. That’s where Huckabee’s reasoning fails. In the end, God not only rapes unbelievers, but tortures them as well. Nice.
He makes a movie which ‘documents and satirizes religion’, yet he has called himself an apatheist (not caring one way or another about God, gods, deity, what have you).
And such an interesting point of view to believe that all people of faith are delusional, apparently including even MLK and Mother Teresa, and should be checked into Bellevue.
He’s absolutely right – millions died during the Crusades. But has he ever noted the many millions who died during the atheistic regimes of Hitler, Stalin, et al? I doubt it.
People like Maher just leave a sour feeling in my stomach.