(Summer reruns while I work on a script. Here’s a favorite. Don’t forget to check the archive.)
I watch Bill Maher, religiously. Every week. Like church.
He speaks truth to power in a manner so cool and rational and funny, it’s refreshing and entertaining beyond shit.
No matter who the guest or panelist is, he has a way to instantly disarm them with pure reason. It’s hard to argue when someone is brandishing the cold, hard, indisputable facts.
Unless, of course, the subject of religion comes up.
Suddenly, this cool, calculated rationalist begins ranting and raving; practically foaming at the mouth about gullibility, ignorance, stupidity and the ‘fairy tales’ of the believers.
To quote Shakespeare, “Methinks thou doth protest too much.”
How is a raving atheist spewing contempt and intolerance for believers in Jesus or any other faith any different than an evangelical Christian on the other side spewing condemnation and intolerance for heathen non-believers?
They are really mirror images of the same basic intolerance.
Who CARES what someone else believes? Nobody really knows. Why does it bug you so much, Bill? If someone wants to believe in Jesus, Mohammed, Scientology, Leprechauns, or the magic underwear of Mormonism, what’s it to you?
Sure, if someone uses religion to incite hatred and violence and war (as so often has been done throughout history, past and current), then expose it and condemn the hypocrisy of the agenda behind it. But don’t become one of them.
CNN has a religion column and 90 percent of the people who post comments to the column appear to be atheists angrily mocking or condemning the idea of faith, God, or religion. Religious columns online provoke more responses from atheists than actual followers of one faith or the other. What does this say?
Again, methinks they doth protest too much.
I have a theory that many atheists, and probably Bill Maher included, are burned believers. Why else would they get so riled up over what someone else believes?
At some time in their lives, perhaps in the early devout Catholic upbringing of the half-Jewish Bill Maher, they fervently believed in something. Maybe it was the power of prayer. Maybe it was the saving power of grace. Or maybe it was a miracle that just didn’t come through. 
They lost a parent or precious loved one or even a pet; the bully unjustly got away with his crime; or their parents stopped loving each other and divorced. So they threw away prayers or faith in anything beyond belief in the random cruelty or callousness of life, and embraced pure rationalism.
And now, any time someone else brings up faith or religion, it stirs their blood and those inner emotions and triggers a deep anger at something they once might have believed in and have since lost. How DARE someone else have faith in something?
It’s just a theory.
But I would also remind atheists or non-believers attempting art that almost every great masterpiece in the world of art or music was inspired by faith in something bigger than, or beyond the ego or rationalism of the artist.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (that’s Jesus in man’s ‘Joy’ there)
Mozart’s Requiem
The Beatles “Let It Be”
Michelangelo’s Pieta or David or Sistine Chapel
Even a secular artist such as Paul Simon found his greatest inspiration in gospel music when he composed, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
And what would Soul Music – think Marvin Gaye, Al Green or Otis Redding – be without the ‘soul?’ Probably just lifeless, uninspired programmed crap like the Black-Eyed Peas, “I Got a Feeling,” who’s only inspiration appears to be greed for a dance floor remix that has a shelf life about the same as milk.
John Lennon sang “imagine no religion” in his classic, “Imagine,” but he wasn’t talking about God or faith. He meant the use of religion by men as a form of control over others. And keep in mind he wrote this song after extensive experimentation in primary therapy writing cathartic songs like, “God,” and “Mother,” where he was screaming about the loss of … well, his mother. It happened when he was young. He probably prayed to have her in his life and felt betrayed. And he got angry. And later … he protested too much.
But he must have made his own peace eventually forgiving everyone else their silly beliefs in faith or God or religion or alcohol or pills or magic underwear, because one of the last NUMBER ONE hit songs he ever had was the very positive and cheerful, “Whatever Gets You Through the Night.”
It’s all right. It’s all right.
Here’s a simple test to determine whether you believe in some form of God or spiritual life.
Have you ever meditated? Do you believe in the power of meditation?
We’re not talking prayers. Prayer is ASKING for something from above or beyond yourself.
Meditation is LISTENING for something beyond yourself.
If you believe in the power of meditation, then you are not an atheist.
Because meditation is going within yourself to find a silence or inner peace beyond the chatter of your own mind.
It’s letting go of the ego or mask of identity you’ve created for yourself that pretends you really are separated from anyone or anything else.
It’s going within to find that inter-connectivity.
In physics, it’s called The Unified Field Theory. Everything in the universe; solid, gas, or liquid is really just dancing particles of energy suspended in space. Everything really is just ONE thing in a field or matrix.
In metaphysics, this inter-connectivity is called the Collective Unconscious, or Universal Consciousness.
In religion, followers call it God.
And to poets and dreamers, it’s called … Love.
Believe in that, Bill, and you just might find the inner peace and tolerance that evade holier-than-thou zealots who simply can’t “live and let live,” or “Believe what you want, and let believe.”
Believe in that, Bill, and you just might believe again.
I believe in you, Bill.
— A. Wayne Carter
