THIS IS A LONG ARTICLE AND REPLY BUT PLEASE READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE THANX
Refuting the likes of Fox News’ popular talk-show host Bill O’Reilly and the razor-tongued television pundit and spewer-out of bestsellers Ann Coulter may seem pointless. They say the same things time and again to Fox’s mostly white, badly informed audience which is in danger of dying off; the median age of O’Reilly’s viewers is seventy-two. However, when it comes to religion, much of what they say reflects tacit anti-rationalist assumptions shared by far too many people from all walks of life – assumptions that must be challenged and refuted.
A case in point: on April 2, O’Reilly opened his show with a segment entitled “The War on Christianity Getting Even Worse.” In it, he provides a distressing video overview of recent terrorist attacks against and executions of Christians in Africa and Pakistan, and declares that “Christians are being slaughtered all over the place.” He segues to the United States, where “verbal attacks against Christians are the headline,” and “some far-left people . . . are smearing Americans who oppose things like abortion and gay marriage,” from which he concludes that “it is open season on Christians.”
The evidence? “Well-known religion hater” Bill Maher (shown calling religions “stupid and dangerous”) has a “free pass to bash people of faith,” with his “vicious behavior toward Christianity largely ignored in the press.”
O’Reilly presents results from an Associated Press – Gallup poll according to which 57 percent of Americans favor letting “wedding-related businesses with religious objections” opt out of serving gay marriages, as well as a Public Religion Research Institute survey showing that 54 percent of Americans believe their religious liberty is under threat.
“Most Americans get” what’s going on, he says. Nevertheless, “secular progressives have succeeded in putting people of faith on the defensive,” with a prime example of this being the pizzeria in Walkerton, Indiana, which, in a report aired by a local television channel, declared it would refuse to bake pizzas for a gay wedding.
(The shop’s owner added that “We’re not discriminating against anyone. It’s just that’s our belief, and everybody has the right to believe anything.” Her internally inconsistent statement went unchallenged by the reporter.)
O’Reilly informs us that “all hell descended on the store, as secular zealots threatened all kinds of things.” He then flashes a clip of Newt Gingrich denouncing “lynch mobs.” (No “lynch mobs” besieged the pizzeria, which, following its homophobic proclamation, managed to rake in donations of more than $50,000 from supporters. O’Reilly omits mentioning this.) Who’s to blame for the mounting perils Christianity faces in America? Religious leaders, both Catholic and Protestant, for failing to “push back” against the secular onslaught.
But facts rarely hinder O’Reilly. To deepen his audience’s (mis)understanding of the (non-existent) war on Christianity, he then turns to Ann Coulter. As one might expect, Coulter blames the liberal media and progressives for “hating on” the Christians.
“It’s Christianity that the Left hates most of all,” she says, “because that is the foundation of our country . . . and all of our freedoms come from that, freedom of association, freedom of speech.”
In this, “the most consequential nation on earth,” she says, Christians would prefer to change “the bedpans of Ebola patients in Nigeria rather than stand up to the New York Times and stand up against abortion and fight against these bullies.” The dastardly liberals and their media are trying to “tear down the heart of this country by going directly at the heart of America, which is Christianity.”
And Christianity as the “foundation of our country?”
Coulter, formerly a constitutional lawyer, could knowingly pronounce such a monstrous untruth only to mislead further the already historically illiterate – that is, Fox’s audience, dumbed-down by watching shows such as O’Reilly’s and taking them seriously. That Christian zealots initiated the mass European migration to North America no one disputes. They did not, however, found the country; the secularist Founding Fathers, who mostly regarded religion with deep suspicion, did.
Check no further than Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state” and, obviously, the Constitution’s First Amendment (which protects free speech from faith by forbidding Congress from establishing a state religion), as well as the more obscure Article VI, which declares that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”
If Christianity really were the “foundation of our country,” by Coulter’s logic the Founding Fathers would have included an amendment making Bible study mandatory for all aspirants to public office.
This is sophistry of the most contemptible variety. By such unscrupulous subterfuge the faithful (and their apologists) commit treason against reason, betray honest discourse, and hope to render their (preposterous) dogmas immune to disproof and open to limitless interpretation, depending on their needs of the moment. Either an objective proposition (say, that Jesus was the son of God, or that the Prophet Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse) is true or it is untrue. It cannot be whatever the one advancing it says it is; much less, true for some, but not for others.
O’Reilly himself clings to this New-Age idea that we all have a right to our personal, customized truths. In his 2006 interview with Richard Dawkins, O’Reilly admits that he’s “not positive that Jesus was God,” but he’s “throwin’ in with Jesus, rather than throwin’ in with you guys [atheists], because you guys can’t tell me how it all got here.” A minute or so later, he announces that he’s “stickin’ with Judeo-Christian philosophy and my religion, Roman Catholicism, because it helps me as a person.”
That doesn’t mean it’s true, replies Dawkins.
“Well, it’s true for me,” says O’Reilly. “See, I believe it.”
“You mean true for you is different from true for anybody else? . . . Something’s either got to be true or not.”
That O’Reilly’s faith helps him feel good has no bearing on its truth and certainly cannot stand as an argument in its favor. The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw summed it up memorably: “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.”
Consolations based on a false religious premise pose their own problem: what happens when they are exposed as unfounded? The believer, having never matured, having never really advanced beyond the childhood realm of wishful thinking, is suddenly rendered defenseless before the challenges — the terrors, even — of mortal life.
What really flabbergasts O’Reilly and Coulter is that nonbelievers are no longer keeping mum about the rank stupidity embodied in Christianity. A virgin birth? A rib-cum-woman? A man walking on water? The vicarious redemption of “sin” through a cruel and unusual act of human sacrifice? All these fantasticalities offend thinking, sane individuals. No one should expect us to accept the truth of such fantasticalities or to allow dogma arising from them to determine discourse on how we live, which laws pass, and whom we marry, without fierce resistance.The one thing both O’Reilly and Coulter do get right is that there is a war going on, but it’s not between hapless Christians and “vicious” atheists. It is between rationalists who seek to live in ways they reason to be best, and the faithful cleaving to fatuous fables and Paleolithic preachments inscribed in ancient books that should be pulped, or at best preserved as exhibits for future students majoring in anthropology, with minors in mental derangement.i believe in God and Jesus i don't put restrictions or perimeters on that belief . i do wonder about the Biblical writings it seems to me that the scribes were writing more in tune with the beliefs of the time in the Old Testament and as time passed we saw changes and The New Testament is written, what i wonder is who changed God or the scribes who now write for that time??? we now have more less restrictive teachings to down right blasphemous hate of those we were first told that we should love as we love ourselves. once again i ask who changed God or the new leaders of so many religions we seem to want to demonize in favor of their religion being the true one.
http://biblehub.com/matthew/22-39.htm
everyone vested in one or the other organized religions defends theirs and denounces other but who gives them the permission to speak for God or Jesus nonetheless they do on a daily basis it is their fall back when what they do is wrong and they need something to either validate or free them from that guilt if that is true what does it say it's okay to be Godless then call me if you need to be absolved???
Catholics get to basically whatever and then can go and talk to a priest of maybe questionable morals to intercede on behalf of God and grant them Absolution for it seems a very menial effort of sorrow, who's idea was it God's or those who assume to speak for Him/Her they are basically saying it's okay whatever as long as you tell Father Joe and say 10 Hail Mary's. i'm baptist brn and raised i attended Catholic church for 2 years but not by choice i was a teen living with relatives in different states.
Baptist well as i see it they are human too and subject to the same frailty's we pray to be absolved or have the minister again maybe of questionable morals pray with or for us but who gives them that power God or us??? i left my church for along time i went back i asked questions of elders and deacons to be told "you can't question God's motives, he moves in mysterious ways" which i translated int "i don't know why you asking me, just do as we say not as we do", then they decided i needed i guess a re-evaluating learning process so they wanted me to attend the Jr. church children's Sunday School, i left again.
i found out later the new pastor had political ambitions to be mayor, they hire the wrong guy, as to other religions i have no knowledge of their teachings so i can't speak from experience which is the best reference.
back to article the right wing religious cult is more an indoctrinating part than soul saving God teaching org. just look at the things they do and say while crying that the rest of us are trying to usurp their right to religious freedom which is right wing speak for "let us be the racist and bigots or churches teach us to be and you should follow, if you are not with us you are against us" and there they have it a homegrown finger pointing to the real enemy of their religious freedom, to bad the flocks don't recognize that in their holier than thou stance they don't see or in some cases see that they are the enemy that they are being directed to believe we are.
bottom line folks we are obviously free to think whatever we want in our minds but here in the greatest country in the world voicing it can be dangerous to you and yours to the tune of racial or bigoted exclusion to death or voter suppression which is still denying you a voice heard outside of your own mind by those same elements. we talk about other countries and their deplorable treatment of their people, ask yourself if you are not White and super rich are you being treated so much better and do you really have those freedoms republicans constantly refer to or are they too missing maybe in the same place where those WMD's are???
