"Most religions were pulled into the modern Enlightenment with their fingernails dug into the past"
By Michael Shermer, January 18, 2015
This isn’t an original SALON article, it’s an excerpt from Shermer’s new book The Moral Arc. (When he’s not attacking religion, Shermer writes books like Why People Believe Weird Thingsabout pseudoscience, and books about Darwin.)
Bill Maher is an atheist who made famous documentary called Religulous attacking various religions. In a 1997 interview, he repeated this joke about his own religious background:
On my first Tonight Show I said I was half Jewish and half Catholic, so I used to bring a lawyer into confession. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I think you know Mr. Cohen.” Johnny Carson loved that.
But if you search for Maher and Muslim, or Maher and Islam in Salon’s archives, or Maher and Islam, you get pages of stuff not saying "Bill Maher is right about religion", but going on about how secretly nice Muslims are, and how evil Maher is for criticizing them, and finding some Muslim journalist or spokeman to say it.
October 9, 2014 There are six words that sum up Bill Maher’s basic case against Islam: “I’m the liberal in this debate.” No, unfortunately, Maher was not the liberal in that debate.
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