Mike Huckabee & Bill Maher Discuss Religion

For years, whenever I saw a campus preacher going at it with some sinnister nonbeliever I’d stop and admire the latter, maybe even put in my own $.02.

I used to relish the process, the argument, setting up a sand castle just to smoosh it down and laugh.  I learned a lot by watching debates like this one, between Bill Maher and Mike Huckabee, sharp atheist and well-versed zealot, respectively.

But now I’m not so invigorated by that predictable thud I hear when the bottom falls out on the religious guy’s flimsy argument.  And it will fall out, time permitting.  The only hope for the devout religious one is to run out the clock; so that the commercial break knockout point.  By the time Geico’s geckos & cavemen & pseudofamous noncelebs finish being witty, most American viewers won’t even remember which topic the talk show people talking about–much less who had made sense and who just sounded stupid.

Stupidity is less amusing to me lately, more sad than it is entertaining.  Any dents religion gave to me during my formative years I can now really say have smoothed out.  For I know that whatever unease I felt at wanting not to fear death was nothing next to what my pious youth leaders would have suffered had they really heard and pondered my questions.  I should be over that now, those days in the church basement, being told not to come back, I wasn’t good enough for God.  It was as it was, because it had to be.

Reason was absent in our conversations; and I could not and would not believe the logicless answers offered in its place–the contradictions and the hypocrisy and the tragedy of simple minds taking great pains to remain simple.

But they need that simplicity, that hope–to guide them through the scariest question we face, the one for which there is no proof or definitive answer and never can be.  And that’s where Huckabee hits the nail on the head in his debate with Maher.  Why not live and let live?  Believing in a God is more important to them than debunking the myth of His existence is to me.  If faith brings purpose & hope & meaning to their lives, why should I bust their balls?  What improvements could possibly come to my life by stripping others of purpose & hope & meaning?

And now, to pose an even more disturbing question; consider the most mentally unstable of all fanatics, the ones with faulty wiring for whom religion is the only blockade between themselves and insanity, a necessary crutch that keeps them from going postal.  Would we want to live in a world where all those people, who right now literally need God suddenly don’t have Him?

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