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Andrew: This is a really good and thoughtful interview. I'm a Maher fan and watch his show regularly, but he is just out of his element in his rants against religion and not very funny. I'll probably watch his movie anyway. You got in some good jabs.
I am an 80 yr old protestant Christian life time church going person who has never been a Biblical fundamentalist and never ceased to read history, science, politics, philosophy, poetry, Shakespeare, etc. etc. When Bill says that being "religious" is by definition "ridiculous" or irrational there is nothing left to talk about. He has no respect for religious people of any type or any faith. He thinks that religious people by definition have no doubts and are all about "beliefs", about which they are certain. Not true. Moreover, the priest in the Vatican who said they were "all stories" is absolutely right. But Bill doesn't understand that such "stories", like great poetry, theater, art, etc. carry deep truths. He doesn't appreciate, for example, that both sacred scriptures, like the Bible, and theology itself is a language of mythos, of poetry, all of which convey "truths" that cannot be conveyed by science and rationality because that language cannot accommodate it. Religion is all about "meaning". That it gets seriously distorted and turned into "reliculosity" is just part of the human condition. We are not gods but we sometimes behave as if we are. Then things get really bad. Bill doesn't understand any of this. Andrew Sullivan has called him on this powerfully on Bill's show. You can't be a serious critic of something so pervasive in humanity as religion if you don't understand it and don't respect those who do.
