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• Thursday, October 2, 2008 12:20 PM

  If you have all the answers, you're too stupid to understand the questions.

  Back on his ABC show, Maher had (retired) Episcopal Bishop Spong on, at least once that I remember; he's the kind of intelligent, questioning, religious adherent who wouldn't draw Maher's scorn. The episode I remember, Spong basically eviscerated one of those interchangable fundamentalist Republican cutsie-pie spokesgirls in one sentence, calling her beliefs idiotic. Mahers was pleased, as was I.

  And I'm not anti-religious, anti-Christian, anti-faith, or the antiChrist; what I am is antiidiot. No, not even that; what I am against is idiots in positions where they wield power in service of their idiocy, whether that idiocy is religious, scientific, financial, managerial, or political in nature.

  Furthermore, this fundamentalist nonsense is hardly the return to that "old fashioned religion" it claims to be, nor is the combination of faith with questioning any kind of new fangled heresy. The great religious figures of the past, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition which I have studied with all the depth of my required humanities option in college, were clearly heavily invested in interpreting the scriptures and the thoughts of those who preceded themselves, and would have been much more at home with Spong's current dismissal of virgin birth as nonsense than Spong's victim's ingenuous Biblical literalism warped into the service of her prejudices.

  —gzuckier Read gzuckier's other letters
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