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Thursday, October 2, 2008 12:00 AM

Bill Maher vs. the "talking snake"

The HBO host and comedian talks about "Religulous," his onslaught against the religious idiocy that threatens to deliver America to Sarah Palin and her fellow "space god" worshipers.

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  • Friday, October 3, 2008 11:54 AM

    the lacunae of religion

    Again, this is limited by my lack of familiarity with other than judeo-christian thought, but as far as i know it applies to pretty much every other religion, with the possible exception of scientology...

    What does religion tell us about.. the cosmos? Other planets? How come nobody mentioned that they exist, let alone that the stars would have their own set of planets. Did the Creator decide to put intelligent life on them or not? Do they worship God as well, or are they heathens we can treat like Native Americans? We could use some moral guidance on these subjects before we get out there and start messing around.

    And what about DNA? If species are just hammered out of clay rather than by evolution, why bother making them backwards compatible in the basic operating system? And on a more practical note on the same topic, any advice on the morality of handling the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between human and nonhuman, which the scriptures seem to treat as firm and inviolable?

    Quantum mechanics? If anything would seem to rival the most abstruse mystical concepts, it would be wave/particle duality, the Uncertainty Principle, the whole probabilistic nature of what we discern as hard reality; might as well toss in relativity there, too. No need for Kaballah when you have Schroedinger.

    I mean, in between telling us that the universe was created in 6 days, and woman was created from Adam's rib, it would have been awesome, literally, to toss in "and by the way, everything you know and believe to be reality is merely highly probable, and things which you believe to be physically impossible happen all the time; you'll understand when you invent the tunnel diode".

    Any religious authorities opining on why none of the really transcendent discoveries of modern science are addressed in the Bible? I mean, with the limited subject matter, it almost reads like it was written by Middle Eastern shepherds a few thousand years ago, rather than dictated by the Creator and Lord of the universe. All He had to do was toss in a couple of hints to the current vision of reality, which would have been meaningless to Moses but would certainly have enhanced the book's reputation today. I mean, look at how well Nostradamus is doing.

    Maybe, whether the Bible and its derived relgions are the direct work of the Divinity or not, they aren't meant to be a science text? Heck, it can't even provide you the correct value of pi to a decent approximation.

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