Bravo to Maher for saying it like it is. Crazy as batshit is crazy as batshit, and when a society is too cowed by the immoral and slavish ‘respect’ we bestow upon superstition, it’s a great thing that someone with some sense can come out and speak truth to power.

I have no time for rabid, drooling Zionists. 
For me, Maher is best remembered for the free passes he gave to Annthrax Coulter whenever she deigned to grace his show.

Yes, he’s a hypocrite.  Talk about fueling all kinds of grief and mayhem via one’s own selfish behavior: he doesn’t grow his own pot.  He buys it from people who have to commit crimes to feed his habit.  Crimes that have included murder and torture.  Why doesn’t someone ask Bush boot licker Chris Matthews’ best friend (Maher) if he thinks buying marijuana from violent criminals is a good and noble idea?

If Bill believes in what he says than how come he never says anything against Israel?? He always stands with any Israeli policy!

(this comment will not get published for attacks on Israel!)

“Last time I checked, Maher uses an internal combustion engined car to get to work. Given the CLEAR, ACCESIBLE EVIDENCE there is as to how car exhaust contribuites to climate turmoil… how freakin’ rational is THAT?” - unregistered moron

What do you mean “last time I checked”? Are you stalking him?

Religion gets you nowhere; the car gets you to work. Now tough guy, you’ve proven nothing other than you don’t have spell check. Including how YOU get your sad pile of carbon atoms to any employment. Don’t bother, we don’t believe you are employed.

No to state that Maher or anyone for that matter has made trade offs in life. That shouldn’t stop the conversation.

Bill hits one out of the park!

H.E.R.B. - Had Enough Religious Bullshit
http://www.edkrebs.com/herb

I hear you, Maher.  But rationality can’t know everything.  Allow me to demonstrate Zen in its relation to rationality and religion.  I learned this trick tutoring remedial kids on-line.

Religion is only one of the four functions of mythology.  Most people attack religion and toss the others out.  The functions of mythology are:

To awaken a sense of awe in knowing that I and the the Universe are selfsame.

To present an order of the cosmos.

To further the cohesion of a particular group in its relation with a particular place.

To guide humans through the trials of life with dignity and grace.

(Any other students of Joseph Campbell in the house?) When the religious function is perverted and enslaved to the goal of aggrandizing one group by dehunmanizing the Others, as the Nazis did and our politicos do as well, myth gets tossed out with the bath water. But the religious function isn’t the be-all and end-all of mythology.

We are rational because of the way our brains work: based on neuronal models of stimuli, the self-emptying vessels of mind into which experience is pouring; from which awareness is arising like steam; and out of which we are flowing like water. Comparing one model with another is what brains do.

Sadly, we’ve based our psychology on an outdated physics.  We believe the ego to be exactly like a Newtonian atom: a lonely billiard ball in absolutely empty space.  Thus we trap our selves in cellves of our own making.  Today, we talk in terms of unified fields.

Examine your own boundary.  Every cell has a membrane.  Every one of them is semi-permeable.  The Flow must go on! else we would starve or die by poisoning.  So where do you draw the line?  Where does “that” become “you?” Show me your Green Card!

My answer:  Zen in its relation to Science.

Draw a one-sided line.  Please note that as a line is being drawn, ‘sides’ appear.  The line, ‘Side A’ and ‘Side B’ mutually arise in the act of dividing what begins and remains an indivisible field.  We are Indivisible.  This is why political power inheres in WE, the People.  When your sense of self blows past all imagined limits, this is the sublime.

Humans identify the line-making function with creator gods.  Some religions, especially in their most fundamentalist members, egregiously err by pretending to be the only one able to speak for this function.

Forgetting that we made up the line to begin with, fundamentalists of both science and religion assume the line and the sides to be given.  They then do their best to extol their side and demean the Other, always presuming to speak from absolutely neutral ground.

After assuming 1) that sides exist as given and always are separated by some kind of line; and 2) the observer is not the observed are absolutely divided, Science tries to see each side exactly as it is.  Science, and deceptive politicians, presume always to stand on the line. Science assumes the middle is always excluded.  In dualistic religions, Evil is assumed to be at war with Good.  In politics, you’re a patriot or a traitor.  There goes our common ground!

By assuming the line to be given, by forgetting that it is We who have the power to divide, we think we are apart from the Source of all being.  So we go searching apart from our source for our very source. We are blinded by our assumptions about the line-making function from seeing that “it” is “we.”

As one Zen poet put it, “It is like ice and water: apart from water, there is no ice; apart from your self, where do you seek the enlightened one?” (Pronoun ‘you’ chosen for effect.)

As another poet put it, this one a possum, “We have met the enemy, and ‘they’ is ‘us.’”

Atheists’ greatest mistake? Assuming that being an atheist will help you untangle all those conflicts you accuse religious people of being unable to untangle. And thus they know not what to do when a religious person presents herself as simply making the choice of “stretching” “rationality” as far as, though in a “different direction” than a non believer may want/choose to stretch his/her own.

“Liberal” pundits will keep missing the target when making religion/religious people the object of their wrath. Yes it will giive you quick laughs, but it will also push you even deeper in the delusion of knowing what religious types -as if there was such a thing- are all about.

Last time I checked, Maher uses an internal combustion engined car to get to work. Given the CLEAR, ACCESIBLE EVIDENCE there is as to how car exhaust contribuites to climate turmoil… how freakin’ rational is THAT?

But then again, Maher seems to be after the cheap laughs. However liberally laced, these are cheap laughs alright.

This is like jokingly commenting on how silly the prison floor’s pattern looks while being raped up the you know what on a regular basis.

We are not the crazy ones neither was Thomas Jefferson neither was Benjamin Franklin neither was George Washington.Neither were they crazy when they declared there should be a clear line between religion and government.Well we have combined religion with government and we ended up with George Bush.How is that working out for you?