I wonder what happens when they run into each other at the water cooler at the NIH.
]]>]]>Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions: the mild and gentle people it carries towards mercy and justice; the persecuting people it carries into fiendish sadistic cruelty. Mind you, though this may seem to justify the eighteenth-century Age of Reason in its contention that religion is nothing but an organized, gigantic fraud and a curse to the human race, nothing could be farther from the truth. It possesses these two aspects, the evil one of the two appealing to people capable of na?ve hatred; but what is actually happening is that when you get natures stirred to their depths over questions which they feel to be overwhelmingly vital, you get the bad stirred up in them as well as the good; the mud as well as the water. It doesn’t seem to matter much which sect you have, for both types occur in all sects….
Yeah, what I didn’t get to explore in this piece are my endless conflicted feelings about this sort of new atheist humor. Since I like thinking about religion and I like laughing, laughing about religion, including at it, is pleasurable to me. But on reflection, stuff like this is just so, I don’t know, destructive. The baby with the bathwater, and I’d miss the bathwater too. I really don’t mind having fundamentalists around, so long as they live and let live (or can be forced to). Keeps life interesting.
And liberals—too many qualifications. It would take the whole movie just to figure out what they actually believe, if anything.
]]>I also saw Bill Maher’s movie. It had a lot of Bill Maher in it. I enjoyed it while watching but sitting a few hours later, I came to detest the movie. His subjects were so absurd (the ex-gay counselor, the miracle guy in the chachka shop, the tourists to the holy land amusement park, the rabbi at halakhah and technology center) that I came to reject *them* as ridiculous instead of their views.
Of course I’d also like to see someone confront liberal religion, because *that*, after all, was the religion I rejected, not any of the lunatic orthodoxies people discuss. It’s almost like people think, “as long as were not as crazy as the wingnut in the black hat, we’re okay.”
The movie’s best moment: when the truckers pray for him.
Anyway, I look forward to catching up on your travels!
]]>