Refuting the likes of Fox News popular talk-show host Bill OReilly and the razor-tongued television pundit and spewer-out of bestsellers Ann Coulter may seem pointless. They say the same things time and again to Foxs mostly white, badly informed audience which is in danger of dying off; the median age of OReillys viewers is seventy-two. However, when it comes to religion, much of what they say reflects tacit anti-rationalist assumptions shared by far too many people from all walks of life assumptions that must be challenged and refuted.
A case in point: on April 2, OReilly opened his show with a segment entitled The War on Christianity Getting Even Worse. In it, he provides a distressing video overview of recent terrorist attacks against and executions of Christians in Africa and Pakistan, and declares that Christians are being slaughtered all over the place. He segues to the United States, where verbal attacks against Christians are the headline, and some far-left people . . . are smearing Americans who oppose things like abortion and gay marriage, from which he concludes that it is open season on Christians.
The evidence? Well-known religion hater Bill Maher (shown calling religions stupid and dangerous) has a free pass to bash people of faith, with his vicious behavior toward Christianity largely ignored in the press.
OReilly presents results from an Associated Press Gallup poll according to which 57 percent of Americans favor letting wedding-related businesses with religious objections opt out of serving gay marriages, as well as a Public Religion Research Institute survey showing that 54 percent of Americans believe their religious liberty is under threat. Most Americans get whats going on, he says. Nevertheless, secular progressives have succeeded in putting people of faith on the defensive, with a prime example of this being the pizzeria in Walkerton, Indiana, which, in a report aired by a local television channel, declared it would refuse to bake pizzas for a gay wedding.
(The shops owner added that Were not discriminating against anyone. Its just thats our belief, and everybody has the right to believe anything. Her internally inconsistent statement went unchallenged by the reporter.)
OReilly informs us that all hell descended on the store, as secular zealots threatened all kinds of things. He then flashes a clip of Newt Gingrich denouncing lynch mobs. (No lynch mobs besieged the pizzeria, which, following its homophobic proclamation, managed to rake in donations of more than $50,000 from supporters. OReilly omits mentioning this.) Whos to blame for the mounting perils Christianity faces in America? Religious leaders, both Catholic and Protestant, for failing to push back against the secular onslaught.
It hardly takes a journalistic sleuth to ferret out the simultaneously ludicrous and lamentable false equivalency that OReilly has drawn here between the horrific, all-too-real massacres of Christians underway in countries afflicted with terrorism abroad, and the barbs, criticisms, and, yes, insults about religion coming from some vocal atheists, including Maher, in the United States. The death toll from the former stands in the hundreds; from the latter: zero. Im unaware of a single atheist who, motivated by his or her nonbelief, has called for or committed acts of violence against Christians anywhere, at any time. Obviously, nonbelievers possess no sacred text with which they could justify harming anyone, let alone people of faith. (NB to those who will take to the comments section and rant about Stalin and Mao. Murderous dictators both, they ordered their atrocities not on account of their atheism, but to defend the revolution and secure their power.)
But facts rarely hinder OReilly. To deepen his audiences (mis)understanding of the (non-existent) war on Christianity, he then turns to Ann Coulter. As one might expect, Coulter blames the liberal media and progressives for hating on the Christians.
Its Christianity that the Left hates most of all, she says, because that is the foundation of our country . . . and all of our freedoms come from that, freedom of association, freedom of speech. In this, the most consequential nation on earth, she says, Christians would prefer to change the bedpans of Ebola patients in Nigeria rather than stand up to the New York Times and stand up against abortion and fight against these bullies. The dastardly liberals and their media are trying to tear down the heart of this country by going directly at the heart of America, which is Christianity.
Where to start here? Nigeria suffered only a handful of Ebola cases and has been free of the hemorrhagic fever for almost six months now; the worst-hit countries have been to its west. Religion as the source of free speech? The three Abrahamic faiths, with their revealed truths against which blasphemy (that is, any behavior supposedly disrespectful of God) is forbidden (and punishable by death in the Bible), have historically fought against free speech, the most lethal opponent of their bizarre, improbable doctrines. Few need reminding that the Vatican formalized the suppression of free speech with its infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books), which included the works of the Enlightenments key luminaries and many other intellectual giants, and which was abolished only in 1966.
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Bill Maher terrifies Bill OReilly: An atheist has the Fox News host running scared