Bill Maher

I generally watch his show on HBO on Friday nights but wonder why he spews so much against God/ religions/ especially Catholicism, etc. He seems boastful of this fact that those of us whom believes are the cuckoos. At least with the 'Gospel of Oprah' you have some tinge of spirituality/ perhap some Christian message but he preaches an anti-gospel. Now, I am also sure he only gets a fraction of the audience Oprahs gets so I guess this is good.

http://www.foxnews.com.pssht.com/bill_maher_anti-religion.html

Losing his religion

Maher, 48, grew up Roman Catholic, attending weekend catechism classes, and weekly Sunday mass with his father and sister. His father was Catholic, his mother Jewish.

When he was 13, his father pulled everybody out of church.

"It was like V-J Day in my room," Maher says, laughing. "I couldn't have been more thrilled.

"My father, God bless him, became very disillusioned with the pope at the time, which was Pope Paul [VI]. He loved Pope John [XXIII]. He was the liberal pope, 1958 to 1963. So my father, as an Irish-Catholic American, was in his glory in the early 1960s. He had an Irish president. He had a liberal pope, whom he loved. But Pope Paul obviously rubbed him the wrong way."

This explains, at least in part, why today Maher has no religion. And no middle name.

When his family left the Catholic Church, he was preparing for the sacrament of confirmation.

"I was dreading it because that's where you get your middle name, and mine would have been Aloysius," he says. "It's actually a very common, Irish, Catholic, horrible name. So that's why to this day I don't have a middle name. I got off the hook right at that moment."

Aloysius is the patron saint of teens.


On last weeks show he couldnt stop slombering over the author Christopher Hitchens and his recent book titled: God is not Great:

http://www.amazon.com/God-Not-Great-Religion-Everything/dp/0446579807

From Publishers Weekly
Hitchens, one of our great political pugilists, delivers the best of the recent rash of atheist manifestos. The same contrarian spirit that makes him delightful reading as a political commentator, even (or especially) when he's completely wrong, makes him an entertaining huckster prosecutor once he has God placed in the dock. And can he turn a phrase!: "monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents." Hitchens's one-liners bear the marks of considerable sparring practice with believers. Yet few believers will recognize themselves as Hitchens associates all of them for all time with the worst of history's theocratic and inquisitional moments. All the same, this is salutary reading as a means of culling believers' weaker arguments: that faith offers comfort (false comfort is none at all), or has provided a historical hedge against fascism (it mostly hasn't), or that "Eastern" religions are better (nope). The book's real strength is Hitchens's on-the-ground glimpses of religion's worst face in various war zones and isolated despotic regimes. But its weakness is its almost fanatical insistence that religion poisons "everything," which tips over into barely disguised misanthropy. (May 30)