How would you respond to Bill Maher's attacks on Christianity?
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Question:
How would you respond to Bill Maher's attacks on Christianity?
Answer:
Anyone who has ever watched Bill Maher’s “PoliticallyIncorrect” show (no longer on the air) knows his style. He is sort of like the sarcastic kid in 7th grade who sat in the back row and sniped stupid remarks atthe teacher under his breath. Add a few years and you have Bill Maher. I’venever heard Maher really make a substantive argument about anything. He seemsto think that if you take enough sarcasm and stir it into any assertion youhave instant deduction.
Maher has recently decided to take his ranting to new levels against faith, particularly of the God-kind—particularly of the Christian kind. His recent movie Religulous did nothing at the box office, of course. I’m sure it served as a personal catharsis for Maher, which is worth something, I suppose. He seems to need that kind of thing.
An exchange between Maher and one of the hosts of The View has been getting a lot of exposure lately. It has become a YouTube favorite. In the exchange Maher suggests that the Jesus resurrection story is nothing more than a repackaging of the Egyptian myth of Horus. Actually, he says more than that. He says it is “exactly the same thing.” This is a bold claim from someone who seems to base this idea on nothing more than the documentary film Zeitgeist.No scholarship stands behind this idea. In fact, there is no record of Horus raising anyone from the dead (none is recorded in the Egyptian Book of the Dead). In a desire to make Jesus a run-of-the-mill Messiah, the connection is made to “El-Osiris” (which sounds like “Lazarus”...in English) and Jesus and Lazarus. But it doesn’t matter…Horus is not said to have raised Osiris from the dead anyway. There are other false claims that Jesus was a copycat of Horus: both were born under a star sign and three kinds, they both had 12 disciples, both walked on the water, etc. None of these things were ever written about Horus.The claims are just sucked out of the air.
You can bet that if Jesus was the repackaging of a previous Messiah it would be all over the papers. We would never hear the end of it. In fact, scholars have spent more than 40 years trying to draw a connectionbetween Jesus and messiah figures in the Dead Sea Scrolls (to no avail). Maher is bent on dismantling Jesus. He follows in a long line of Jesus rejecters. The frustration of having nothing new to say against him must be so overwhelming that he feels forced to appeal to historical misrepresentation. I guess he feels he will get away with it—after all, who is going to travel to Luxor toread the inscriptions?
Maher believes that faith is the “lack of critical thinking.” Actually, there are many who promote this idea, even some theologians. You have science, you have mathematics, and then when there is no evidence or reality left…you have faith. And you "jump the gap" of what you can know with what you "feel" in the act of faith. Barak Obama promotes this view in his book "Audacity of Hope." It is the heritage of liberal Christianity.
This is certainly a horrid view of what faith is. The resurrection of Jesus is offered as a proof that Jesuswas who he claimed to be. It is offered for the consideration of the mind.Christianity was not born in a series of visions and personal experiences notavailable to anyone but the faithful. Jesus came in real history, died and was resurrected in real history. This story is subject to historical investigation—as Horus or Osiris would be had they existed in real history. Of course, no one believes they did.
What is religulous is Maher’s idea about what faith is. If faith is irrational belief apart from critical thinking then he is right, it is religulous. But Christianity never presents itself in such terms. It is presented as earth reality in the context of history for the consideration of the mind.
And real critical thinking would have led Maher to an entirely different conclusion than he arrived at by watching a documentary.
