Jana wrote:Greg wrote:I'm a devout Christian and I'm not ashamed to say so. I believe Jesus Christ died for all of our sins and provided a way of salvation for all of us. I'm not a perfect Christian, but I try my best to live as how Christ would have me to live.
Now, I can't speak for any other faiths that Bill Maher has made fun of, so I'll just speak from my point of view. If Bill Maher wants to make his millions making fun of Christians, let him go ahead and do so. In the end, he's only hurting himself. He's not hurting the Christian population. In fact, we already knew ahead of time that there would be people mocking us, making fun of us, and alienating us from the world. It's not going to stop us from standing up for our beliefs. I just feel sorry for those who feel the need to support such an idiotic display of entertainment. Those people, in my humble opinion, appear to be more easily swayed than those they accuse of being "brain washed". We can be super sensitive to race, nationality, and sexual preference, but religious beliefs are a free for all? It's a glaring hypocrisy of the world that all nonbelievers will argue up and down doesn't exist.
What I've said all along is this: It's easy to be a nonbeliever and live your life without limits, without morals, and without any regards for your fellow man. But, it takes a real man to live for Jesus Christ.
Are you saying all nonbelievers live their lives without limits, without morals and without any regards for their fellow man? I know plenty of Christians who go to church, but yet one taught Sunday School and cheated on his wife and was verbally abusive. I can name many more Christians who go to church and don't walk the walk. My brother is not religious. His wife is and their children are raised in the Catholic faith. My brother is the most moral person I know, honest, caring, was a great son, and great asset to the community, tremendous husband and father. Because he doesn't believe in God doesn't make him any less of those things or living his life without morals as your statement implies. My other brother believes in God and Jesus Christ and is an asshole and was a selfish son and father.
I find many Christians to be judgmental. One of my best friends, though, found a new-found faith in God and became very involved in church. not just a Sunday morning attendee. But he embodies what a Christian should be. He was the least judgmental person I know. He came over to visit his mom and wanted to go out with a group of us dancing. One of my friends where I worked was wild and had a mouth on her like you wouldn't believe, F'k this, F'k that. I worried about him and how he was reacting to her. When he was leaving he raved about her and saw the good in her, not the negative. I was stunned, but realized that's really what believing in God should do, make you less judgmental, not more. But, sadly, that's not the case for a lot of "religious" people..
My family and I are Easter and Christmas mass Catholics, so I could probably watch this movie and find parts of it pretty funny. For me, there are two kinds of the worst people in the world: Extreme liberals and extreme Christians. For the former, their "acceptance" is little more than pigeonholing those who don't share their exact views and painting them with nice broad ad hominem attacks (ex: I don't believe in affirmative action, so I'm a racist). For the latter, shit, I might have sinned by simply breathing the last breath I took. Everything's bad: Playing poker is bad, going to a sports event and having two beers is bad, cohabitation is bad, this and that is bad.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard the "He doesn't believe in God, but he's the best person I ever met in my life" and "He was a hard-line Christian and he was an awful person" anecdotal evidence expressed above to try and denigrate those who hold religious beliefs. I don't doubt the truth of the anecdotes, but it's just as silly and judgmental as the Christians who try to tell you everything you do is bad or that you must believe in order to be moral.
The few are not representative of the whole. There are indeed Christian sects who probably deserve a bit of mocking for the way they carry out their beliefs, but if Maher is really mocking the undergirding of all the Judeo-Christian faiths (i.e. the actual "existence" of God), then anybody who considers himself/herself religious should, at the least, find the film faulty even if it's funny.
I will say this, I'm not much of a practitioner of my religion and I really don't think about it too often, but I do think my upbringing in the faith indeed helped instill some values in me that I'd probably struggle with otherwise when making day to day choices. It's something that's at work subconsciously most of the time. So, if I don't get a lot out of going to church or praying, maybe that's what I got out of it. Or maybe it's just my conscience at work that needed no help from an upbringing to do so...
I've struggled with religion's cost/benefit over the years because it seems to be the catalyst for much of the violence throughout history, but who knows, I'm sure we would have found another reason to kill each other in the absence of religion.
Pascal's wager seems prudent to me... "I can't prove whether there is or isn't a God, but it certainly can't hurt to believe." (my own paraphrasing...)
