After the torment and agony of reading the first one hundred pages of "The God Delusion," you can color me underwhelmed. And I don't just say that because this guy is batting clean-up for the wrong team.
Dawkins naked, baseless assertions and irreverent jabs at Christians are in nearly every instance what I would expect out of a hack like Bill Maher. The only difference being that Dawkins is well-educated and cleverly articulates otherwise thoughtless points where Maher drops an F-bomb, or substitutes humor for anything that could be considered throught-provoking.
Either way, they are both appealing to the lowest common denominator: people of faith - concrete scientific evidence + (insert bigoted joke about Christians) = Christians are stupid, delusional = God is a myth...
--------
This evening I found a column by D'Souza just ripping Bill Maher and his feaux-intellectual game. Excellent and quick read...
Bill Maher is a very irritating fellow. Now surely he would say that he irritates people because he is so iconoclastic, shattering entrenched orthodoxies with his rapier wit, but the truth is that Maher is offensive because he has an offensive personality. He seems chronically unable to wipe the smug arrogant smile off his face, which is especially galling because this arrogance is entirely unsubstantiated by intellectual ability.
Even Maher’s humor seems, well, gratuitous and condescending. His is not the wry, gentle wit of Jay Leno or Jerry Seinfeld. Nor does he exhibit the outrageous, side-splitting humor of George Carlin or Richard Pryor. Rather, Maher employs his trademark sneer to poke snide, sarcastic fun at people, usually people who are markedly less sophisticated or culturally established or economically well off than he is.
Full column ripping Maher HERE.
No comments:
Post a Comment