Young Billy Maher brings home a Scarlet Letter

I love me my Bill Maher show on HBO. Most weeks, he tackles an issue or two on Friday from a perspective that I’ve been obsessing about since early in the week but nobody in the media has yet picked up on.

I usually don’t take exception to Maher’s end-of-show rants, even when he steps over the line… which is admittedly most of the time. It’s kind of what he does. A vibrant democracy needs voices of dissent like his to fuel its engines.

“It’s getting dark culturally; better throw a comedian on the barbie.”

But tonight he went off on a tear defending atheism, setting he and his fellow devout non-believers as the cool rational men of reason and science.

If I was his science teacher, I’d be sending him off to the guidance counselor to talk about changing his major.

It’s one thing to attack religion. They’ve made themselves fair game. They’ve set themselves up on a pretty high pedestal—what the fuck is up with granting them tax-exempt status when returning veterans, for instance, still have to feed the government beast?—it’s only natural to expect people to take a few swings at them. That’s why the houses on the hilltops always have gates around them; because modern animal-welfare laws make crocodile-infested moats such a tediously grey area, legally.

But Maher accidentally shone a spotlight on his argument’s weakness in the way he misframed the question tonight. By rising to the defense of Atheism, he capitalizes the “a,” and underscores all the ways Atheism is indeed like any other religion.

Technically, Maher is correct. Atheism is fundamentally different than religion in that it is unstructured, unmonetized, has no charismatic figureheads or spokespeople (sidebar: why are atheists always such assholes and Mormons always such nice people? Discuss.) … in every sense recognized by the law and society and society, atheism is no more a religious entity than that group of consumers who prefer Pepsi to Coke.

But as philosophical constructs, Atheism and Deism are indeed two sides of the same coin.

Is there groupthink? Is it unyielding, intolerant of any deviation from approved canon? Arrogant in its self-assurance and haughty about the desperate ignorance of the unconverted?

Tell me again how Atheism, capital A, is not like a religion.

And best of all, what is the difference between the religious zealot’s conviction in the existence of something unproveable and the Atheist’s conviction of something equally as unproveable? Isn’t his faith in sciences he doesn’t personally understand as unshakable as Billy Graham’s faith in the six-day creation of the earth that he doesn’t understand?

The only difference I see is that religious people don’t try to hide behind science when they drone on about their endlessly unproveable belief structures.

The only truly cool-headed conclusion to reach is that although science tends to suggest religion is a slowly dying, vestigial limb of an earlier time when the species required explanations for phenomena science hadn’t caught up with yet, science equally suggests that anyone with a truly open mind has to leave the door open to theories they cannot yet disprove, no matter how outrageous.

Maher tried to head this criticism off at the pass by saying that if Christ came back from Glory during the Superbowl half-time show, he’d say, “okay, I was wrong, praise the Lord.”

But that assertion rang as hollow as his insistence that forcing his faith-based belief structure down my throat was in no way like religion.

People in the grip of a religious fervor will tell you anything to sway you over to their side.