Bill Maher: Western culture isn't just different, it's better.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

On "The Daily Show," Jon Stewart relatively soft-pedaled his defense of fellow Comedy Central employees, "South Park's" Matt Stone and Trey Parker, against a group of Muslim critics. Over at HBO this weekend, though, Bill Maher wasn't holding anything back. On his show "Real Time With Bill Maher," the show's every-incendiary host opined during his segment "New Rules:"

"When South Park got threatened last week by Islamists incensed at their depiction of Muhammad, it served -- or should serve -- as a reminder that our culture isn't just different than one that makes death threats to cartoonists. It's better." In his defense of the First Amendment and other Americal civil liberties, Maher -- who made the film "Religulous" -- continued: "The Western world needs to make it clear: Some things about our culture are not negotiable. And can't change. And one of them is freedom of speech, Separation of church and state is another."

Completely spot-on observation about real differences in cultures, one that will not play well with PC police. Bill Maher is certainly no friend of religious people; and gives grief equally to Christianity, Judaism, Scientology, and Mormons as you will see. But he specifically singles out Isalm with the recent actions in Afganistan and the Taliban's attack on an all girls school.

Comments

Small specious quibbles.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

1) Henry VIII, England, 1533. Reformation anyone. Started up the whole state/church thang really, which you have mentioned earlier. Before which the Pope was head of the Church and the monarchs kings in their own right but still all under his spiritual jurisdiction.

4) Louis was never head of the Catholic Church. Nor even the Catholic Church in France: there was a Cardinal for that. The flaw in your argument is that in France, the Church and State were separate. It was the feudal ancient regime bankrupting itself supporting the American war of Independence*, that precipitated the economic collapse that led, eventually, to Madame la Guillotine.

*Because what was bad for Britain was good for France. Such thinking needed a revolution. Then a long war, then a few more....

Re: Small specious quibbles.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) Actually it existed long before that. The Investiture Controversy.....

2) I said that religion and culture were the same, which they were. The idea that individual ethnicities had cultures on their own is at the extremely earliest in the Napoleonic Wars....