Bill Maher

Bill Maher is, among other things, a political commentator, and has appeared on networks such as CNN and MSNBC. He host the show Real Time with Bill Maher

Relevance to Biblical Christianity
His father was Catholic and his mother Jewish, the latter unbeknown to him until his teenage years. Bill considers himself a "rationalist," "preaching the gospel of 'I don't know.'"

Maher, like many modern atheists, considers religious belief to be a neurological disorder that is the cause of many, if not most, of society's problems. He believes the public display of the Ten Commandments on government property is a violation of the "separation of church and state," a common sentiment of people critical of American Christianity, despite the fact that this phrase is nowhere within the constitution. Apparently Bill holds Thomas Jefferson's personal letters to be in equal legal standing with the Constitution itself. However, In 2002, he told the Onion AV Club, "I'm not an atheist. There's a really big difference between an atheist and someone who just doesn't believe in religion. Religion to me is a bureaucracy between man and God that I don't need. But I'm not an atheist, no. I believe there's some force. If you want to call it God... I don't believe God is a single parent who writes books." He asserts that religion provides answers to questions that "cannot possibly be answered." Questions such as "Where do I go when I die?" or "Is there a heaven?", he says, are impossible to answer. By claiming to have the answers, Maher argues, religion is dishonest and it "stops people from thinking."

Bill Maher recently produced the film Religulous, a satirical documentary on religion, in which he spends the most part of the movie interviewing people and asking inane questions (ones whose answers could be reached in seconds on a google search, indicating that he's not really interested in the answers so much as he is in making the interviewees look silly or stupid), only to end the last 10 minutes with one giant non-sequitur: while the rest of the movie was taken up by immature jabs at religion (some funny, some incredibly asinine, depending on one's personal taste), the final 10 minutes suddenly introduces a rapid-fire clip compilation of war and ostensibly religious people doing bad things, while Maher's tone becomes notably more harsh than during the opening sequence (the same location as the ending--the Mount of Olives). To the Christian, it is apparent that Maher failed extravagantly in actually building the case he makes in the final scene, leaving out any substantiating evidence in the rest of the film.