This pretty much sums up the current condition of the American right:
“It’s easier to believe in a benevolent God — the baby Jesus — than it is in some kind of theory about global warming. It’s just easier, isn’t it not?” – Bill O’Reilly, on The O’Reilly Factor, December 16, 2014.
O’Reilly was making the point that literal belief in the story of Jesus’s virgin birth that is laid out in later gospels is easy, while believing that burning fossil fuels causes climate change is hard.
He’s thinks that this is self-evident and obvious.
Another way of putting this is that O’Reilly thinks it is easier to believe that a woman can be impregnated without sperm than it is to believe the consensus of the scientific community on an issue you don’t understand.
This is also why conservatives find it easy to believe that their party will solve the deficit problem by cutting taxes.
Factoring in the prevalence of “baby Jesus” messages and imagery and the amount of time devoted to worshiping the little guy and listening to sermons about all the gifts he brings, it’s not at all easy to believe in him.
Given an equal amount of exposure to science and god from birth forward, science would be easier to accept because it’s tangible.
with the very specific reference to baby Jesus I couldn’t help but think of this:
it’s also worth noting that many if not most right-wing american “Christians” are Calvinists who don’t believe in a “benevolent” god…
Cute. “The baby Jesus” devotion was absent in my Catholic upbringing — my mother wasn’t into fetish worship. Still recall one of my rare visits with my cousin and out of the blue she said, “Don’t you just love the baby Jesus?” I was maybe ten or eleven years old and my first impulse was to say, no. I settled for, “Yeah, sure.”
This would be the same Bill O’Reilly who had this exchange with David Silverman of American Atheists:
O’Reilly: I’ll tell you why [religion’s] not a scam. In my opinion, all right? Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You can explain why the tide goes in…
Silverman: Tide goes in, tide goes out…?
O’Reilly: Yeah, see, the water — the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr.
Silverman. It always goes in…
Silverman: Maybe it’s Thor up on Mount Olympus who’s making the tides go in and out…
O’Reilly: No no, but you can’t explain that… you can’t explain it…
Surely a majority of Americans aren’t as ignorant as this clown? Are they?
Has nobody explained to him how search engines work? And that there’s a government agency known as NOAA that can explain it even to pea-brains.
Apparently he’s never heard of Newton, much less Einstein.
O’Reilly is a demagogue. He’s knows damn well his sky god isn’t running the tides, just like he knows damn well an army of mercenaries is an idiotic idea. It’s all a big show with him at the center. That’s why Bill always knew exactly what Colbert was doing. Because what he is doing is different only in intention.
Ah yes the GOP the party of Gospel Order Psychotics.They must keep everything simple for that is all they can handle.
Submental.
Heh. Jusssst right.
“Isn’t it not”? WTF?
I am so not in the mood to read any damn thing Bill O has to say. Bill O can kiss my natural Black…
Bill O is a bigot and a racist and yimone who knows along to anything he says wit any type of “understanding”, I hearby consider to be the same.
If I could put my foot up Bill O’s behind I would do so gladly and leave it there until it has to be surgically removed
You are braver than I. I’m pretty squeamish about putting my foot in something so nasty.
OTOH, I would LOVE to watch you do it!
You just have to wear a hazmat suit.
Bill O should wear a shirt that says, “Be faithful to your first wife” on the front and “Beware the falafel” on the back, or the other way around…
“Hi Mr. O’Reiley. Hope all is well. Kiss the plaintiff and the wifey!” – Luda
Wilful ignorance. Absent normal critical thinking across an entire cohort and the result is inevitably tribalism. To call this ‘religious’ overestimates the thoughtfulness of the affected by several orders of magnitude.
Booman, you don’t know the half of it. O’Reilly is Catholic, and so he must believe (else it’s a sure trip to the hot place) that not only did the Holy Mother of God conceive sans sperm (or penetration!), but that little baby Jesus was born without causing the tiniest bit of damage to her holy hymen. I shit you not, you can’t make this stuff up. Google “perpetual virginity of Mary”. 🙂
(Of course, the whole load of virginity malarkey was made up, a couple hundred years after Jesus’ death…)
But it is di fide (fundamental and essential) Catholic doctrine now. Hilarious.
assuming he was an actual non-fictitious person (with a non-fictitious death).
If fictitious to the core, it would be fascinating to know who Jesus’ L. Ron Hubbard was, and what their motivations were. 🙂
For that matter, will Scientologists know the name L. Ron Hubbard in 2-300 years?
-Jay-
For someone like O’Reilly, who is fairly smart but scientifically illiterate, and who has no problem with believing in miracles, it probably is easier to believe in the baby Jesus than in a complex scientific theory like global warming. I mean, you have to know something about science to understand the theory, but you don’t have to know squat to believe in the baby Jesus.
But even nonscientist O’Reilly should be acquainted with the (Leibniz) paradox of a supposedly omnipotent and benevolent god who also allows the suffering of innocents. Pretty hard to dodge that one, Bill. For me, that makes it far easier to believe in global warming than in a benevolent god.
Invisible deities good, actual observations of modern science bad.
I stand with Thomas Jefferson on this matter.
Bill O’Reilly has an annual salary of $18 million and his net worth last year was $85 million. It’s in his interests to appeal to a certain segment of the Right Wing. It will be interesting to see how long he can juggle his Right Wing talking points without insulting Pope Francis. Something has to give soon; however, that could offend a certain segment that watches him. It would be too much to hope for a Bill’O implosion.
Karl – I think you’ve scored the bullseye. Bill will say anything to keep the gravy train rolling. Above, Incurable mentions the role of “willful ignorance”, I think that’s right as well. Perhaps I am being naive but I think O’Reilly is smart. I think he has made the (immoral, anti-christian) choice that his willful ignorance can be bought for $18M/year.
It’s like that woman who killed her 10-year old son in his sleep because she believed he’d be a lot better off in heaven.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/kansas-mom-killed-10-year-old-son-heaven-cops-article-1.204702
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Holy Shit. I’m so old I can remember when Bill O’Lielly claimed to believe in Global Warming as part of his argument why he, and Fox, weren’t right wingers. This goes back to the earliest years of Fox – 1996/7.
Of course, when Bill “Satan Wannabee” O’Asshole made that claim it was of course done in a way to undermine the cause he lied about supporting. “And I believe in Global Warming – and that’s a tough stance to take because as many scientists believe the earth is getting warmer as who don’t.”
It’s at times like this that I almost wish the Xtian myth were true, that Jesus did return, and that he confronted the wingnut leaders. Of course, they’d just rationalize him away, but even so it would be fun to watch.
“it is easier to believe that a woman can be impregnated without sperm than it is to believe the consensus of the scientific community on an issue you don’t understand. “
Actually, he has a point. “Credo quia absurdum est.” It IS easier to believe something on faith, because it demands nothing more than faith, than to believe something on faith that you are SUPPOSED to understand. Obviously the second might take a lot of work and lead to discomfort, whereas the first does not. Many cannot or do not want to do this.
Climate change is not a religious dogma, it’s not supposed to be taken on faith. It’s supposed to be something you can understand on the basis of fact and reason, at least to some extent.
And this no doubt troubles a lot of people, especially if they don’t have much education. (Including those who supposedly had an education, but learned very little). Because, as O’Reilly says, they don’t WANT to believe it.
That’s a beautiful point. I always thought the Tertullian was some kind of very cool existential thing but it’s really a bit lazy, isn’t it?
When applied to anything that can be understood by reason, it is laziness, yes. And of oourse fear.
I used to think “Credo quia absurdum est” was a kind of absurdist thing: “I believe it precisely because it is absurd”. But later I saw a deeper meaning, in that when something doesn’t make sense rationally, the ONLY way it can be accepted is by faith. So, “credo” as opposed to “intelligo”.
In other religions, such as Judaism, there is little or no such emphasis. If something appears absurd, or factually false, one assumes there is some interpretation whereby it can be understood,or some level on which it is true, even if you haven’t found it yet. You look for it. There are many levels of interpretation.
Or else you just do it rather thank try to figure it out. Not as belief, but as action.
Which is not to say that faith is not important. It’s just that faith takes over only where rational understanding gives out. And this varies with the person, the society, the time, and of course the particular doctrine.
In my view, one of the biggest problem with religion today is not that believers have faith (everyone has faith in something, it’s impossible to function without it), but they substitute faith for reason ON QUESTIONS WHERE THE ANSWER IS NOT A MATTER OF FAITH. For this, hyperrationalism and so-called scientific philosophy (e.g. Steven Hawking, Richard Dawkins and all the other scientists who do very bad theology and philosophy) are as much to blame as the bible thumpers. They’re all fundamentalists of one sort or another and they feed off each others’ fears and dogmas.
Yeah. The evangelical fundies and Dawkins share the same idea of what religion is, a set of simple creedal statements which are obviously empirically wrong like the thing the other day about the benevolent baby, but saying they’re wrong as if that explained anything is as stupid as insisting they’re right. To me that action hypothesis is pretty sufficient for Judaism or Buddhism, my favorites. I love Christianity (the real Christianity of somebody like old Francis) as a tourist, but I could never live there.
Baby Jesus, yes, but I doubt he pays attention to adult Jesus.
Bill O’Reilly just laid out in layman’s terms what theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer analyzed in The Cost of Discipleship. It is the disease that is epidemic in the American Christian churches. The English translation of Bonhoeffer’s German is “cheap grace”.
Believing that human beings are changing the climate has a cost–ending the use of carbon-based fuels and quickly taking mitigating steps on a massive scale that prevent melting of the permafrost and release of methane.
Believing a religious assertion that no longer freights the feminism it once did is virtually without cost.
But cheap grace and cheap politics is what “old time religion” in both the Protestant and Catholic churches are all about, why the business folks who run the congregations love it, and why it makes the best grift in America. And it matches so well with that prosperity gospel of capitalism.
Incidentally the ferocious glee with which Colbert goes at O’Reilly in this interview is amazing. Bill-O takes it all like a joke he’s in on (which he is to some extent), and Colbert is like a titanium fortress.
I love Stephen’s line: You know what I hate about people who criticize you? They criticize what you say, but they never give you credit for how loud you say it. Or how long you say it.
It’s just easier, isn’t it not?”
Is this verbatim what he said? If so, it’s easily read as a hilarious, unintentional double negative, usually meaning the opposite of the proposition advanced, i.e. should be, “is it not?” instead of “is it not not [easy].”
I guess he’s worth every cent of the $18M they pay him a year, is he not not?”
I won’t even attempt to analyze the absurdity of comparing a myth-based “article of faith” to established scientific fact.