{"id":4528,"date":"2013-04-01T04:00:25","date_gmt":"2013-04-01T08:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/?p=4528"},"modified":"2015-03-06T22:33:48","modified_gmt":"2015-03-07T03:33:48","slug":"the-theology-of-bill-maher-god-and-jesus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/the-theology-of-bill-maher-god-and-jesus\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Maher on God and Jesus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I consider <strong>comedian Bill Maher<\/strong> to be a fairly funny guy. I don&#8217;t care for his politics. But I watched his movie Religulous, and I thought it had some funny and interesting moments. He&#8217;s not as smart as he thinks he is. He&#8217;s typical of kids who were raised Catholic, who didn&#8217;t pay too much attention, and who later sloughed off the whole thing as childish, without any serious investigation.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s some of his schtick:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/5FG6iNe_3rs\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>&#8220;God had a son&#8221;<\/strong> &#8211; sorry Bill, you can jeer at the claim rather than seriously consider it, but that only reveals your contempt for Christianity &#8211; it doesn&#8217;t show anything ridiculous about the claim. Granted, it is an unusual claim. Of course, Jesus was an unusual man.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>&#8220;suicide mission&#8221;<\/strong> &#8211; Sort of sounds like he&#8217;s blowing himself up to kill others. Gee, Bill, that&#8217;s just <em>not at all like<\/em> the claim that he came, in part, to willingly offer him as a sacrifice for all the sins of humanity. Bill surely knows better, and is depending on the ignorance of the audience to find that a stinging and funny comparison. Fail.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>&#8220;they can&#8217;t kill you because you&#8217;re really Me&#8221;<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here, <strong>Bill has a point<\/strong>. Consider this argument:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>God is immortal.<\/li>\n<li>Anything which is immortal can&#8217;t die.<\/li>\n<li>Jesus died.<\/li>\n<li>Therefore, Jesus is not God.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>The argument is indisputably <strong>valid<\/strong>; that is, if 1-3 were to be true, then 4 would have to be true too. But are 1-3 true? 1 and 3 are directly and clearly asserted in the New Testament. 2 is true by definition. It looks like if you agree with the New Testament, you must endorse the argument as sound, and not only valid. Incidentally, far better men than Maher, and long-time faithful followers of Christ, have <a title=\"Anthony Buzzard article\" href=\"http:\/\/www.21stcr.org\/multimedia\/artitcles\/ab-helping_world_count_to_one-pg4.html\" target=\"_blank\">made this same argument<\/a> &#8211; not to mock Christianity, but rather to clarify New Testament teachings.<\/p>\n<p>About <strong>all the catholic tradition has to say<\/strong> to this compelling argument is that Jesus died &#8220;in his human nature&#8221; or that only his human nature died or that he &#8220;died as a man&#8221;. But that won&#8217;t do. The New Testament plainly assumes and asserts that Jesus was a man, a human being &#8211; and one who died. It doesn&#8217;t say that only a component of him &#8211; his &#8220;human nature&#8221; (which enjoyed a &#8220;hypostatic union&#8221; with the eternal and immortal Logos) died. A human nature, the tradition says,<em> is not a man<\/em>. So it can&#8217;t be the man who died. Also, it seems contradictory to say that as man, Jesus died, but as God (or as divine, or as the Son) he didn&#8217;t die; we&#8217;re talking about one Jesus here, and he can&#8217;t have died, and not have died.<\/p>\n<p>Also, <strong>Bill is also right that many Christians<\/strong> hold Jesus and God <a title=\"conversation on Jesus and God\" href=\"http:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/archives\/3011\" target=\"_blank\">to be numerically one<\/a>. That conflicts with 4, of course &#8211; that&#8217;s the joke. (Never mind that it&#8217;s not funny &#8211; I realize that this post is not giving evidence for my claim above that he&#8217;s pretty funny&#8230; this is not his best stuff.)<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re a thinking Christian, <strong>you need to decide<\/strong> what you think of the above argument. I believe it to be sound. We can thank Bill Maher for drawing our attention to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I consider comedian Bill Maher to be a fairly funny guy. I don&#8217;t care for his politics. But I watched his movie Religulous, and I thought it had some funny and interesting moments. He&#8217;s not as smart as he thinks he is. He&#8217;s typical of kids who were raised Catholic, who didn&#8217;t pay too much&hellip;&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/the-theology-of-bill-maher-god-and-jesus\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Read More &raquo;<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Bill Maher on God and Jesus<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35035,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[37,15,6,44,33,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apologetics","category-christology","category-complaints","category-humor","category-incarnation","category-unitarianism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4528"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35037,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4528\/revisions\/35037"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trinities.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}