Alelou wrote:I agree he can be very funny, but the anti-religion thing gets me with him too and when he piles it on too thick it just doesn't strike me as funny anymore. Same with Bill Maher. I can respect not being religious -- my own parents are not at all religious -- and I can even enjoy a joke about religion, but to endlessly equate all religious people with ignorant twits who believe snakes talk gets really old and just makes the joker look ignorant and close-minded.
It depends on what you hit on, but as an obsessive fan of his I know that most of the time, the thing that set George Carlin apart from other anti-religion comedians like Bill Maher was that he had the ability to put himself into the mindset of a believer and then say, "Ok, assuming you believe this, then what about ____?" or something similar.
The thing you have to be aware of with Carlin is that he perceives "religion" as an institution and thus criticizes its belief structure the way one would criticize the nationalism and propaganda of a government if it tried to claim all-knowingness.
I don't know, as someone that's not a strong adherent to organized religion but not considering myself an atheist, I always very much identified with his criticism of religion, which wasn't as one-dimensional as "all religious people are nuts". I think people who
are religious just get insulted when someone who's an agnostic or an academic, like Carlin, tells them that they're only religious because their beliefs are a crutch to get through the hard times, and consequently there doesn't end up being any meaningful debate.
Because Carlin disagrees with
organized religion and religiously-motivated external policy (i.e., prosylizing of one's values onto others), he rarely ever admits to having spirituality or religious beliefs because he doesn't want to be categorized that way. But rarely, and there are some in his performances, he'll talk about what he believes spiritually - tossed in with some comedy like, "I pray to Joe Pesci. And I get the same result as when I prayed to God,"
.
I think that the perspective of the Agnostic or atheist who's trying to say that religion is ridiculous is probably best understood by imagining what one would feel if you were the only sane person in an insane asylum of 6 billion people and you were trying to explain to everyone that the flying purple cats that professed their eternal love and told them what to do weren't real, and that they're just making up those flying purple cats to cope with their hard lives. The huge majority of the 6 billion would undoubtedly consider those people to be insulting them. When in fact those people are just trying to tell them what their own logical mind leads them to conclude.
Just an illustration.
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