Here’s a nice interview with Bill Maher (Maher: ‘I’m spreading the anti-gospel’) about religion. He says he’s not really an atheist, but he sure sounds like one a lot of the time. (Hey, you all know that M. Murray O’Hair used to say that agnostics were just chickenshit atheists.) Some tidbits:

…referring to Jesus as an “imaginary friend”… “I think so much that’s wrong with our society stems from religion”… “That’s one of the things that really bugs me about religion. If you don’t know the answer, just say, ‘I don’t know.’ Don’t make up stories and make people believe them, and then work backwards in everything in life from the dumb little story you made up, you know? We don’t know. Be a good person just because it’s the right thing to do. How ’bout that?”… Maher’s memories of the Catholic portion of his childhood are hardly fond… “I remember a nun said to me, ‘The boy who is slumped over is going to go to hell.’ For slouching.”… He uses words like “poison” and “stupid” to describe his early religious indoctrination… “I believed all this stuff when I was young,” Maher begins, smiling wryly. “I believed there was a virgin birth, I believed a man lived inside of a whale, and I believed that the Earth was 5,000 years old. But then something very important happened to me — I graduated sixth grade.”… One of the many things that annoys me about religion is that it’s arrogance masquerading as humility”… “it justifies insanity… Flying planes into buildings was a faith-based initiative.”

It’s not all good; but enough to justify a read.