But I did have to comment on what you just saw there. Bill Maher doing what he does best and that’s disparaging a straw man. Bill Maher doesn’t even, Bill Maher wouldn’t know religion, what religion is if it bit him on the arse, as we say. My problem with Bill Maher, when all is said and done, is I just find him to be the ultimate hypocrite. He’s trying to position himself as a disaffected liberal who’s upset with wokeness. And yet, Bill Maher provides the very foundation by which wokeness arises in the first place. Bill Maher is what we would call a scientific rationalist.

He believes that only those things that can be empirically verified by the scientific method are legitimate objects of knowledge. Anything that falls outside empirical verification cannot be known. And what we have to, and so that’s why he disparages God and so forth, and religion in general, because he makes this argument that it’s beyond empirical verification, not recognizing that it’s the very foundation of the scientific empiricism that he appeals to for knowledge in the first place. Regardless, what’s key to understand here is that scientific rationalism is rooted in doubt and skepticism. So you have the right to doubt the existence of anything that cannot be verified by the scientific method.

And that’s basically what Maher does. That’s how he looks at religion. As religion goes outside, it transcends or it is something that cannot be verified by scientific rationalism and is therefore a legitimate object of doubt and skepticism. The problem is when you have an entire worldview like Maher does, rooted in doubt and skepticism, as you get in terms of his characteristic flippancy and the like, it doesn’t have to be, you don’t have to be a genius to figure out that eventually that doubt and skepticism is going to eat up your own epistemology.

And that’s exactly what happened in the 1960s. In the 1960s, the academy went through a bit of a revolution of knowledge where more and more scholars were arguing that the scientific rationalist method was itself just another cultural way of knowing that was every bit as valid as any other cultural way of knowing. There was nothing inherently superior to scientific rationalism. In fact, they would make the argument that there are literally limitless ways of knowing and perceiving the world with not one being legitimate or ultimately superior to the others. And so you had the birth of what’s called postmodernism.

Postmodernism really starts going mainstream in the 1970s, which says that scientific rationalism is not the only true way of understanding the world, that there are manifold ways of understanding the world, cultural ways of knowing the world. And therefore, scientific rationalism is not flunks its own test of superiority. In other words, if doubt and skepticism are the very foundation of your worldview, eventually that doubt and skepticism is going to destroy that worldview. And that’s exactly what happened in the 60s and 70s. Gang, first, I do want to give a quick shout out to my good friend and sponsor Ross Givens.

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The one thing is you can’t wait. Seating below right now. At the same time, Patrick Dineen argued that Bill Maher’s liberalism eroded what he calls mediating structures in society. Liberalism basically enshrines the individual as absolute, saying that the individual has no moral obligations to any institution apart or any belief system or anything apart from that which he chooses to impose upon himself. And so what that did, that belief that of that radical liberalism, what that did is it basically eroded family, it eroded faith traditions, it eroded community. And without those intermediary institutions, the government had to step in and fulfill the role.

We see that particularly in the welfare state. So ironically, these two central cores of Bill Maher’s belief, liberalism and scientific rationalism gave to us the very big government totalitarianism and irrationality that are the fundamental tenets of wokeness. Wokeness is a radically irrational belief system, doesn’t even know what a woman is anymore, can’t know at all. All it does is push regime talking points. And then it enforces those regime talking points upon populations through totalitarianism by eradicating any other mediating institution other than the state. So ironically, Bill Maher actually gives to us, his belief system actually produces the very wokeness that he claims to despise.

Now, that’s my first problem with Maher. My second, I’ll just be very brief with this, is he is the beneficiary of an American republic that’s rooted in what’s called the Golden Triangle of Freedom. And the Golden Triangle of Freedom works like this. Our founding fathers all agreed that if we were going to be truly free, we had to cultivate virtue. We had to cultivate what they would call civic virtue, because only then could we be a self-governing people. But in order to cultivate civic virtue, you had to be rooted in faith. One of the great religious traditions, because religious traditions, they believe, were the foundation for civic virtue.

But if you’re going to have a true religion, you had to be free, since coerced faith is not faith at all. So they argued that in order for you to be truly free, you had to have virtue. In order to have virtue, you had to have faith. But in order to have faith, you had to be free. But in order to have a true freedom, you had to have virtue. In order to have true virtue, you had to have faith. In order to have faith, you had to have freedom. So what our founding fathers all agreed on is faith, religious faith, is the foundation of our constitutional republic.

And so in the end, what Bill Maher is doing is he’s just simply, I’m just going to say it, he’s just a parasite of a society that is the result of the very faith he despises. The very faith he mocks produced a republic that his scientific rationalism, his atheism, never could. And so in the end, he’s not a producer, he’s a parasite. He exploits the very civilization, the faith he so gleefully mocks produced. And that’s why I think Bill Maher, in the end, is the ultimate hypocrite. God bless you. [tr:trw].

See more of Dr. Steve Turley on their Public Channel and the MPN Dr. Steve Turley channel.