Bill O'Reilly: Culture Idiot

Earlier in May, we were treated to the eminent biologist Richard Dawkins on The O’Reilly Factor. The show is well known for Bill O’Reilly and the sharp and arrogant way he discards his guests. Its rare that he have a guest that he won’t bully around. But he invited Dawkins to the show, knowing that Dawkins has indeed fought many a battle and argued against many a theist. The segment was short but to the point. In the end, O’Reilly simply said something about atheists having no morals and ended the segment quickly. I expected as much, seeing as Richard Dawkins had an answer for everything, even though he was cut short repeatedly.

But later that month, The O’Reilly Factor brought on Christian and actor Kirk Cameron. Cameron has done little with his career since becoming a Christian but managed to get a starring role on the “Left Behind” movies. These two movies are of course based on the award winning “Left Behind” book series about the apocalyptic end of days as read in the book of Revelations. For those of you who don’t know your Bible, it’s the last book in the New Testament, but it was written first among the other New Testament books. Revelation is some what of a mystery seeing as it reads like it was written by a man on LSD in a haunted house.

Cameron likes to speak like he knows allot but leaves quit a bit lacking intellectually. That’s okay, so he doesn’t know his faith very well and likes to read off old religious sayings and clichés, that’s fine, most Christians try that with me and fail because I actually know the history of Christianity and the Bible. But with O’Reilly and Cameron congratulating themselves for being so religious, I had to suppress the gag reflex. O’Reilly even had the nerve to say “I think I beat Richard Dawkins in our debate”. Well that’s utter nonsense, but I would expect that from such an arrogant prick like him. He went on to say something about Buddha creating earth or what have you, but in the end, neither of them knows diddly squat about the Christian faith.

Most Christians know very little actual history about their faith or who it came to be. They believe the Bible is all they need and they go about their merry way believing that all the books of the Bible were magically put together by god soon after Jesus rose to heaven. There is not problem with those who keep their faith were it belongs, in them. But when they decide to “tell the world” about it, then it becomes tiresome. Kirk Cameron and Bill O’Reilly simply spread ignorance and promote blind ignorant faith by their type of conversation. Even a well schooled Christian would have been embarrassed by them. Because of his indulgence of fundamentalist Christian Kirk Cameron, he loudly endorsed the millions of uneducated fundamentalist Christians sitting at home watching fox and chuckling to themselves about how immoral and doomed atheists are. Thus increasing the forever growing arrogance of the Christian population.

But worst of all, they promoted the idea that all the myths and legend Christians believe about their faith are true. He influences millions and millions of conservative evangelical fundamentalists every night on his show. He is a journalist and should be held to those standards. As a journalist, he let us down, and failed to speak nothing but the facts. Instead he has allowed his show to become a platform for his own personal pompous and arrogant speak which he cannot or will not ever see anything wrong with it. And why should he? After all, he styles himself a culture warrior. All the while, he spins and doctors his show towards the far right, constantly telling them that he stands for no spin and that he is the only non-biased TV show on the only non-biased news station. Well, when half yours stories start by talking about Democrats when all the main stories are about Republican corruption in a government headed by the most unpopular president in our life time, you lose that ability to be the “no spin” guy on TV.

Bill O’Reilly makes his money by catering mindless; spin laden, party bias drivel to millions of conservative viewers. He adds to the general surplus of ignorance every time he is on the air. The sad part is, he thinks he is doing the world a favor. As always, it will be to late when the world realizes that a pompous arrogant prick like O’Reilly, no matter what he stands for, is never good for the people.