Flashback: BillO says religion is a constraint on society

[Major Nikon]

Evidently not so much when you are dragging your wife down the stairs or engaging in non-consensual phone sex with a subordinate, but nonetheless a constraint because of the 10 commandments or something.

[Curmudgeoness]

1. "The Judeo-Christian philosophy is not a myth, it is reality."

BillO, you are an idiot.

[mountain grammy]

2. Richard Dawkins Atheist

Richard Dawkins: is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist,[3] and writer. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford,[4] and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.[5]

Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982, he introduced into evolutionary biology the influential concept that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms. This concept is presented in his book The Extended Phenotype.[6]

But on Fox, he's just Richard Dawkins, Atheist. For fox watchers, they can just listen to the drone of BillO, because the atheist says nothing.

[RussBLib]

3. religion is certainly a constraint on women

and on blacks
and on atheists
and on science
and on rationality
and on sexuality
and on free time
and on free speech

BillO is right! Religion is a HUGE constraint on society.

[onager]

4. Canadian journaiist Heather Mallick kicked his butt good...

From her 2004 article "My FOX Trot With Bill O'Reilly:"

Mr. O'Reilly is not a smart man. He's like one of those old guys you see on the street ringing a bell and shouting about eternal damnation. He talks to his trousers...

And then he asked me if I was a socialist, and I said, "Certainly," and it was as if I'd said I like donkey semen in my latte instead of milk...

It was like talking to a manic child who had eaten 800 cherry Pop Tarts for breakfast. He kept interrupting, so that no point could be made that could win a reply, much less a reasoned response — not so much a gabble of sound bites as a howling from Bedlam...

The whole degraded debacle and everyone's reaction to it, including mine, reminded me that Americans now have to cope with a new surrealism in public life. In the 1936 Spanish Civil War entries in a diary I read long ago, by someone who may well have been Stephen Spender, the writer describes an O'Reilly-esque scene. "A man squats and defecates in the street, without comment." Re-reading these diaries decades later, Spender writes, "What on earth did I expect him to say? Olé?"

The article is so old I couldn't find a working link to it. But Googling the title will find the whole thing; it was reposted in many places.

[RussBLib]

5. The Magic of Reality

Very coincidental that I just checked out Dawkins book noted in this video clip, "The Magic of Reality" from the library. It's really great so far. Well-written with lots of illustrations, and would probably be really good for kids in a science class.

I checked it out as an antidote to the most-recent book I just finished reading, Christopher Hitchens last book "Mortality." That book was such a downer I had to find something to take my mind off of it. Hitchens went into painful detail about the cancer that was ravaging him and it really got to me.