Sports draws the traffic. On the talking box, on the intertubes, to the stadium and in chit-chat; sports is the universal solvent of unacquaintance and disunion. It’s a somewhat paradoxical effect given the habits of hockey fans and Olympic attendees to occasionally jeer or attack the other side but even the bitterest footie yob who would bite the ears off another ticketholder for wearing the wrong colors can find a kinship there while he could only blink in amazement at any suggestion that, hey, it’s just a game. Discouraging words like that are passing rare, as heresy deserves. Interest in a sport and adherence to one team or another cut across other demographic divides combining races, classes, those who do and do not wear glasses into a single SportsNation whose language is as loud as it is untranslatable. But the outside elements do intrude. Even a militant sports detractor like Yours Truly knows that there has scarcely been an event in forty years where some guy in the stands with a painted face and rain-fro wig hasn’t been waving an enigmatic sign; John 3:16. It is not too inscrutable. As the non-sportsman still knows who won the World Series, so even the most rabid secularist recalls or can find out that this is a citation to a verse in the King James Bible, (from recently refreshed memory) For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that he who believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. As a drunken Billy Graham might have put it, this is Christianity for Dummies, or those with busy schedules. Religiousity has been part of sports as it has been part of life all along. Chariot racers competed for the favors of Athena and Mars. The Aztecs played ball to decide who would be sacrificed, and who executed. Knute Rockne, whether in life or as depicted in that bastard child of two distractions; the sports movie, was a praying man, publicly so and so were his players, his staffers, his imitators and his fans. So no need to denounce Tebow as a usurper or opportunist since he has brought a quick, ritualized endzone bow into the previously dignified world of touchdown celebrations.

But denounced he is. The cry reaches out even to those who avoid sports and sports-related talk as part of THEIR religion. Foremost comes the muddy, nasal griping of a pygmy in all regards; a man who delights in faux rebellion, who denounces with abandon and demonic relish all things outside his sophisticated approval. The guy that makes Newt Gingrich sound like William F. Buckley and look like Fred Astaire is perhaps (and thankfully) too obscure to need no introduction. That puke’s name is Bill Maher. He doesn’t come over the airwaves unbeckoned any longer. One must volunteer and PAY to hear his belchings and (ugh) witness his hijinx but the world where objectionable persons or material could be quarantined to channels you don’t watch is long, long gone. The media paddle-mixer is always running, in this instance drawing in a drop of Maher from the twitterverse and presenting it as News on par with the demise of Kim Jong-Il. We refer, of course to The Tweet Heard ’round The World! (although they all are) “Wow, Jesus just f**ked #TimTebow bad! And on Xmas Eve!”

This bit of ecstasy was precipitated by Tebow’s Broncos getting a stiff (though far from historic) shellacking at what Maher seems to think is an ecclesiastically significant moment. He would deny that HE thinks so, pro forma. This is what they call “satire” which seems often to mean little more than a bit of mockery that needs explaining. Maher appropriates what he THINKS Tebow and his numberless co-religionists consider significant. And that IS comical, certainly. As everyone knows Christmas is a fraud. The historical figure Jesus of Nazareth was not born on December 25th and even if he were it is unlikely in the extreme that there would be picturesque snow drifts around his place of birth in Bethlehem. The date comes from various pagan traditions and in any event, whatever the virtues of Christian teachings or that old malcontent’s brave acceptance of execution by torture, there was no divinity in Christ because there is no divinity in anything. There is no such thing as “Divine” as there is no such man as Santa Claus.

These are hard truths that Maher is selling (yes, literally selling) as an alternative to what he describes as malign self-deceptions. An opposing case is difficult to construct though many a sucker is enticed into doing so on Maher’s home turf. What it always comes down to is Faith, a term that draws Maher’s hole into its most patently vile smirk and brings the howl of hungry cur from his smug audience in studio or at home. 0.2 cheers for Maher though. While an obnoxious antagonist, and far from an Equal Opportunity Offender, unlike nearly any other public figure you could name, he does have critical words for islam. Not merely does he apply the same skepticism to Mohammed as he does to Christ, which would be remarkable enough, he also sees that even if the full-blown atheist case is empirically true, still there is much to prefer in a Christian neighborhood over a Muslim one. And he does venture into the lion’s lair. While he is justly avoided by serious news shows due to his serial vulgarity on live broadcasts, he is routinely found before hostile questioners. Famously he took on Keith Ellison, the out-and-proud Muslim member of the House from Minnesota. Ellison cried. But foundationally Maherism still falters as it is based on a derisive dismissal of Faith as revealing of anything other than a psychological state, perhaps beneficial but dangerously blinkered. But that too, is Faith.

Like all sophisticates, Maher bases his objections to Faith on a Socratic framework. The only true knowledge lies in knowing that you know nothing. Now, that is not an absolute nothing but a relative nothing. As the Greeks figured out that wherever the sun is, it is so far away that its light is functionally parallel across the entire earth, and therefore the size of the earth can be construed through it, so are we all functionally equally ignorant since not the most genius of us could hope to know the tiniest fraction of what there IS to know. Principled claims to ignorance are only a superficial part of Maherism, however. Like a baseline coach who signals a pitch or play, but then must disguise that signal in a pantomime of counter-signals, so does Maher always claim a purity of skepticism and willingness to entertain even the Gods of Aristotle if only one would speak up. But if that were so his protestations would be based in humility and self-examination rather than the arrogant, bilious rage that is his bread and butter. There HAS been a certified miracle in the land though. As is the nature of twitter, this could change any minute, but as of now the stunning come-from-behind win by the Broncos in overtime, producing an odd confluence of numerical improbabilities has left Bill Maher…. speechless.

It’s not quite the loaves and the fishes but it will do. Could it be that somewhere Bill Maher is wrestling with a headache? If it has kept him from his smartphone, it must be a doozy. It is now a historical fact as much as the inflation rate in Weimar Germany that Tebow threw for 316 yards including the Hail Mary capper. This was the result of 10 completions, likewise giving him a pass yardage average of 31.6. Naturally any ten pass game would produce the same result, but if the universe IS, as Maher (but not Socrates, BTW) claims nothing more than so many tiny billiard balls still bouncing about from the break, isn’t this… curious? Those who make sports statistics their daily bread can say, so I will merely ask, what are the odds of any particular three-digit number coming up in this context? What are the odds of a ten-pass game? If the Faith of Tebow is meaningless outside the psychological advantages of a supernatural cheerleader then we must see this sort of thing time and again, right? Or maybe Tebow, whether consciously or not, has perpetrated a fraud? But that would take genius and skill nearly god-like in scope and up until now, his talents have been highly suspect. It is his showboating piety that draws the fans (more fools they) and allows a subpar quarterback to claim a position he has not earned and should not have. This was the chant which I transmit only with the observation that such complaints were made of Donovan McNabb and Michael Vick but were dismissed as mere bigotry. Like last year’s investment advice, these pronouncements are currently subject to review.

Now Tebow is getting HIS review and the reviews are good. It may well be that Maher is playing a little media scamola of his own. Perhaps he is not particularly hostile to Tebow The Phenomenon but is hitching his wagon to it as court jester. His silence speaks against it though. Is he feverishly but privately trying to brush up on his long-lost mathematics skills to figure out, man, just how much of a long-shot was this? And if the rain of 316s is to be dismissed in the game stats, are the ratings, which drew a 31.6 share also to be ashcanned? Not likely. If Maher had a Holy Book it would come out weekly and be the Nielsen’s. But mathematics, the language of the ancient Greeks, so much revered by the brainy secularists, has other questions for the Big Bangers. In the so-called Intelligent Design field you will find questions based on biochemistry and brain science that reveal, as far as we know now, the emergence of Life is so astronomically unlikely as to be impossible. The development of that wet, repository of consciousness between your ears, likewise is so complex it makes the rest of our knowledge a mere dustmote against Mount Ararat against a neutron star. Wouldn’t a genuinely skeptical, as opposed to opportunistically credulous gnome like Maher have to at least admit that what is unseen is far larger than the seen or the seeable?  Once such an admission is made the slippery slope has been mounted. Now we must discuss and contest; what is the nature of this “unseen” scene? What is it made of? What does it do? Does it impact our measurable reality? None of these questions have proven answerable in the same way to all people but all the combatants claim Faith, the Evidence of Things Unseen in the end and craft their absurd rituals and myths from that resource. Perhaps somewhere in a posh hermitage Bill Maher is pondering these questions and staring, staring, staring at that 31.6 share, as if something, somewhere KNEW that he could easily dismiss the numbers from the game but THIS seems aimed squarely at an Audience of One. The secularist conclusion is obvious: yes the universe is indifferent but is indifferent to me with special malice and certainty.

Or put another way, God is pissed with ME, Bill Maher. Not too much though. Certainly we will patch it up.

 

 

 

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