Bill Maher Gets Real: Religions Are "All Stupid and Dangerous'

Last Wednesday, political comedian Bill Maher talked about religion in the show, "Jimmy Kimmel Live", calling for the unequivocal protection of free speech.

He was promoting the impending season of "Real Time with Bill Maher." In a reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attack, that had killed 12 and wounded 11, he agreed that it was a direct assault on freedom of speech, according to salon.com.

He began by pointing out that such kinds of attacks have to stop. "...and unfortunately, a lot of the liberals, who are my tribe - I am a proud liberal....".

To his statement, Kimmel joked that Maher was about to turn on the liberals.

But Maher answered that he was not turning on anyone. He said that he was just requesting everyone to move towards the truth, just as he had been doing for some time. "I'm the liberal in this debate. I'm for free speech," he said.

He agreed that in order to be a liberal, one needs to stand up for liberal principles. It wasn't his fault that the section of the world most opposed to liberal principles was the Muslim world, he added.

Although Maher conceded that most Muslims would not perpetrate such attacks, he pointed out that "hundreds of millions of them" supported the current attacks. Asking everyone to totally condemn the assaults, he went on to explain his views on the dangers of all religions.

"We have to stop saying when something like this that happened in Paris today, we have to stop saying, well, we should not insult a great religion," Maher said. "First of all, there are no great religions; they're all stupid and dangerous. And we should insult them, and we should be able to insult whatever we want. That is what free speech is like."

Last October, while going through a heated discussion on his show with Ben Affleck, he averred that Islam is the "only religion that acts like the Mafia, that will fucking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture or write the wrong book," according to vocative.com.

It brought about a backlash, when students at the University of California, Berkeley, which is supposed to be a cradle of liberalism and free speech, started a petition in Change.org against him. It became fashionable to call him "blatant bigot and racist."

But after the Paris attack, the question resurfaces: Who exactly is a liberal?

It would be wise to remember that Maher does not attack only Islam, but violators of humanity. After the WTC attack, he had said: "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, that's not cowardly." He made the comment a week after Sept. 11, 2001, on Maher's show Politically Incorrect. For that, he lost his job.