
The footage of Bill Maher and Ben Affleck has gone viral for the obvious reasons, one of them being that they're both talking about a polarizing topic of Islam and that Affleck and Maher are two of the biggest 'go to' sources for debate porn. My interest in this is more because of Maher but I also have an unhealthy obsession with Affleck that I don't understand so, let me try to wrap my head around that issue first.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vln9D81eO60[/embed]
When you look at Affleck's film resume from the get go, it wasn't until he started directing projects he wanted to do when he started forming a political voice. In my opinion, ARGO is hardly that political perspective, but since Hollywood has plenty of smoke to blow it it needed an asshole to blow it up in and that asshole is Ben Affleck.
Put him up against Clooney or Redford, or both when it comes to making politically driven films and the nation of Affleck gets wiped off the legitimacy map.
In the argument he's instigating with Maher, if he wasn't so over driven with emotion, he would have let the point be made and know when to shut up. Instead he's stumbling. On the other hand though, it's possible that even without emotion clouding the facts; his problem is that his logic about the world is like ARGO where he doesn't have the depth it takes to understand anything below the surface.
ARGO is about Americans escaping Iran under the cover of the production of a fake science fiction film, while this is just people who say "Islam is motherload of bad ideas," are racist. Affleck is a terrible "logic delivery" system who only scratches the surface of an issue because of his tunnel vision.
Lately, Maher has been the trendy meat in a Aslan and Affleck sandwich over his "Islamophobia." What Affleck and perhaps even Aslan doesn't seem to understand about Maher's view is that ideological beliefs have to be done away with, period. I agree with him that religion doesn't make any difference in why we're already goo and in this case, when referring to Islam he's basically saying that the violence and extremism that's at a possible "fringe" element of Islam is what dominates what that religion is to everyone else.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzusSqcotDw[/embed]
He's talking about being too afraid to draw a picture of Muhammad because he'll be killed. In no other religion would he have a problem drawing a figurehead. And let's be honest, it only takes one person to kill someone else for it to become a reason to spin it as a violent religion. And for one Muslim to take offense (in the reality the number is larger) and want to kill someone for doing that, it already makes that religion look like bad news.
Maybe if it wasn't so difficult to convert or 'try out' Islam where you wouldn't have to go through all the theological hurdles, it might not be the deal-breaker Maher is saying it is. I mean, in Western religions, all you have to do is go to a church building where you can sit, stand, listen to someone on the pulpit, sing some hymns and then hit the buffet afterwards. Islam asks for too much, you have to go and it takes reading and learning from a completely different book to catch up.
So you have to understand where Maher is coming from when he takes that broad brush to Islam, but as Affleck told him, he's wrong to do so. Also, Maher seems to love quoting polls to make his point so, he's already pretty hardened in his view. He's not making it clear to Affleck what his stance is on religious indoctrination first.
But let's go back to Affleck. He's defending religion as a ethnically established culture in order to say that it's racist, which is a stretch if you're of the view that people are people or humans are human and not these indoctrinated tribes. Because Maher didn't single out the people by their ethnicity, he was going after the ideology which we all know covers different races.
On top of that, when Ben Affleck makes that generalization, it is only possible within a social mindset that's politically driven.
So basically, one person who is reasonably going after the ideology vs a guy who can't reach the depths of basic logic; Maher was right to say they should agree to disagree.
Notes:
- Ben Affleck And Bill Maher Are Both Wrong About Islam (Bubblews)(Bubblews)