Sometimes events transpire so as to cause one to worry that the world is turning upside down. For the second time in as many weeks I find myself applauding Bill Maher for calling liberal flummery what it is - though flummery is perhaps more polite than the word Maher chooses to use.
The first time I found myself agreeing with Maher was when a week or so ago he refused to go along with Rachel Maddow's desire to see the wealthy socked with even higher tax rates than they already pay. In the present case he makes a guest named Brian Levin, a putative expert on religiously inspired terrorism, look condignly simple-minded.
Levin tries to argue that all religions are equally violent, a claim so preposterous that even someone as hostile to religion as Maher can't let it pass:
It's incredible that an intelligent, educated man could believe what Levin apparently believes, i.e. that there is some sort of equivalence among the world's religions in terms of their propensity to commit violence.
The fact that Levin had to go back seven hundred years to find examples of how Christians committed the kinds of atrocities that are routine today throughout the Islamic world should have given him a clue that he was making himself sound foolish.