Maher: ‘Religion, it’s like Wikipedia. Anyone can write something in.’

In the “New Rules” segment of “Real Time With Bill Maher” on Friday night, host Bill Maher begged the media to stop with their fawning coverage of the new Pope, who he dubbed “the virgin bachelor.” He said, “I have just about had it with the press squealing in delight at every mundane thing the new pope does. ‘Oh, look, he walked across the street! He picked the name Francis! He shook hands!’ Oh, fuck, he’s a 76-year-old executive who got a promotion, they act like he’s a baby who just made a boom-boom.”

But then Maher turned his attention to Catholicism as a whole. “Can we at least stop saying that the job of Pope is so hard, such a burden, no one would even want it. What? First of all, you’re selling an invisible product. It doesn’t get any easier than that,” he began. “No one’s ever going to come back from the dead and say, ‘Ah, it’s bullshit up there, there’s no heaven, it’s just an empty lot.’”

“And what other business could you be in where your company gets caught running a child sex ring since forever and you still keep your customers?” he asked.

Maher, who said he was raised Catholic, continued to mock the religion, saying, “The Catholic Church has basically always done what we do here at ‘Real Time,’ it’s a bunch of guys sitting around making up new rules.” He went on to site examples of Catholic doctrine not found in the Bible, from the rite of confession (“They pulled that out of their ass in the twelfth century”) to papal infallibility (“another rectum-derived edict that came in the year 1870″) and beyond. “I mean, the whole thing is just so shamelessly made up as they go along,” he said.

“I tell you, religion, it’s like Wikipedia,” he concluded. “Anyone can write something in.”

Watch the whole segment, which first aired on HBO on March 22, 2013, below.

via The Raw Story http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/23/maher-religion-its-like-wikipedia-anyone-can-write-something-in/