Bill Maher = Ben Stein?

Last year I blogged very briefly about Ben Stein's travesty of a documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. As a science type and a skeptic, I'm offended by many aspects of this movie: the lies about science, the implication that Darwin caused the Holocaust, and the deliberate distortion of historical truth to support the film's position. As a person and occasional journalist, I'm disgusted by the tactics of the film's makers, namely lying to their interview subjects about the type of film they were making, including giving them a false company name and false title. Then they edited their interviews in a misleading way to make the interview subjects look stupid or evil.

As an agnostic, I was inclined to be a fan of Bill Maher's Religulous. After all, it's a pop culture vehicle to support my own beliefs, right? But then I discovered that Maher is not a philosophical skeptic or a scientific thinker: he's a promoter of pseudomedical nonsense. And today I found out that when making Religulous, he and his producers, um, lied to their interview subjects about the type of film they were making (including giving them a false title), and deliberately concealed Maher's involvement to get interviews which they then edited in a misleading way to make the interview subjects look stupid or evil.

So I hereby declare Bill Maher to be the exact mirror image of Ben Stein. Both professional entertainers who tried to influence the public discourse by lying and deceiving. A pox on both their houses.