RE: Bill Maher

Regarding my previous post (and by "post," I mean "linking to a video with a snarky comment"), Orac has a great takedown of Bill Maher's recent comments, and why it's frustrating and ironic that the Atheist Alliance International would give him the 2009 Richard Dawkins Award (named for Dawkins, not given by him). Sure, Maher's film Religulous was entertaining, if mostly shallow, but his endorsement of cancer and flu death is every bit as dangerous, faulty and antiscientific as the rhetoric of the religious extremists he chronicled in Religulous. As Orac beautifully put it:

He's an anti-vaccine, quackery-supporting font of flaming moronicity every bit as bad as Ken Ham, Michael Behe, or any flak from the Discovery Institute. His views on medicine are every bit as much ideology driven as any view on evolution from a creationist. Indeed, the vitalism from which Maher's germ theory denialism derives is every bit as much a mystical, religious viewpoint as that of the worst hard core young earth creationist. And he's the 2009 recipient of the Richard Dawkins Award.

Good going, AAI.