by Donovan Schaefer
Bill O’Reilly: It is a fact that Christianity is not a religion; it is a philosophy. If the government was saying that the Methodist religion deserves a special place in the public square I would be on your side.
David Silverman, president of American Atheists: So you wouldn’t have a problem with the government of the United States establishing atheism, because that’s also a philosophy?
I was going to write something about this clip, where Bill O’Reilly tries to outmaneuver an atheist by asserting that Christianity is “not a religion, but a philosophy,” and how it points to conceptual tensions at the heart of the category “religion” that can then be exploited by the cynical and the dishonest to score cheap political points, but, you know, fish in a barrel.
