How Could Bill O'Reilly Be Considered Honest?

Bill O'Reilly loves teh controversy.  It's good for ratings and as Stephen Colbert will tell you, ratings=truth.

If you haven't heard yet, Bill has the balls and the hubris to explain how it is that he finds that he doesn't have enough faith to be an atheist.  On his cable news show The O'Reilly Factor on January 5, 2011, Bill had David Silverman, the president of American Atheists, as a guest to discuss advertising signs that American Atheists had rented along American highways.  For the umpteenth time Bill retreated to one of the most asinine justifications that he's ever tried to foist on people.

For those of you who don't watch The Factor and have missed this story, the reason that Bill is certain that his Judeo-Christian god exists is because "the tides come in, the tides go out.  The sun goes up, the sun goes down.  You can't explain it."

It is very sad that every American that attends grade school is taught the answer to this question, and Bill O'Reilly has done more than just attend grade school.  As much as I'd love to detail his education, suffice it to say that his has been superior to probably 98 or 99% of the American population.  Mr. O'Reilly has been given the explanation for both of these phenomena when he was in grade school.

Let's assume for the moment, however, that due to the passing of time he has forgotten the lessons he learned in grade school, Marist College, Queen Mary College, Boston University and in Harvard.  The only way that he would be able to learn new things would be to have new information presented by a person, he stumbles upon it or for Bill himself to seek it out.  Makes sense.

Now, on this very important question that Bill believes is evidence that his Judeo-Christian god exists, Bill has tried to maintain deliberate ignorance, but one cannot be deliberately ignorant.  In order to know what you don't want to know you must first be aware of it, so deliberate ignorance is really just a euphemism for plausible deniability.  As long as the video doesn't surface of someone actually explaining how the tides work and that the sun doesn't actually rise or fall it would be wrong to say that I have knowledge he knows the answers to his challenge, but common sense says that since it was part of his curriculum in school and that it would be unlikely no one has explained it to him in the meantime, I can feel justified in saying it is so likely that he knows he's lying to feel comfortable saying it.

Bill O'Reilly has claimed knowledge that no one can explain natural processes.  He has definitely heard the explanations whether he remembers or ignores them.  He, as far as I am aware, has yet to deny the existence of gravity or how the revolving of the Earth makes it appear as though the Sun is "rising" and "falling".  One of my favourite points that he made was when he told Richard Dawkins that until Prof. Dawkins could explain how everything started he was going to throw his hat in with Jesus.  Maybe that would have been a better name for this blog.

Not strangely at all I have yet to find any clip of Bill claiming that until Jesus can explain how the tides work that he's throwing his hat in with Buddha, or Allah, or Mithra...  His standards only apply to entities that exist and can answer his questions, not to mythical beings who claim magic powers.

The only conclusion that I can comfortably support is that Bill O'Reilly is a lying liar, just as Al Franken said.  If you're willing to lie, brazenly I might add, about what you claim is the most important thing in his, or supposedly other peoples, life then it is likely that he is lying about pretty much anything as the fancy takes him.  He'll have to ramp up the anger and the vitriol to distract his audience.