8 Responses to “The Great Debate Continues”

1. #  kofi the i'd hit that 5/25/2007 6:01 PM

   impure thoughts?  

2. #  Brandon 5/25/2007 9:03 PM

   Sounded like most daily show episodes to me  

3. #  kofi the i guess it was different because the audience asked questions? 5/26/2007 2:34 AM

   I agree with Brandon here. I watched both clips expecting to discover something that is currently lost, but what I found seemed fairly familiar. Maybe I'm drinking too much of the koolaid, but I imagine there is a significant difference (decline) between interviews 30 years ago and interviews todays. This doesn't seem to be an example of it.  

4. #  Jon 5/26/2007 2:54 AM

   Since Brian is in the middle of a book about religion destroying our world, I have to wonder if he scoffed at Billy Graham's seemingly unbreakable confidence in his own faith. But as an agnostic who doesn't plan to come down from the fence anytime soon, I have to say that the Graham who charms the audience in these clips deserves even more credit for his graceful approach to religion in interviews at the twilight of his life. I took note of this in a 2006 Newsweek article:
   
   "A unifying theme of Graham's new thinking is humility. He is sure and certain of his faith in Jesus as the way to salvation. When asked whether he believes heaven will be closed to good Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus or secular people, though, Graham says: 'Those are decisions only the Lord will make. It would be foolish for me to speculate on who will be there and who won't ... I don't want to speculate about all that. I believe the love of God is absolute. He said he gave his son for the whole world, and I think he loves everybody regardless of what label they have.' Such an ecumenical spirit may upset some Christian hard-liners, but in Graham's view, only God knows who is going to be saved."
   
   Contrasting this attitude with that of the recently departed Falwell, I found this excerpt addressing the differences between the two Christian leaders in the same article to be somewhat interesting:
   
   "One of those people is Jerry Falwell, who called on Graham after New York. They sat together in Graham's kitchen and discussed the distinction between an evangelist, whose job is to spread the Gospel, and a pastor, who, in Falwell's view, has a duty 'to confront the culture.' 'There is no question that your role and mine are opposites,' Falwell told Graham. 'You are an evangelist; I am a pastor. I have prophetic responsibilities that you do not have.' Falwell is unapologetic about his own calling. 'I have spent the last 30 years forming the religious right,' Falwell told NEWSWEEK. 'I write a letter every week and send a newspaper every month to 200,000 pastors who are broadly called evangelicals, bringing them up to date on what is happening in Washington, in the state capitals, in the culture, and what we need to do about it. And of course I'm criticized for it, and of course I have calculated the positives and the negatives, but I have long been at peace with what I do.'
   
   I am wildly skeptical of Falwell's distinction and sort of doubt that he bought his own argument. I think this was a desperate attempt to legitimize his own closed-minded brand of religious activism while in the shadows of a man with infinitely stronger moral character.  

5. #  Billy Joe Mills 5/26/2007 1:21 PM

   It was different than the Daily Show because here the host, Woody Allen, was about 12 times funnier and more intelligent than Jon Stewart. He was also somewhat open and accepting and respectful of Graham, something Stewart does not practice.
   
   I have a lot of faith in God, but that does not mean I have a lot of faith in the Bible, in fact, I don't. Graham bothers me here because he conflates faith in God with faith in the Bible. They are two entirely different subjects.  

6. #  kofi the if that's what one believes 5/26/2007 1:30 PM

   Graham sounds as though he believes the Bible was written by God. It's the traditional "Holy Spirit inspiring the authors who were nothing more than mediums for God's message" theory. If that's what one believes, they are not two different subjects.  

7. #  Brian 5/26/2007 1:54 PM

   Jon,
   
   Before you suck up to Graham too much, you might want to listen to the Nixon tapes, in which Graham speaks to Nixon about the Jewish community in this country. In a 1972 discussion with Nixon, Graham expressed the belief that Jews control the American media, and that "this stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain." When talking about Jewish friends of his, Graham said, "They don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this country." He would've been saying these things at about the same time in his life when he was charming Woody Allen's audience in these clips. When the tapes came out in 2002, he apologized.
   
   Also, in 1993, he said before an audience in Columbus, Ohio, "Is AIDS a judgment of God? I could not say for sure, but I think so." When he received criticism for this statement, he apologized.
   
   And I'm all for forgiving the guy, and, yes, he's better than Jerry Falwell. But, yeah, I'm still going to scoff at anybody who entertains those thoughts in the first place, and who tells his flock to be sexually repressed, and who believes any of the other myriad silly things that this man is required to believe due to his choice to submit to an ancient text written before the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, or any of the other great leaps forward in knowledge that this world has seen.  

8. #  Jon 5/26/2007 2:10 PM

   Thanks, sweetie. I know what Wikipedia is, too, so I'm familiar with some of the not-so-great stuff he has said.
   
   He seems to have become a very non-partisan religious figure, and like I said before, I respect him for THAT. It is the same thing that differentiates Pope John Paul II from Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. JP2 said some stuff that would make both of us cringe, but he also earned worldwide recognition as a champion of peace and social justice. Graham is very much the same.
   
   Since neither of us really relates to Christianity all that much, we're going to think most Christian leaders are whack except for people like Desmond Tutu, who basically bucks every single Christian rule that we dislike. I'm trying to emphasize that out of the group of top-tier Christian leaders that actually remain somewhat within the confines of traditional Christian doctrine, Graham is one of the most refreshing because he isn't a political hack.