During the course of the segment, Mr. Bennett asked Mr. O'Reilly if he believed the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Mr. O'Reilly replied, “I believe that was an allegorical story. You know what I mean by allegorical … I don't believe it literally.”
Frankly, this should not be a surprise to anyone. In his book, “The O'Reilly Factor,” published in 2000, he admitted, “The most important thing I can say about religion is that it's a good thing for all of us to have. It doesn't matter what you believe — as long as you believe in something.”
God help us. Osama bin Laden had religion and he believed in something.
Bill O'Reilly is typical of many modern-day conservatives who have lost sight of their true biblical roots. Jesus would ask, “Can the blind lead the blind? Will they not both fall into the ditch?”
When a person claims, “It doesn't matter what you believe,” moral absolutes are negated. And when there is no absolute truth, then everything reduces to my opinion. The result is that whoever comes up with the most convincing argument, based on some utilitarian premise, wins the debate.
Mr. O'Reilly commented later during the exchange with Mr. Bennett, “I am not God.” But in fact that is the role Mr. O'Reilly has assumed, unknowingly or otherwise, by picking and choosing which portions of the Bible are to be taken literally and which are to be dismissed as mere allegory.
At one point during the show, Mr. O'Reilly said, “I have a big problem with the Old Testament.”
He was referring to passages in Deuteronomy and Exodus where God ordered promiscuous girls and those who worked on the Sabbath to be put to death. These were indeed laws issued by God to the nation of Israel when it was living under a theocracy.
But his problems with biblical exegesis go deeper than even he is willing to admit. In a bold display of his ignorance of the New Testament, he insisted that it is only in the Gospels where we find the word of God.
“Look, the Gospel is named the Gospel, Mr. Bennett, for a reason. That is the word of God — that's the Gospel,” he said.
But if we go to the Gospels, we discover that three of them, Matthew, Mark and Luke, all mention Sodom and Gomorrah in their accounts of Jesus' pronouncement of judgment on the cities of his day for rejecting him as the Messiah.
In Luke's Gospel, Jesus referred to God's destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as an historical event: “…But on that day that Lot went out of Sodom, it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all.”
Mr. O'Reilly shouldn't have a problem with any of this. He admitted to Bennett, “Yes, of course … as a Catholic … I do [believe Jesus Christ is God].”
So then if Jesus' words are God's words, what exactly is his problem?
When a ship's rudder is subject to the currents of the ocean, the captain must take control and steer or the ship wanders off course or flounders. When a man's rudder is left unattended, and subjected to the currents of modernity, then it is the culture that shapes his values and not vice versa.
With no fixed vantage point, a man in such an ocean might just as well be adrift.
The truth is not always easy to embrace, let alone live on a day-to-day basis. Or in Mr. O'Reilly's own words taken from the introduction to his book, “The truth is often annoying. It's always easier to look the other way.”
Yeah, Bill, tell us about it.
Syndicated columnist Gregory J. Rummo's new book, The View from the Grass Roots, is an anthology of his commentaries written about life in 20th- and 21st-century America. This article courtesy of Agape Press.
