Steve Harvey…if I remember correctly, he was a funny guy. The man has two successful TV shows, writes books, and wins awards for them. He is riding high, he’s on a fantastic gravy train and is probably very, very wealthy. That’s great for Steve. I will not be caught dead perusing any of the media he generates, but I laud him for his achievements.
Fame, as I think we all know, does not confer smarts or wits. Of course, Steve has to have some, as it is his bread and butter. Maybe knows a little something about everything. Comedians usually have above average intelligence.
With a few notable exceptions. Observe:
Emmy Award-winning TV host and best-selling author Steve Harvey advises women not to date atheists because you don’t know where the man’s “moral barometer” is, and says that as far as someone not believing in God, “well, then, to me you’re an idiot.”
Hmm. How to apprehend these two assertions? He seems to not know any atheists. Almost all atheists have a moral code. It’s called humanism, and it calls for nothing less than the advancement of humanity in a positive, meaningful direction. We are all about love, the thing that resides in all of us if we could just listen to our hearts. I like to think I have a fairly decent conscience and a healthy “moral barometer”. As far as us being idiots, well…
Harvey, who also hosts a radio show and started his career in stand-up comedy, went on to say that Darwinism is essentially nonsense because he doesn’t think the universe “spun out of a gastrous ball and then all of a sudden we were evolved from monkeys.” If that were true, he says, then “why we still got monkeys?”
Wow. There’s so much ignorance in that sentence I barely know what to do with it. What the fuck does Darwinism have to do with the Big Bang theory? And what does the word “gastrous” mean? I had to look it up; it is basically a dead word that means “monstrous”. I guess I can concede that he is correct in a weird way. The universe is kind of monstrous in size and behavior. Then he goes on to say that all of a sudden we were evolved from monkeys… first off, it took a billion years for life to actually show itself on earth. Secondly, we are not monkeys, we are apes-and we migrated from the ape with the aid of a change in allele frequency, and it took miliions of years to produce man as we know him. So shit didn’t happen all of a sudden. This is a common mistake of the religious, to assume that evolution proceeds in quantum jumps. Nope. It’s as slow as molasses in a complicated life form like ours. Today, evolution is only evident in our species by observing our cultures; there’s hundreds of ways that man has figured out how to survive and produce success in managing our environment/territory. Some of them are fucked up, but that’s another post entirely.
Joy Behar tries to grill him on his pronunciamentos:
Behar: “Do you believe that only people who are religious are ethical and moral?”
Harvey: “No…”
Then:
“I just believe if you don’t believe in God, then where is your moral barometer?
…if you’re an atheist, you’re basing your goodness and morality on what?”
So you know you’re being a judgmental, stupid asshole. But there you are anyway, talking about shit you don’t get.
What Steve and Christians like him lack is a basic understanding of biology, philosophy and astrophysics. I ain’t sayin’ I fully understand it myself. But I am a curious ape, and I am learning. That’s the difference between you and me, Steve. I occasionally stick my beak into books other than the fucking bible. So stop projecting. You are the idiot.