This Week in God

At the sight of Stephen Colbert the studio audience begins cheering with anticipation: It's time for "This Week in God." Colbert calls up the "God machine" and gives it a tap, and a window begins spinning to the most unholy sound as a panoply of religious symbols and images—the pope, believers in the shroud of turin, assorted rabbis, imams, ministers,
priests, creationists, spiritualists, even those those professing secular humanism and atheism ("The religion devoted to the worship of one's own smug sense of superiority")—flash on the screen. Finally the machine comes to rest on a particular target. We see a Jerusalem rabbi, imam, and priest set aside their mutual hatred long enough to denounce that city's gay-pride parade. Or we watch Colbert conduct a blind taste test to see whether he can tell the difference between holy water and Pepsi. Through it all he pokes fun at faith itself, sparing no religion and no holy man (in Blasphe "Me!!!" he takes on deities themselves, challenging, say, Quetzalcóatl to strike him dead by the count of five). Watching "This Week in God" on Jon Stewart's Daily Show, we are, it might seem, witnessing the culmination of a historical progression, from Robert Ingersoll, the great nineteenth-century public unbeliever, to Clarence Darrow, who in the 1920s and '30s would debate a rabbi, priest, and minister during a single evening...more here