I don’t which was funnier: watching Bill O’Reilly compare War on Christmas deniers to global warming deniers or the crackpot psychotherapist he consulted who described atheists as bullying abusers. And if you thought Dr. Keith Ablow was a nutcase, get a load of Dr. Karen Ruskin.
The basis for this War on Christmas segment was a billboard saying, “All I want for Christmas is to skip church. I’m too old for fairy tales.”
Ruskin – whom you may recognize from her recent psychoanalysis of Grubergate – somehow missed the nuttiness of getting all exercised over a billboard and seeing it as some kind of threat to Christmas. Instead, she “explained” the atheist mindset behind the dastardly deed:
When you feel like you are in the minority, you experience the desire to try and push, to sell your product, if you will, to sell your belief in a loud way to others in order to make yourself feel better, to validate your view, to make sure others hear you.
Ruskin talked to viewers like we were a kindergarten class. Or maybe she was just trying to sell her belief in a loud way.
“It’s horrifically insulting, it’s really disrespectful,” Ruskin said about the billboard, “but not unlike the bully who tries to push other people down in order to make themself feel better. That’s what’s happening here.”
Ruskin acknowledged that not all atheists are like this. But she went on to liken the billboard sponsors to a family:
It is very upsetting in a family unit when you have one person shouting loudly in their nasty way about how everybody else in the family should be believing what they’re believing. The pushing of other people down, the nastiness…
…The sign has a little girl who’s saying all I want for Christmas is not to go to church. What’s Christmas? Christmas is all about the celebration of Christ. But now what she wants for Christmas is not to go to church! So that’s very confusing which once again shows why there is an emotional confusion for some who are atheists in their need to push their product to others.
Frankly, I don’t think O’Reilly bought this. He sounded a bit impatient as he interrupted Ruskin to change the subject to his victorious “campaign” to stop store employees from saying, “Happy Hoidays.”
“I know tomorrow you’re going to get the nasty little things in the media,” O’Reilly later said to Ruskin. “…If somebody denies global warming, they’re all over ‘em. But it’s right before your eyes. There’s the sign. What generates that denial?”
Ruskin said: “Just like any type of denial, if you don’t allow yourself to believe a certain reality, then you can stay in your belief system. Like anything. If you choose not to believe that somebody has hurt you in a hurtful marriage, then you ignore the signs around you that that person’s hurting you.”
Fox News: where an atheist billboard is likened to spousal abuse. By a psychotherapist.
Watch it below, from last night’s The O’Reilly Factor. Warning: I laughed so hard, tears came out of my eyes.