Mike Todd, our go-to Religious Leftist, has found reason to place Bill Maher on his list of 21st century prophets:

I can't help but wonder if Bill Maher will now go on to read other portions of Holy Writ and wax on eloquently as to the theology found therein.  Somehow I doubt it.  He'll do what I'm thinking, perhaps wrongly, Mike Todd would do... find ways to explain those Scriptures away.

I took it upon myself to attempt to understand what the Catholic Catechism has to say about it all and found the following:

2266 The State's effort to contain the spread of behaviors injurious to human rights and the fundamental rules of civil coexistence corresponds to the requirement of watching over the common good. Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime. The primary scope of the penalty is to redress the disorder caused by the offense. When his punishment is voluntarily accepted by the offender, it takes on the value of expiation. Moreover, punishment, in addition to preserving public order and the safety of persons, has a medicinal scope: as far as possible it should contribute to the correction of the offender.

2267 The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude, presupposing full ascertainment of the identity and responsibility of the offender, recourse to the death penalty, when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor.

"If, instead, bloodless means are sufficient to defend against the aggressor and to protect the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.

"Today, in fact, given the means at the State's disposal to effectively repress crime by rendering inoffensive the one who has committed it, without depriving him definitively of the possibility of redeeming himself, cases of absolute necessity for suppression of the offender 'today ... are very rare, if not practically non-existent.'

There's room there as I see it to suggest that Bill Maher may have to include Catholics in his judgment of who is a non-Christian.

Which I guess would leave Mike Todd and those who believe as he does to be the only Christians in the world. 

Talk about an exclusive theology.

UPDATE: From the comments at my place, Leslie with wit and wisdom:

Please correct me if I'm wrong about what I'm about to say.

It is my understanding that the Jews rejected Jesus as Messiah because, among other things, he didn't come as the military/governing state Messiah that they were hoping for. Yes? No? Interestingly, Bill Maher and Mike and all the others slide Jesus into that very role of personal substitutionary atonement for the government with an aftertaste of general redemption of the citizenry.

We are so far from understanding the difference between appropriate roles and action of state and individuals. Let Bill and also Mike's ignorance stand as a shining light to the global failure of public school systems to teach things like a given nation's civic framework.

Ask someone about civics these days and they'll point you to a row of Hondas. Jesus then gets thrown under the Honda.