Colbert and Zimbardo and Sunday School
Colbert guest Philip Zimbardo says God was wrong, Lucifer was right. Stephen Colbert smacks him down, and gets a big ovation from the audience.
The whole thing is interesting, but this exchange is at the end, starting at the end, with 1:00 left.
ZIMBARDO: "If God was into reconciliation, he would have said 'I made a mistake.' God created hell. Paradoxically, it was God who created Hell as a place to put Lucifer and the fallen angels, and had he not created Hell, then evil would not exist."COLBERT: "Evil exists because of the disobedience of Satan. God gave Satan, the angels, and man, free will; Satan used his free will and abused it by not obeying authority; hell was created by Satan's disobedience to God and his purposeful removal from God's love, which is what Hell is: removing yourself from God's love."
ZIMBARDO: "Wow."
COLBERT: "You send yourself there, God does not send you there."
ZIMBARDO: "Obviously you learned well in Sunday School."
COLBERT: "I teach Sunday School, motherf****r."
Colbert knows his Christian theology. 
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"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."
Well, he's not kidding: he *does* teach Sunday school!
i no omg
You can read Phil's follow-up on my blog, the Hero Workshop. It was certainly quite an interview...
Matt: thanks, that's interesting. I don't know much about Phil's work; I do know he's way off-base about God being wrong (as Colbert proved, he misunderstands why free will and hell exist in Christian philosophy), and I think his infamous prison experiment was so fraught with methodological error that it means absolutely nothing.
I do agree with his point about being a "hero-in waiting," though. It's a fine philosophy, and one I share. I disagree slightly with "socio-centric" versus "ego-centric" however; the way I view it is that we should recognize that our own self-benefit results from a thriving society. The ego remains the focus, but the means is the benefit of society at large. We are at root selfish creatures, and we can't change that; but we can change how we perceive what is, and is not, a benefit to our selves.