Quote of the Day: The Unreformability of Religious Belief

Almost daily we hear Republicans, Christofascists and conservative pundits condemning moderate Muslims for not reining in extremist elements of Islam.  I, make similar demands on what I call "the good Christians"  who are generally silent when it comes to condemning the hate and fear mongering that are the stock in trade among evangelical Christians and the Christofascists.  But as a piece in Civil Commotion underscores, what really reins in extremist religious adherents and the hate and violence they too often inflict on the world is science, knowledge and the values of The Enlightenment.  Here are some on point excerpts:

What civilisation Judaism and Christianity possess came from the outside. They did not reform themselves, which is why calls for a Muslim reformation so spectacularly miss the point. Civilisation came from the battering that religion took from the Enlightenment, from sceptics, scientists, mockers and philosophers, who destroyed their myths and exposed the immorality of their taboos.

Left to its own devices, Christianity in the West would be indistinguishable from Islam in the Middle East.

It was the Enlightenment that tamed religion, not religion that tamed mankind.

 In yet another post that derides a leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, Civil Commotion underscores the evil that is perpetrated in the name of religion and "biblical authority."  Here are highlights:

Does Mohler know who was the author of the Pentateuch, or even one of the four canonical gospels, or of Revelation, or of about half of the Pauline epistles? He does not. For all anybody knows, those texts might have been written by the 1^st-century analog of a bunch of drunk college boys who just wanted to see what they could get away with. Does he know that virtually no Biblical scholar on earth — outside of the sectarian academy, with its contractual obligation to uphold the company line — believes that the man Moses actually existed, or Abraham, or that the Jews wandered lost in the desert for 40-years, or that the Jews were ever in captivity in Egypt? The truth is that Biblical scholarship has forever destroyed Christian claims of “Biblical authority,” and it is inconceivable to me that Mohler doesn’t know that.

Gays are gratuitously humiliated by Bible-thumping yahoos every single day in this country, and in the African states whose members now contemplate schism they are killed (along with Muslims and every variety of skeptic). We are not talking about the quibbles of stamp collectors; we are talking about something that bears on the actual lives, and deaths, of real people. As I said, Mohler is right that, ultimately, what is in contention is “Biblical authority.” I should add that, with stakes so high and scholarship so overwhelming, it takes a real failure of intelligence or character to uphold a claim so grossly dishonest and self-serving.

The real enemy of mankind is religion and the embrace of ignorance that it applauds, not secularism.  Knowledge, intellect, science, modernity and Enlightenment ideals provide promise in contrast to the hate and division that religion for the most part has brought to mankind for thousands of years.  These truths are worth remembering as we see Republicans increasingly pandering to the purveyors of hate and division who use claimed religious belief as their justification for foul acts and the mistreatment of others. .

Kasich Wants a Propaganda Department to Spread "Judeo-Christian Values"

Driving home I heard John Kasich being interviewed and the topic of defeating ISIS and Islamic extremism came up.  In addition to advocating "boots on the ground" (and then evasively  dancing around naming the number of American lives he'd throw away), Kasich shockingly indicated that he would establish a propaganda department to spread "Judeo-Christian values" to win the war of ideas against ISIS.  That statement along proves to my mind that Kasich is unfit for the White House.  If one looks at history, it is the values and ideas of The Enlightenment that moved mankind forward and which are the real basis of modern Western civilization.  Religion and Christianity in particular have a bloody track record of giving the world, hate, bigotry and the murder of those with differing beliefs.  Be it the annihilation of other Christian sects during the early years of Christianity, the Crusades, Europe's wars of religion, the extermination of native peoples in the Americas, Judeo-Christian values have proven deadly.  The Washington Post looks at Kasich's ridiculous proposal.  Here are article highlights: 

During a speech Tuesday at the National Press Club, Ohio Governor and Republican presidential candidate John Kasich offered a litany of ideas meant to broaden the influence of the United States and combat the rise of the Islamic State. Among them was one that, on its face, seemed to contradict the 1st Amendment to the Constitution.

U.S. public diplomacy and international broadcasting have lost their focus on the case for Western values and ideals and effectively countering our opponents' propaganda and disinformation. I will consolidate them into a new agency that has a clear mandate to promote the core, Judeo-Christian Western values that we and our friends and allies share: the values of human rights, the values of democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of association."

Curious about the constitutionality of such a thing, we called New York University civil liberties professor Burt Neuborne, former legal director of the ACLU and founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice.

"The 'Judeo-Christian' phrase, my sense is, is an unfortunate phrase by the governor," Neuborne said. "What he really means is historically the values associated with Western culture.

A President Kasich, though, "couldn't create an agency designed to promote strictly religious values," Neuborne said. "To the extent he's insisting in making it a religious institution, he's making it harder on himself. But my bet is that's not what he intended."

Apparently, Kasich failed to notice that Bobby Jindal's self-prostitution to the Christofascists did not save his campaign.  And, as noted above, he is apparently so ignorant of history that he doesn't understand that it was The Enlightenment - which embraced knowledge and reason and rejected religious based ignorance and bigotry - that is the basis of what we now consider to be western values. Sadly, the author of the Post piece is seemingly as ignorant as Kasich on this point.

Today's GOP: The Beginning of the End of an Informed Democracy

The Founding Fathers believed in the principles of the Enlightenment.  They also believed in an informed population and believed in learning and the advancement of knowledge.  Once upon a time, the Republican Party likewise believed in science and knowledge.  Sadly, now ignorance is celebrated in the GOP and at times the party seems as if it wants to take America back to the Dark Ages.   Science is ignored if not openly attacked and the fantasies of the delusional Christofascist/Tea Party base are advanced as fact.  The GOP's denial of climate change perhaps best embodies the knuckle dragging depths to which the GOP has fallen.  A piece in Salon looks at the GOP's embrace of ignorance and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's view of what the GOP is doing to America.  Here are excerpts:

If Americans agree about one thing, it’s that their favorite astrophysicist is Neil deGrasse Tyson. A ubiquitous presence on TV, radio and a host of other mediums, Tyson has become one of our greatest popularizers of science, this generation’s Carl Sagan . . .

Recently, Salon spoke with Dr. Tyson about the second season of “StarTalk,” which premieres Sunday, October 25 at 11pm ET on National Geographic Channel. We asked Neil both about the show and about what he thinks of the role of science in popular culture and political discourse today. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

Why do we need a late-night talk show grounded in science? . . .  the goal here is to leave people with the impression, the correct impression, that science is ubiquitous in our society, in our culture.

Do you think that programs like StarTalk and Cosmos are how we make science more prominent in pop culture?    Yeah, I don’t want to say that they are our best hope. I want to say that the approach to the subject and the approach to the pedagogy, if you will, we have found them to be quite fertile but not uniquely fertile. The website I Fucking Love Science has about 40 or 50 million followers now – something like that. It’s a crazy high number. It’s way more than the number of actual geeks out there, I’m sure of it. So what it means is, that people who are not traditionally geeks are finding their inner geek. Because people are thinking about ways to share this moving frontier of science.

What do you make of that anti-science demagoguery in our political discourse right now? Is that just ideological biases triumphing over good thinking?  The moment you start bringing your personal belief system into governance, then that’s the end of pluralistic democracy. We have words for governance like that and they’re called dictatorships. You have a belief system, you have a philosophy, and that philosophy has some adherence and others have their own philosophies. Those are your personal truths. One of them is, “Jesus is your Savior.” I’m not going to say that Jesus is not your savior. That is your personal truth. But, in a country where we have different religions, if the person who said: “Jesus is your Savior” is going to govern a pluralist country, then their legislations must be based on objective truths, not personal truths.

[W]e have people in Congress whose job is to pass laws. If they pass laws based on things that are not objectively true, that’s the beginning of the end of an informed democracy.

People quietly assume that science will save us from ourselves, whether it is climate change or resource depletion or systemic poverty or any number of other problems. The hope is that we’ll always innovate our way out of crises. Do you think science and technology will solve all these problems for us?  Yes, but it requires enlightened governance for that opportunity to arise. Science doesn’t happen in the abstract. It pays to have science done. Frontier science, historically and in modern times, is generally paid by government-based sources. . . 

You remember Thomas Malthus saying that the population growing exponentially will outstrip the food supply that is only growing linearly. This became a philosophy of governance for so long until people realized that they can apply scientific principles to farming and have the food supply go up exponentially just as the population is, and they won’t have a food problem. That’s exactly what happened.

 

[W]e are producing more food than ever before in the history of our species. So, science solved that problem. Now, enlightened governance has to move the food to where it needs to go. That’s another layering on top of this. The scientist can’t be the one who says, “I’ve invented this way to triple the output on the land. Now, I’ve got to figure out how to get it to where people are starving.” That’s what politicians are supposed to do. That’s what enlightened geopolitics does.

Unfortunately, enlightened governance and today's GOP  are mutually exclusive.   Instead, of enlightened policy, the GOP offers polices based on greed, racism and pandering to the ignorant who cling to Bronze Age myths encapsulated in the Bible.

Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

As Americans enjoy this holiday weekend, it is critical to remember that enlightenment concepts and intellectualism motivated the most remembered Founding Fathers.  Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Washington - all Virginians, Franklin and others were educated men who respected and embraced learning and knowledge.  They all were also skeptical and suspicious of religion and the toxicity it could bring to the secular government they eventually established.  These realities are now totally ignored by the Christofacists and most of the Republican Party that is only too willing to prostitute itself to the demands and bigotry of the spittle flecked, knuckle dragging elements of the party base.  The following is a reprint of the Declaration of Independence via the Virginian Pilot.  Read it.  This is not the work of anti-intellectuals.  This is the work of those who embraced the best of The Enlightenment.  Those who truly love this country need to fight tooth and claw to defeat those who seek to embrace ignorance be they in pulpits or in political office.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.

They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.    

The GOP/Conservatives’ War on Truth

One of the ironies in my view is that the Christofacists and their political whores in the Republican Party claim to treasure and worship "Christian values," yet no one lies more consistently and distorts the truth than they do.  It is truly as if the commandment against lying and bearing false witness had been totally removed from the Ten Commandments.  It is one of the reasons that I often state that if a Christofascist's lips are moving, the safest assumption is that they are lying. Why all the lies?  Because the truth and objective reality simply do not support their foul agenda.  The GOP/conservative agenda is nothing less than a war on modernity and the principles of the Enlightenment which motivated the thinking of the Founding Fathers.  A column in Salon looks at this decades long phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

Deep on page 546 of his 1,839-page budget, Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker tucked in a crucial idea. He proposed to strip a principle from the mission statement of the University of Wisconsin, a school that attracts students from all over the nation and from 131 foreign countries. From the core philosophy that has driven the university since the turn of the last century Walker wanted to hack out the words: “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.” Rather than serving the people of the state by developing intellectual, cultural and humane sensitivities, expertise, and “a sense of purpose,” Walker prefers that the state university simply “meet the state’s workforce needs.” In the face of scathing criticism, the governor backtracked and, despite a trail of emails that led to his office, tried to claim the new language was a “drafting error.”

But Walker’s attempt to replace the search for truth with workforce training was no error. Since the earliest days of Movement Conservatism in the 1950s, its leaders have understood that the movement’s success depends on destroying Americans’ faith in the academic search for truth.

They have refused to engage with facts and instead simply demonized anyone who disagrees with their ideology. This is an astonishing position. It is an attack on the Enlightenment principles that gave rise to Western civilization.

The Enlightenment blossomed in the wake of the religiously-inspired Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century, when thinkers horrified by the war’s carnage set out to break the fetters of superstition and tradition that had prompted the strife. Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Jefferson and other thinkers advanced the idea that if people could listen to reasoned arguments, weigh them against evidence and choose the soundest ones, progress would follow. The Enlightenment revolutionized science, culture and politics, and gave rise to the modern world.

Enlightenment ideals prompted America’s founding and reigned for generations as Americans searched for the best ways to manage the economy, changing demographics and international conflict. But in the 1950s, the idea of progress through reason presented a problem for wealthy businessmen. They hated New Deal legislation because it regulated business and protected workers.  . . . . But the problem was that the New Deal was extraordinarily popular. After an economic free-for-all of the 1920s that had pitched the nation into the Great Depression, Americans embraced the government regulation that reined in shady business dealings and protected workers. How could businessmen make inroads against such a popular program?

[In 1951 William F.] Buckley launched an intellectual war to replace the principle of academic inquiry with a Christian and individualist ideology. Buckley’s radical idea didn’t go far at first, but Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy provided a new rhetorical tool to advance the Yalie’s intellectual premise. In the early 1950s, McCarthy revealed the power of the outrageous lie. He sought to gain power by claiming to defend Christianity and individualism from the secret plots of the godless Communists in the American government. . . . . 

McCarthy’s hit-and-run smears suggested that a compelling lie could convince voters so long as it fit a larger narrative of good and evil. . . . Buckley and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell turned Buckley’s ideological stand against academic inquiry into just such a narrative. In their telling, a few brave men were standing against an evil majority trying to destroy America.

They wanted to purge the country of the Liberals who made up the majority and create a new “orthodoxy” based on the ideology of strict Christianity and individualism.To press this radical political program, Buckley launched the National Review in 1955, announcing that government activism “must be fought relentlessly.” He railed against President Dwight Eisenhower, who had modified the New Deal consensus into his own “Middle Way.”

This Manichean worldview led Barry Goldwater’s candidacy to grief in 1964 as voters recoiled from its aggressive irresponsibility, but with Ronald Reagan the Movement Conservative program gained the one new piece it needed to sell its ideology: a warm narrative. Reagan pushed Christianity and individualism with both lies and anti-intellectualism, but he did so with folksy stories and charm. He described a world of hardworking individuals threatened by “a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol,” and pushed policies that dramatically rolled back New Deal reforms. When opponents noted that his stories had little basis in fact and that his policies didn’t work as he claimed, he accused them of being haters and rallied supporters against the “Liberal media.”

By the time of the George W. Bush administration, Movement Conservatives had constructed a post-modern political world where reality mattered far less than the popular story of Conservatives standing firm against the “Liberal agenda” of godlessness and communism. As a member of the Bush administration famously noted to journalist Ron Suskind, “the reality-based” view of the world was obsolete. It was no longer viable to believe that people could find solutions to societal problems by studying reality. 

Facts and argument had given way to an ideology premised on Christianity and the idea of economic individualism. As Movement Conservatives took over the Republican Party, that ideology worked its way deep into our political system. . . . . And it has given us attempts in Oklahoma, Texas, North Carolina and Colorado to discard the A.P. U.S. History framework and dictate that students learn instead the Movement Conservatives’ skewed version of the nation’s history.

The search for truth must be replaced by an ideology that preserves Christianity and big-business individualism. Religion and freedom for mega-business, Movement Conservatives insist, is what America is all about.

A further irony is that Christofascists blame the acceptance of homosexuality for the fall of Rome - never mind that the Roman Empire existed for twice as long as the United States has existed - when in fact, many historians believe that Christianity was a leading cause in the fall of Rome.  Again, fact and the truth don't matter.  For the far right, it is all about furthering a greed and self-centered agenda that is the antithesis of the Gospel message.

Destroying the Right's "Christian Nation" Myth

Fourth of July weekend is a good time to remember the driving principles of the Founding Fathers that launched the United States as the world's first democratic, secular nation.  And those principles - despite the efforts of the Christofascists and Dominionists to claim otherwise - had little to do with Christian dogma.  Indeed, leading Founding Fathers were widely seen as "infidels" and "heretics" by the professional Christian classes of their day.  Sometimes described as deists, the roots of their principles often derived from pagan Greek and Roman philosophers.  On the celebration of America's founding, it is important to remember this truth and not be duped by the lies  of the "godly folk".  A new book, "Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic," looks at the true principles of the founders which would horrify today's bellowing Baptist preachers and Tea Party crowd.  Here are excerpts from a review in the Los Angeles Times:

Matthew Stewart wants to make one thing perfectly clear: The United States was not founded as a Christian nation. The principles that inspired the American Revolution, he argues in "Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic," belong to an intellectual tradition dating to ancient Greece and reviled by every variety of Christian — early church fathers, Catholic clergy and Protestant divines alike.

[T]his tradition flowered in the 17th century to produce wide-ranging inquiries into the nature of God, humanity, religion and society that got Benedict de Spinoza labeled "the atheist Jew." Meanwhile, the more circumspect John Locke (careful to mask his iconoclasm with boilerplate declarations of conventional piety) ended up praised by historians as "the single greatest intellectual influence on America's revolutionaries."

Yet Spinoza the radical, no less than Locke the moderate, shaped an agnostic world view that shook America loose from Britain.

Contemporaries called them deists when not calling them infidels or atheists, and Stewart devotes considerable care to explaining that Deism, the philosophical engine of the Revolution, is not the Christianity Lite some 21st century conservatives have proclaimed it.

"America's revolutionary deists," Stewart writes, "saw themselves as — and they were — participants in an international movement that drew on most of the same literary sources across the civilized world." His detailed explication of those sources ranges from Epicurus and his Roman popularizer, Lucretius, through early modern Italian freethinkers Giordano Bruno and Lucilio Vanini (both executed at the stake for their apostasy) to the diverse array of English and French intellectuals reacting to Spinoza and Locke.

"Jefferson's vision for the future of American religion … featured nothing but Unitarian churches from sea to shining sea."

His main point is serious. The tradition the deists honored was opposed to the religious doctrines of their day, and they knew it. Epicurus asserted that nature operates according to laws that can be discovered and defined. As Copernicus and Galileo learned, discovering natural laws that contradicted Catholic dogma was a risky business, and Protestant sects were equally insistent on divine judgment as exempt from explanation.

Jefferson was one of many deists appalled by the Calvinist God, doling out salvation and damnation in a manner human beings must accept but could not understand. In place of this punitive figure, deists proposed "Nature's God ... a God of publicly promulgated laws, not of private and inscrutable acts." For them, Stewart states, "belief [was] a matter of evidence, not choice." When American deists applied that concept to the civil sphere, they found contemporary political systems as unsatisfactory as revealed religion.

Stewart spells out the present-day implications of all this in his closing chapter, "The Religion of Freedom." The government created by our deist Founding Fathers does of course protect religious belief, he writes, "but only insofar as that belief is understood to be intrinsically private. It does not and ought not tolerate any form of religion that attempts to hold the power of the sovereign answerable to its private religious belief."

It's become a conservative commonplace to argue that the Constitution establishes freedom of religion, not freedom from religion, but Stewart's eloquently argued book makes a strong case that freedom from religion is precisely what America's founders had in mind.

The next time you hear some professional Christian huckster ranting that America is a Christian nation, remember the truth and don't hesitate to call the lying ignoramus out for peddling untruths.  They deserve no deference and certainly no special rights whatsoever.  Also remember that ignorance and religious belief are a choice - unlike one's race, national origin or sexual orientation.