Was the Republic of the United States created as a Christian nation?

Warren Throckmorton, in a Townhall article here, asks a question more precisely focused but essentially the same: “Did the first amendment create a Christian nation?”

His answer is no. He explains:

Most states had established Christian denominations in the years before the passage of the Constitution but two states did not, Rhode Island and Virginia. Virginia, the home of Madison and Jefferson, is the most relevant to what would become the First Amendment. In 1786, Madison succeeded in shepherding religious freedom protections through the Virginia legislature that in his words, “have in this country extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.”

Unfortunately not forever. “Hate crimes” are laws for the human mind. And they are entirely unnecessary. Those who commit them are either committing a crime, in which case they should be prosecuted regardless of what emotion accompanied it, or they did not, in which case the law should disregard them, hate though they might.

Still, what Madison did achieve was great and lasting – at least until now.

The law that gave Madison his ebullient hope was the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which reads in part:

“Be it enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”

According to Thomas Jefferson, who had no small hand in the matter,some Virginia legislators wanted to direct the act toward Christianity by inserting Jesus Christ into a section of the Preamble. Jefferson’s account makes clear the extent of the freedom of expression which the Virginia legislature affirmed:

“The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason and right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read, “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;” the insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan [Islam], the Hindoo [Hinduism], and Infidel of every denomination.”

So Jefferson allowed a “holy author of our religion” to haunt the law, but managed to exclude naming it Jesus Christ. It seems most of the legislators had some notion that “Jew, Gentile, Christian, Mahometan and Hindoo ” all shared a belief in such a being. If so, they were mistaken of course. And whether Jefferson himself believed in it no one can be certain.

Jefferson and Madison sought to get the state out of the business of “making laws for the human mind.” In so doing …  Madison and Jefferson moved Virginia, and later the nation away from a national religion. …

Virginia moved away from having one of the most solidly established churches all the way to join little Rhode Island on the side of full religious liberty and the separation of church and state.

Madison followed up his success in Virginia with a proposed amendment to the Constitution in 1789 covering religious expression:

“The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.”

Through debate, Madison’s language was modified to the current First Amendment – “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Madison’s work in Virginia and his original proposal make clear that freedom of religious expression is an individual right and not meant for adherents of a particular religion, namely Christianity. …

The First Amendment forbids federal laws which interfere with a citizen’s free expression of religion and the Fourteenth Amendment extends the prohibition to the states.

Madison argued that Christianity itself supported the broad tolerance he was enshrining. Whether he was using the argument purely to achieve his end, or sincerely believed that Christianity was as tolerant as he was painting it, remains unknowable. The point is, it worked. He persuaded the people he needed to persuade.

He put it this way – explaining to the Virginia Assembly why they should not vote funds for teachers of Christianity:

“The establishment proposed by the Bill is not requisite for the support of the Christian Religion. To say that it is, is a contradiction to the Christian Religion itself, for every page of it disavows a dependence on the powers of this world: it is a contradiction to fact; for it is known that this Religion both existed and flourished, not only without the support of human laws, but in spite of every opposition from them, and not only during the period of miraculous aid, but long after it had been left to its own evidence and the ordinary care of Providence.”

With that he must have have sounded like a true believer, which he needed the Assembly to be convinced he was.

If he really was as firm a believer as he sounded then, it is all the more remarkable that he worked and pleaded so persistently and skillfully for the greatest possible tolerance of all religious belief and (by implication) none.  Or to put it another way: either he was an extraordinarily broad-minded Christian, or he was an extraordinarily persuasive non-believer. It matters not which, since he achieved the end which did matter and continues to matter – the absence of a national religion.

But now the freedom of conscience and belief that Madison bequeathed to the nation is under threat from “the Mahometan”.  Muslims whose freedom of religion he ensured, are exploiting the tolerance he enshrined, in order to destroy it.

Another sadistic Christian sect (see our post immediately below, The Church of Christ Sadist) lets children die in agony. It calls itself the Church of Christ Scientist (an oxymoron).

No date is given for the report we quote from here. These horrors were allowed to happen decades ago. Has legal action stopped them from ever happening again?

Authorities in four states are prosecuting Chris­tian Science parents on manslaughter, murder, or child abuse charges for refusing medical care to their dying chil­dren.

The cases — six of them in all, including three in California — represent the largest assault in history against Christian Science reliance on prayer instead of medical treatment to cure dis­ease …

Christian Science began in 1875 with the publication of Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health. About the same time the organization of “Chris­tian Scientists,” an association of Mrs. Eddy’s students, formed to learn the finer points of her mind cure techniques. In 1879 the organization incorporated under its official name — The Church of Christ, Scientist.

Although 44 states have enacted laws to prevent prose­cution of Christian Scientists on the basis of religious beliefs, a growing number of prosecutors are going after parents on the basis of child abuse statutes. Child abuse is not directly allud­ed to in most of the statutes pro­tecting Christian Scientists.

The Massachusetts law pro­tecting Christian Scientists passed by the state legislature in 1971 is similar to that of other states. Prosecutors argue that although it shields parents from charges of child neglect, it does not deal with child abuse.

A child is not deemed to have been abused if prevented by parents from being medically treated:

It reads: “A child shall not be deemed to be neglected or lack proper physical care for the sole reason that he is being provided remedial treatment by spiritual means alone.”

These cases are cited:

Robin Twitchell, 2, died on April 3, 1986, after suffering for five days from a congenital bowel obstruction. [Painful beyond description – JB] …

Mr. Twitchell said he blamed him­self for his son’s death, not for failing to seek a doctor, but because he “failed” in his “belief”. He said he prayed over his baby every night. …

William and Christine Her­manson of Sarasota, Florida, are accused of killing their dia­betic daughter [Amy, 7] by denying her insulin injections. …

The door for the above and other cases to be prosecuted was opened by a recent ruling by the California Supreme Court involving … three active cases in its jurisdiction. The same ruling also opened the door for potential legal action generally against religious groups accused of child abuse. That recent ruling stated that Christian Science parents who attempt spiritual healing and fail to the loss of life can be tried for manslaughter. In all three cases the children involved died of the same ailment — bacterial meningitis; and the parents were all charged with felony child endangerment and invol­untary manslaughter. [All too voluntary in reality – JB.]

The parents charged includ­ed Laurie Walker of Sacramen­to, whose four-year-old daugh­ter Shauntay died in March 1984; Elliot and Lisa Glaser of Santa Monica, whose 16-month son Seth died in March 1984; and Mark and Susan Rippberger of Santa Rosa, whose 8-year-old daughter Natalie died in December 1964.

The most recent case to be publicized is perhaps the most gruesome. Elizabeth Ashley King died of bone cancer near Phoenix, Arizona, on June 5, 1988. At the time of her death, the 12-year-old girl, who had been out of school for seven months, had a 42-inch-round tumor on her leg that had eaten through her bones and genital area.

Elizabeth’s parents, John and Katherine King, were charged with child abuse for let­ting her die. Prosecutor K. C. Scull said he recommended that manslaughter charges also be filed against the Kings, but the county Grand Jury would not go along with it after hear­ing tearful testimony from them.

How mysterious that the merciful God, for all the praying, did not save the children.

Any explanations?

CNN’s religious blog “belief” carries this report:

The Society of Jesus‘ Pacific Northwest unit and its insurers have agreed to pay a record $166.1 million to about 470 people who were sexually and psychologically abused as children by Jesuit priests from the 1940s to the 1990s, the victims’ attorneys said Friday.

Blaine Tamaki, an attorney in Yakima, Washington, described the payment as “the largest settlement between a religious order and abuse victims in the history of the United States.”

The Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus is now in federal bankruptcy court in Portland, Oregon …

“The $166.1 million is the largest settlement by a religious order in the history of the world,” Tamaki said. “Over 450 Native American children … were sexually abused repeatedly, from rape to sodomy, for decades …

Jesuits are the world’s largest order of Catholic priests and are considered the most educated in the priesthood … [They] number about 19,000 worldwide, according to the Society of Jesus in the United States. …

The abuse primarily took place in Jesuit-operated mission schools and boarding schools on Indian reservations in Washington, Alaska, Idaho, Montana and Oregon …

Most of the abuse occurred in the 1960s, so many of the alleged victims are now in their late 40s and early 50s, Tamaki said.

None of the 57 Jesuit priests accused of sexual abuse by the victims has been charged with any crimes, Tamika said. …

Forty-nine of the almost 100 victims represented by Tamaki were sexually abused when they were 8 years old or younger, he said. The remaining victims were ages 9 to 14 during the abuse, he said.

One of the victims, now dead, “was in third grade when the molestation began allegedly by a priest and a nun who worked with the Jesuit missionaries.”

Before he died, Lawrence provided a statement for Friday’s press conference: “The nun or one of the brothers would send me to the rectory to see (the priest). He would give me candy or call me special – and then he would molest me. They all did at various times,” his statement said.

Asked why he never told anyone outside the order about it, he replied “we were scared that if we uttered even one word, we would go to hell.”

With its doctrine of hell, Christianity is still a cruel religion.

(Thanks to our commenter Macnvettes for the link.)

So successfully has the intellectual life of the Western world been commandeered by the Left, that it’s almost impossible to satirize it. Since we know this to be the case, we should not be surprised by a comment on our post below, Against schools, that takes for granted that the six absurd subjects we made up are in fact being taught – though they “take up far less time” than the conventional ones, the commenter informs us. We are, however, a little surprised, if also amused.

It is seriously deplorable that education in America should be so deeply corrupted.

The Left is chiefly to blame, but not exclusively. Religion is another rot in the beams.

Here’s a scandalous story, providing a rather extreme example of attempted indoctrination in the classroom, from Open Salon, written by a blogger who calls himself “The Unapologetic Geek”, and posted on January 18, 2011:

Almost three years and one million dollars in public funds ago, the Mount Vernon Board of Education in Ohio began considering the case of John Freshwater, a middle school science teacher. The accusations had piled up over the previous decade that Freshwater had been proselytizing his religious beliefs in class, that he physically hurt his students, and that he wasn’t adequately teaching the science curriculum. The Board of Education had a difficult determination to make: was Freshwater a bad, abusive, overzealous teacher, or was he the victim of overreaction, gossip, and heresay? It shouldn’t have taken nearly three years and one million dollars to answer this question, because once you look at the case, it becomes pretty clear that John Freshwater was more than just a bad public school science teacher; he – along with the mind-numbingly terrible and wasteful bureaucratic rigamarole the public school system had to go through to get him to stop “teaching” – is a good reason to consider homeschooling your kids. …

John Freshwater … used his eighth-grade science classroom to discuss what the Bible has to say on homosexuality, to discuss whether Catholics can be considered real Christians, and to preach that evolution has been fully discredited. He allegedly assigned pro-creationist literature as required reading … while refusing to spend a minute explaining the facts behind modern evolutionary theory. …

For at least eleven years, other teachers had been complaining about Freshwater. One high school science teacher has been very vocal about how difficult it was to re-teach basic scientific principles to freshmen who had been through Freshwater’s class. This is a serious failing for the public school system, because our science education is already lacking without having to deal with zealots like Freshwater giving young minds the wrong impression of what science is actually about. …

According to multiple reports, Freshwater used an electrostatic generator (a Tesla coil, essentially) to burn a cross into the arms of some of his students. … Even in a legitimate science class … using scientific tools to burn the skin of your students is not an acceptable thing for a teacher to do. In a perfect world, such an act should lead to automatic termination as surely as bruising your students would. After all, let’s call it what it really is: assault. …

The investigation that resulted came up with plenty of physical evidence, and that lead to Doe v. Mount Vernon Board of Education et al., a civil court case that went on for two and a half long years. In the end, Freshwater was heavily sanctioned for his behavior (both out of court and in court) and wound up having to pay several hundred thousand dollars in plaintiffs attorney fees. The Mount Vernon Board of Education had to pay a large settlement as well. It took two additional months for the Board to finally terminate Freshwater, which it did last week. All told, the entire legal battle cost the public school system an estimated total of $902,765.

This is perhaps the most shocking aspect to the case; that it took so long and so much money to fire one bad teacher. A fair hearing or an investigation is one thing, but this has been going on for over a decade. You have a teacher who apparently isn’t teaching the curriculum, is branding his students, and who has refused to obey continued instructions to change his methods, and it still takes you this long to do anything about it. Meanwhile, Freshwater had over ten years to continue his idea of teaching science to impressionable young minds, forcing future teachers (and hopefully parents) to work harder to undo the damage. That is, in a word, unacceptable. …

There’s no telling how many more of these teachers are out there, but Freshwater was certainly not the only one.

Pope Benedict XVI has discovered that the Jews were not responsible for the killing of Jesus.

From IBD:

In an upcoming book to be published this month, “Jesus of Nazareth,” the pope definitively ends any question of official Catholic church anti-Semitism, exonerating now and forever Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Well, better late than never. Two thousand years of blaming the Jews for something they didn’t do, and now it’s “Oops, sorry – we got it wrong. No hard feelings. Come on, Jews – shake hands and let bygones be bygones, okay?”

What needs to come next is the realization by this uniquely open-minded Pope that the Jewish teacher the Greeks called “Jesus”, who reputedly lived in the Roman province of Judea between the times of the Emperors Augustus and Tiberius, was not God.

Then the Church can be dissolved and Christianity can be looked back on as an historical curiosity.

Of course it’s a pity about all the Jews and heretics and pagans who were done to death in agonizing ways by Christians in the name of the gospel truth that turns out to be not so true, but that’s all in the past now and we’ve gotta move on.

Days went by and the president of the United States had nothing to say about the revolution and civil war that broke out  in Libya. Eventually, having consulted with the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, he said that the Libyan government’s murderous violence against its people was “unacceptable”, but avoided condemning Gaddafi the dictator by name. Why had he waited so long to say so little? The ever-ready Office of Glib Excuses and Pretty Pretexts (OGEPP) which, being abstract, is able to hover perpetually in the air of the Oval Office and the corridors of the State Department simultaneously, came out with a sweet one: Obama had held back from saying anything in case the dictator took revenge on American citizens in Libya. The president would have it known that he was desperately keen on protecting the “safety and well-being” of individual Americans. And as usual, the ingenuously gullible – or disingenuously biased – members of Obama’s hurrah-chorus in the media reported the shiny new excuse as if it were credible.

Why do we doubt it?

Oliver North, as skeptical in this instance as we are, explains:

According to Hillary Clinton, “the safety and well-being of Americans has to be our highest priority.” Oh, really? That comment, proffered by our secretary of state Tuesday, is overshadowed by the serious jeopardy U.S. citizens now encounter thanks to the ideological blindness and national security incompetence of the Obama administration.

Since 2011 began, more than 20 Americans have been injured, killed or gone missing in the midst of violence in Lebanon, Tunisia, Iran, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Mexico and the Indian Ocean. American citizens are being held by government authorities in Iran, Yemen and Pakistan — and by pirates in Somalia. Our State Department says it is “concerned.”

Last week, two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were ambushed in Mexico. Special Agent Jaime Zapata was killed, and his partner was grievously wounded. Mexican authorities now claim they have apprehended some of the perpetrators with “connections” to one or more drug cartels. The Obama administration, with its history of “slow rolling” counter-narcotics assistance to Mexico and doing next to nothing to protect our borders, is confronted now by news that a Saudi national has been apprehended in Texas with plans to attack sensitive U.S. infrastructure.

Last week, four Americans aboard the sailing vessel Quest were seized by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. A U.S. warship was ordered to the scene as the seaborne terrorists headed for safe haven in Somalia. If past is prologue, it should have ended like previous armed rescue operations conducted by U.S. Navy SEALs, U.S. Marines, South Korean navy commandos and even Russian and French special operations units — with the safe recovery of nearly all hostages.

But in this case, our ships were inexplicably ordered to simply tail the captured yacht while an FBI hostage negotiator conducted a parley with the pirates. During the negotiations, all four hostages were killed.

We think the four were stupid to go sailing in those pirate-infested waters. Or they were inexcusably uninformed, which is also to say stupid. Or if not uninformed, deliberately courting martyrdom – they were apparently sailing about on the high seas to distribute bibles hither and yon. But as stupidity, ignorance and Christianity are not capital crimes, the four should have been and could have been saved. But their lives were simply not Commander-in-chief Obama’s “highest priority”. Not harming the Islamic terrorist-pirates was higher.

In Pakistan, Raymond Allen Davis, an officially credentialed American with diplomatic immunity, is being held on murder charges at a notorious and often deadly detention facility in Lahore. Unnamed “U.S. officials” are widely quoted in international media claiming Davis is variously a “CIA officer,” a “CIA employee” or a “CIA contractor.” Any of these sobriquets are a virtual extrajudicial death sentence for an American held by anybody in Pakistan. …

The State Department has filed a “protest note” complaining that the government in Islamabad is not abiding by its international obligations and held a surreal media conference call with an unnamed government official to explain diplomatic immunity.

Meanwhile, U.S. Army Spc. Bowe Bergdahl [who is] in the hands of the Taliban, isn’t even mentioned by the administration.

But the Americans have been rescued from Libya. Obama sent a boat to fetch them out – a ferry boat unsafe on winter seas. After three days of hesitation in the Libyan port, its passengers waiting nervously on board, it finally set out for safe haven. (China, Britain, and Italy sent military ships.) Now the might of the United States may be used to strike terror into Gaddafi.

But will it be?

Instead of sending a U.S. aircraft carrier to the coast of Libya to prevent members of the Libyan air force from bombing their countrymen, our commander in chief has dispatched Secretary of State Clinton to Geneva to confer with the absurdly impotent, anti-American United Nations Human Rights Council.

Of which Libya is a member. In fact, Libya actually chairs the UNHRC at present*, seeing to it that its regular business of condemning Israel for something-0r-other is conscientiously carried out.

Oliver North concludes by saying –

Now — with rebellion sweeping Libya, Yemen and Bahrain, which is the home of our 5th Fleet, and U.S. oil spiking at more than $100 per barrel, the highest it has been since 2008 — [Obama’s] commitment to the “safety and well-being of Americans” rings more hollow by the minute. His weakness, incoherence and passivity have bred chaos that places us all at risk.

We agree that he is weak, incoherent and passive, but we tend to the view that he acts weakly, incoherently and passively because, deep in the heart of him, he has no wish to defend Americans or America.

*Correction: This is an error. Libya was elected to the chair of the UNHRC in 2003, but at present a Thailand representative presides over it. Libya was a member until it was suspended yesterday, March 1, 2011. The point we’re making about the nature of the organization remains the same.

The armed intervention by the US (with NATO) in the erstwhile communist and disintegrating state of Yugoslavia at the end of the last century, was probably the most unjustifiable war America ever waged.

Why did the US  expend blood and treasure where absolutely no interest of its own was involved? Why did it go to the aid of the Muslims of Bosnia, and protect – as it still does – assorted Muslim terrorist gangs in Kosovo?  True the Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic was a nasty man, but he wasn’t harming America or Americans. And as brutes in power go, he fell well short of the standard set by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Funny that the left was so against Saddam being overthrown by US arms, yet so ardently for the overthrow of Milosevic.

Now at last comes an answer to “why?”. A revelation. And it should be enough to make the most hawkish of us blush.

According to Samuel Mikolaski, whose article appears today at American Thinker, the answer is: because President Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright hated the Serbs.

At least “in part”  it was her “vitriolic, personal hatred of Serbs” that “facilitated” Clinton’s decision to “import Al Qaeda from Afghanistan into Bosnia”, and “skewed our foreign policy”.

Not since Helen of Troy had a woman’s emotion made nation go to war against nation. (Same part of the world, but a different sort of woman, and an opposite emotion.)

Samuel Mikolaski was born in the Balkans and grew up in Canada. He is a retired professor of theology, so understandably distressed by the “destruction and desecration of literally hundreds of churches, monasteries, cemeteries and other Christian landmarks, some of which are medieval treasures” by the Muslims to whom Kosovo has now been handed over (by the self-described Christian West!). “There are,” he writes, “more churches, monasteries and other Christian landmarks per square kilometer in Kosovo than anywhere else on earth”, because “Kosovo is to Serbian Orthodox Christians what Canterbury is to Anglicans and the Vatican to Roman Catholics.”

Although we don’t share the professor’s religious sensibilities, we do deplore the vandalism and philistinism. But the far greater outrage is the handing over of European territory to Muslim control.

There [was not] even a hint of anxiety or regret [on Clinton’s part] at what his importing of Al Qaeda into Bosnia was causing as they settled down, married Bosnian women, and began the process of imposing Islamic radicalism on Bosnia, which had become significantly secular since the expulsion of the Ottomans from Europe after World War I.

From Bosnia and Kosovo we now have one of the largest and most virulent drug cartels in the world, the worst of white slavery and prostitution trafficking into Europe, and terrorist training compounds. (Several of the 9/11 hijackers spent time in Bosnia among their Al Qaeda compatriots.) …

It is scarcely credible, but nevertheless true, that the Clinton Administration ignored the Islamic Declaration by Alija Izetbegović, former president of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which he clearly urged Islamists in Bosnia and worldwide to take up jihad against the West. Instead they regarded him as “their boy,” ignoring the proliferating terrorist cells in Bosnia. …

The latest bombshell is the Council of Europe’s recently adopted report… that Kosovo leaders, including Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, are complicit in crime, including organ trafficking. There is now a strenuous effort to sweep the body parts issue under the rug lest it torpedo efforts to legitimize the illegally mandated separation of Kosovo from Serbia. The data are horrific: Serbian captive youths were selected on the basis of genetic compatibility for killing in order to harvest saleable body parts. … But there is an insuperable obstacle to effective judicial proceedings: Kosovo is tiny, and it is almost impossible to shelter witnesses, should they come forward. Testifying would mean signing a death warrant against oneself and one’s entire family. …

Apart from which, a self-imposed code of “omerta” has been adopted throughout Europe (and in America by the Obama administration), with regard to Islam: a state of affairs commented on by one of the world’s foremost authorities on Islam, Bernard Lewis, in a passage quoted at the end of the article:

[There is now] a degree of thought control and limitations of freedom of expression without parallel in the Western world since the 18th century … Islam and Islamic values now have a level of immunity from comment and criticism in the Western world that Christianity has lost and Judaism has never had.

Which provokes another “why?”.

There has been an earthquake in New Zealand which has killed at least tens and possibly hundreds of people. We haven’t seen or heard much about it on the usual news channels, but Mark Steyn has commented on it.

We are among Mark Steyn’s most devoted fans. We enjoy just about everything we read of his and quote him often with huge appreciation. We usually overlook  the very few bits of his writings that we don’t admire – occasional references to his Christian faith. But today we take notice of this:

I woke up this morning to photographs of a steeple-less Christchurch Cathedral – a jolting image to those of us with friends and colleagues on the other side of the world … As I write, the estimate of the death toll is between 65 and 200 people, which sounds low by the standards of global catastrophe but is devastating in a country with New Zealand’s population: It would be the equivalent of 5,000 to 15,000 Americans being killed in Hurricane Katrina. …  SteynOnline has a lot of Kiwi readers, and our prayers are with you today.

Why, in his understanding, does the being he worships need to be prayed to about the disaster? Is he not supposed to be all-knowing , all-powerful, and all-loving? Yet was not aware that an earthquake had happened in NZ until informed through prayers? Or is it that the almighty being would not aid surviving victims until asked in prayers? Has to be begged, implored? And such a being as this is to be loved and worshiped? Feared, okay: if author of everything, then author of the earthquake, the suffering, and the deaths.

It’s plain that our forefathers invented an evil deity in this “Almighty God” – but it’s also plainly impossible to invent a good one.

Mike Lee, who made this video, sent us the link.

It’s not surprising, but it’s fun to watch. It shows how dimwitted God-botherers can be.

Or, surely, must be?

Here’s Richard Dawkins.

We are not uncritical of his opinions. We disagree with him sharply on political questions. It seems to us he doesn’t really know anything about politics, but simply feels that nice guys are on the left, so his political views are of no interest. If you haven’t read the review of his book The God Delusion by C.Gee and want to, you’ll find a link to it in our margin.

We like this short video clip in which he talks about evolution (about which he has written great books), and the impossibility of arguing rationally with a person of religious faith.