This being Sunday when Christian preachers preach, here are some antidotal words of Voltaire, one of the stars of the Enlightenment:

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.

Christian: A good-natured, simple fellow; a true lamb of the fold, who, in the innocence of his heart, persuades himself that he firmly believes unbelievable things that his priests have told him to believe, especially those he cannot even imagine. Consequently, he is convinced that three x’s make fifteen, that God was made man, that he was hanged and rose to life again, that priests cannot lie, and that all who do not believe in priests will be damned without remission.

If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reasoning.

Every sensible man, every honest man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.

Which is more dangerous: fanaticism or atheism? Fanaticism is certainly a thousand times more deadly; for atheism inspires no bloody passion whereas fanaticism does; atheism is opposed to crime and fanaticism causes crimes to be committed.

(For source references go here.)

Someone once said “God is the evil in those who believe in him.” Or if someone didn’t, someone is saying it now.

When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed hacked off the head of Daniel Pearl to the greater glory of Allah, he had a video camera record his performance. The cameraman missed the initial slashing of the victim’s throat, so KSM re-enacted that part and then went on energetically to chop and saw through flesh and arteries and bone until Daniel Pearl’s head was separated from the rest of his body.

Writing about this at Townhall, Mona Charen says that KSM “seems to have achieved a kind of religious exultation by decapitating Daniel Pearl.”

They weren’t finished with him, though. After Pearl’s head had been sawed off his neck, Mohammed and his accomplices cut the rest of the body into pieces. They then washed the bloody floor and knelt down in the same spot to pray — perhaps moved to religious ecstasy by the smell of American blood. …

Whether they were moved to religious ecstasy or not, the decapitation of their helpless victim was certainly a religious act, as were the attacks of 9/11 – also the Allah-inspired idea of this same Muslim savage.

How can justice be done to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? It cannot. But he can and must be put to death.

Mona Charen goes on:

Like the communists, who justified any crime in the name of revolution, Islamists justify any outrage if the goal is fulfilling their twisted vision of Allah’s will.

Twisted? What is the Islamic idea of “Allah’s will” when it is not “twisted”?

Where does any notion of a god’s “will” ever come from but out of human minds?

The cruelties perpetrated in the name of various Christian dogmas to carry out “God’s will” were ineffably appalling. Christians stopped burning and torturing in the name of Gentle Jesus a while back but what was done must never be forgotten or forgiven.

Islam’s cruelty is a busily on-going project. As shown in our margin, there have been up to this day 16,690 acts of murderous violence in the name of Islam since 9/11 recorded by “The Religion of Peace” – as Robert Spencer names his indispensable website in deliberate irony.

We have commented on the trials of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff in Austria, both of whom are being prosecuted for telling the truth about Islam. (See our post, Civilization on trial, October 10, 2010.)

Throughout Europe it has become a crime to say anything about Muslims and Islam that Muslims do not like. It makes no difference if what is said is provably true. This means that not only is speaking the truth in this regard a crime, but free speech itself is a heresy.

We wrote that what is really on trial is our civilization. The Western world owes its greatness to the Enlightenment. Now the values with which the Enlightenment endowed us, chief among them freedom and truth – the freedom to search for truth and declare openly what we find –  are under threat. If we are to be returned to the darkness that prevailed in Europe before that dawn of the intellect, to the time when this church or that decided what people were permitted to know and say, and would punish in the cruelest imaginable ways any thinker who challenged the prevailing dogma, our civilization is as surely doomed as was Rome by Christianity.

The darkness is visibly spreading. In Denmark, Lars Hedegaard, President of the Danish Free Press Society, and Jesper Langballe, Member of Parliament, have been charged with committing the same “crime” as Geert Wilders and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff.

With her usual moral clarity, Melanie Phillips writes about this travesty of justice:

A Danish MP, Jesper Langballe, was convicted of hate speech last month for endorsing Hedegaard’s comments about ‘honour’ violence and sexual abuse within Muslim families. In his statement in court … Langballe wrote about the Orwellian Danish legal rules which effectively convicted him in advance of his trial, causing him to choose to ‘confess’ rather than participate in such a totalitarian ‘circus’.

Now Lars Hedegaard faces a similar circus. Later this month, he is to stand trial for ‘racism’ after he stated about Muslim ‘honour’ violence within families: “They rape their own children.”

In vain did Hedegaard explain the following day that obviously he had not meant by this that all Muslims engage in such practices, any more than saying ‘Americans make good films’ means that all Americans make good films; in vain did he adduce copious evidence of concern — including from Muslim victims themselves — about the amount of sexual and ‘honour’ violence, including rape and incest, within Muslim families. None of this made any difference. Hedegaard is about to be burned at the Danish legal stake for his heresy. …

As far as I can see, these developments in Denmark have been totally ignored in the English-speaking media. So much for the liberals’ fetish of free speech — so noisily defended whenever Christianity [MP’s one blind spot, in our view, is her defense of religion- JB], America, Israel or the west are being demonised and libelled; so much for the feminists’ professed concern for the rights of women and the obscenity of rape and sexual abuse. Two men who actually stand up for these principles are being persecuted for doing so, while the so-called progressive world is either helping pile up the faggots for their fire or looking the other way.

It’s not just Hedegaard or Langballe who are being consumed by these flames, however, but Europe’s own freedom.

The immoral ideology of Islam is not just tolerated in the West, it is actively and even passionately encouraged, by Western leaders, to spread and gain privilege and power. Yet the noisy, persistent, lying myth is propagated that Muslim populations in the West – particularly in the US – are victims of “hate crimes”, or what is called “Islamophobia”.

In stark contrast, Christians in Islamic states are continually persecuted. Massacres of Christians by Muslims are increasing in number and ferocity. The absurd morality that their religion teaches them not only prevents Christians from complaining too loudly or too often about this state of affairs, it encourages them never to retaliate but proudly to consider themselves heroic martyrs; which simply means that Islamic evil triumphs.

From Creeping Sharia, January 9, 2011, quoting Christian Newswire:

Despite Communist North Korea topping the annual Open Doors World Watch List (WWL) for the ninth consecutive year, the most dangerous countries in which to practice Christianity are overwhelmingly Islamic ones. … Of the top 10 countries on the 2011 WWL, eight have Islamic majorities.

Notably, one of the Islamic-majority countries where Christians are in extreme danger, is Iraq. What then has the US and its coalition partners won, what has it poured out blood and treasure for through 8 years of war in that incorrigible country? Was it not to make it “democratic” and consequently peaceful and tolerant?

The country that saw the greatest deterioration of Christian religious freedom in the reporting period from Nov. 1, 2009, through Oct. 31, 2010, was Iraq … The country has seen a Christian exodus in recent years, with an estimated 334,000 Christians remaining in this ancient cradle of Christianity, a drop of more than 50 percent since the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The main reason why Christians are fleeing is organized violence by an extremist militia, especially in the northern city of Mosul and in the capital Baghdad, in an attempt to cleanse these areas of its Christian presence. At least 90 Christians were martyred last year in Iraq while hundreds more were injured in bomb and gun attacks. More killings have taken place in the past two weeks. …

The country with the largest Christian community on the WWL’s top 15 is Pakistan with more than 5 million believers. Pakistani Christians also faced a sharp erosion of their religious liberty … Twenty-nine Christians were martyred in the reporting period with at least one killing occurring every month. …

Egypt … could be a focus of persecution this year as 21 Christians were killed in a bomb blast on New Year’s Day outside the Church of Two Saints in Alexandria. [Latest reports say more than 30 were killed, about 100 injured – see our post immediately below, J’accuse.]

In the light of that information, now contemplate this report concerning religion-inspired aggression in the US, also from the very useful site Creeping Sharia, December 29, 2010:

Without serious debate or examination, the Los Angeles City Council recently passed a resolution that opposes “Islamophobia” and “repudiates” random acts of violence against Muslims.

This …  resolution apparently accepts the premise that residents of the city commit acts of hate against Muslims so often that it warrants an official resolution from city leaders condemning and repudiating these acts. Is this really the case?

According to the latest hate crime report from the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, 88 percent of all religiously based hate crimes in 2009 were against Jews. [Most of which – suspicion has it not unreasonably – were committed by Muslims, though no official report says so or gives the identity and numbers of the perpetrators – JB.] Hate crimes that targeted Muslims (3 percent) ranked slightly above those directed at Scientologists (1 percent). In fact, the commission found that attacks against Christians (8 percent) outnumbered attacks against Muslims.

In any case, the actual number of reported hate crimes based on religion is quite small. In a county that has more than 10 million highly diverse residents, only a total of 131 crimes based on religion took place in all of 2009. … [Against atheists for being atheists? Figures hard to come by. Total of 6 recorded in 2007 – JB.]

Since only 3 percent of 131 hate crimes during 2009 was directed against Muslims, it’s difficult to understand why city leaders would pass a resolution that zeroes in on the category that has the next-to-lowest numbers recorded by the County’s Human Relations Commission.

Is it really difficult to understand? We could suggest a few probable causes: cowardice; ignorance; gullibility; Leftist ideology; Christian pusillanimity …

Again we have true stories to tell about the intense hatred, cruelty, and injustice inspired by religious beliefs and prejudices. One of them happened more than a hundred years ago; the second earlier this month.

In 1894, a French army officer of Alsatian Jewish descent, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was falsely accused of selling military secrets to Germany. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony on Devil’s Island, where he was kept in solitary confinement.

In 1896 new evidence came to light that should have exonerated him. It identified another officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, as the real traitor. But the evidence was suppressed and Esterhazy was never formally indicted. Dreyfus’s conviction was confirmed after forged documents were suddenly produced, but not everyone believed he was guilty. Chief among those who claimed there had been a miscarriage of justice was the writer Emile Zola, who published an open letter in a Paris newspaper on January 13, 1898, addresssed to the President of France, headed J’accuse – I accuse.

It was a brave thing that Zola did. For accusing the government of acting out of anti-Semitism and unlawfully imprisoning Dreyfus, he himself was sentenced to a term in jail, which he escaped by fleeing to England. But his efforts helped to bring Dreyfus back eventually from Devil’s Island, to receive a pardon in 1906 for the crime he had not committed. The French army took over a hundred years to admit it had been wrong. It did, however, reinstate Dreyfus, who earned promotion, and served his country throughout the First World War. Esterhazy got away with his treason, went to live in England, and there spent the rest of his life publishing anti-Semitic fulminations.

Now another letter has appeared in a newspaper headed J’accuse. It is written by a brave Egyptian journalist accusing the Egyptian government among others in the matter of the persecution of Coptic Christians, following the bombing of one of their churches in Alexandria early in the morning of January 1. More than thirty Copts were killed, and about a hundred others were injured. The most likely perpetrators were al-Qaeda terrorists.

This is what the journalist Hani Shukrallah wrote on January 1, 2011, the day of the massacre:

J’accuse

Hypocrisy and good intentions will not stop the next massacre. Only a good hard look at ourselves and sufficient resolve to face up to the ugliness in our midst will do so.

We are to join in a chorus of condemnation. Jointly, Muslims and Christians, government and opposition, Church and Mosque, clerics and laypeople – all of us are going to stand up and with a single voice declare unequivocal denunciation of al-Qaeda, Islamist militants, and Muslim fanatics of every shade, hue and color; some of us will even go the extra mile to denounce Salafi Islam, Islamic fundamentalism as a whole, and the Wahabi Islam which, presumably, is a Saudi import wholly alien to our Egyptian national culture.

And once again we’re going to declare the eternal unity of “the twin elements of the nation”, and hearken back the Revolution of 1919, with its hoisted banner showing the crescent embracing the cross, and giving symbolic expression to that unbreakable bond.

Much of it will be sheer hypocrisy; a great deal of it will be variously nuanced so as keep, just below the surface, the heaps of narrow-minded prejudice, flagrant double standard and, indeed, bigotry that holds in its grip so many of the participants in the condemnations.

All of it will be to no avail. We’ve been here before; we’ve done exactly that, yet the massacres continue, each more horrible than the one before it, and the bigotry and intolerance spread deeper and wider into every nook and cranny of our society. It is not easy to empty Egypt of its Christians; they’ve been here for as long as there has been Christianity in the world. Close to a millennium and half of Muslim rule did not eradicate the nation’s Christian community, rather it maintained it sufficiently strong and sufficiently vigorous so as to play a crucial role in shaping the national, political and cultural identity of modern Egypt.

Yet now, two centuries after the birth of the modern Egyptian nation state, and as we embark on the second decade of the 21stcentury, the previously unheard of seems no longer beyond imagining: a Christian-free Egypt, one where the cross will have slipped out of the crescent’s embrace, and off the flag symbolizing our modern national identity. I hope that if and when that day comes I will have been long dead, but dead or alive, this will be an Egypt which I do not recognize and to which I have no desire to belong.

I am no Zola, but I too can accuse. And it’s not the blood thirsty criminals of al-Qaeda or whatever other gang of hoodlums involved in the horror of Alexandria that I am concerned with.

I accuse a government that seems to think that by outbidding the Islamists it will also outflank them.

I accuse the host of MPs and government officials who cannot help but take their own personal bigotries along to the parliament, or to the multitude of government bodies, national and local, from which they exercise unchecked, brutal yet at the same time hopelessly inept authority.

I accuse those state bodies who believe that by bolstering the Salafi trend they are undermining the Muslim Brotherhood, and who like to occasionally play to bigoted anti-Coptic sentiments, presumably as an excellent distraction from other more serious issues of government.

But most of all, I accuse the millions of supposedly moderate Muslims among us; those who’ve been growing more and more prejudiced, inclusive and narrow minded with every passing year.

I accuse those among us who would rise up in fury over a decision to halt construction of a Muslim Center near ground zero in New York, but applaud the Egyptian police when they halt the construction of a staircase in a Coptic church in the Omranya district of Greater Cairo.

I’ve been around, and I have heard you speak, in your offices, in your clubs, at your dinner parties: “The Copts must be taught a lesson,” “the Copts are growing more arrogant,” “the Copts are holding secret conversions of Muslims”, and in the same breath, “the Copts are preventing Christian women from converting to Islam, kidnapping them, and locking them up in monasteries.”

I accuse you all, because in your bigoted blindness you cannot even see the violence to logic and sheer common sense that you commit; that you dare accuse the whole world of using a double standard against us, and are, at the same time, wholly incapable of showing a minimum awareness of your own blatant double standard.

And finally, I accuse the liberal intellectuals, both Muslim and Christian who, whether complicit, afraid, or simply unwilling to do or say anything that may displease “the masses”, have stood aside, finding it sufficient to join in one futile chorus of denunciation following another, even as the massacres spread wider, and grow more horrifying.

In the remainder of the letter there are interesting indications of how Egyptians – or at least some of them – see the United States as a sort of big brother, to be appealed to for rescue when Egyptians are overwhelmed by their own political-religious conflicts:

A few years ago I wrote in the Arabic daily Al-Hayat, commenting on a columnist in one of the Egyptian papers. The columnist, whose name I’ve since forgotten, wrote lauding the patriotism of an Egyptian Copt who had himself written saying that he would rather be killed at the hands of his Muslim brethren than seek American intervention to save him.

Addressing myself to the patriotic Copt, I simply asked him the question: where does his willingness for self-sacrifice for the sake of the nation stop. Giving his own life may be quite a noble, even laudable endeavor, but is he also willing to give up the lives of his children, wife, mother? How many Egyptian Christians, I asked him, are you willing to sacrifice before you call upon outside intervention, a million, two, three, all of them?

Yet Shakrallah himself would like his people to outgrow the need to appeal to Uncle Sam:

Our options, I said then and continue to say today are not so impoverished and lacking in imagination and resolve that we are obliged to choose between having Egyptian Copts killed, individually or en masse, or run to Uncle Sam. Is it really so difficult to conceive of ourselves as rational human beings with a minimum of backbone so as to act to determine our fate, the fate of our nation?

That, indeed, is the only option we have before us, and we better grasp it, before it’s too late.

It’s a fine clarion-call of a letter. But will it change anything?

Here is a real-life drama, of the tragic type, illustrating how the greatest impediment to moral behavior is religion.

Act One:

In November 2010, a Christian woman in Pakistan, Asia Bibi (also called Asiya Noreen in some reports), was sentenced to death for the crime of blasphemy.

She is 45 years old and has five children according to some news sources, three according to others. Whatever its size, hers is the only Christian family in the village of Ittan Wala. She was working in the fields on a hot summer’s day in 2009 when she was asked by the other women working with her to fetch water, which she did. But when she brought it some of the women refused to accept it on the grounds that she was a Christian, so by carrying the water to them with her infidel hands, she polluted it.

A few days later she was attacked by a mob, beaten and gang-raped. The police were called, and they took her, at first, into protective custody. Then, pressed by her accusers who said she had “insulted the Prophet Muhammad”, they charged her with blasphemy. She and  her defenders, who included Shahbaz Bhatti, the minorities minister, denied the charge.

She was kept in isolation for more than a year. Finally brought to trial, she was sentenced to be hanged.

Act Two:

On January 4, 2011, the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, was shot dead by one of his own bodyguards because he had spoken in defense of Asia Bibi, visited her in prison, and advocated reform of the blasphemy laws.

Taseer had openly supported Sherry Rehman, a politician who’d sought to effect such reform. The mere attempt had brought tens of thousands of protestors on to the streets of Pakistan’s cities in December, 2010. The crowds were incited both by  the “fundamentalist” Deoband movement and the “tolerant” Barelvi sect.

The government wilted before the religious frenzy of the mob. Babar Awan, the justice minister, hurriedly promised that there would be no reform of the sacred laws of blasphemy  – for which cowardice Salman Taseer bravely criticized him and the government as a whole.

A few days later Taseer was murdered.

The bodyguard-assassin, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, declared on being arrested that Taseer was a blasphemer and the punishment for blasphemy was death. Far from being a criminal in his own eyes, he had virtuously carried out what his religion and the law of the land required him to do. Pakistan’s law is based constitutionally on sharia, and prescribes death for blasphemers.

Qadri instantly became a hero. Islamic scholars defend him. He has thousands of followers on Facebook.

Chances are this killer will live a long life, honored and esteemed by his compatriots and his co-religionists.

Chances are Asia Bibi, the bearer of water to the thirsty, will be hanged. Her husband tried to shelter her two youngest children from knowledge of the verdict. They will know it soon if they don’t already, and their religion will tell them to condone the injustice.

We  believe that the Framers of the United States Constitution intended to found a secular nation, not “a Christian nation” as so many conservative pundits assert. We have looked for informed opinion about it, and found this one, given to us by Tom Hinkson, who is “a  life-long atheist”. He was, he says, “not brought up with any religion”, though both his parents “believe in a Christian deity”. He served his country in the Navy as a Nuclear Reactor Operator for seven years. In the last election cycle he joined the campaign for Marco Rubio. He is a  life member of both the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW).

Here is his opinion. It is his and not ours, but the information he provides confirms our own.

2011 is supposed to be the year of the Constitutional Conservative, but is it really? The Tea Party has helped  the Republican Party gain a majority in the House of Representatives, and near parity in the Senate, so things in the US have to get better – right? Not so fast! It seems that we as a nation have traded one evil for a possibly lesser evil, but another evil nonetheless. Have you noticed who is at the helm of the Tea Party? Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich … the list goes on. You might ask, “Well aren’t they better than Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Joe Biden?” The answer is yes, of course they are. But too many of the Tea Party figureheads represent that “silent majority” of biblical literalist Christians who, instead of wanting to turn the United States into a socialist utopia as Obama and the Democrats do, want to turn it into a kind of theocracy.

Since the rise of the Tea Party, there has been a movement to re-learn our American history, mainly fueled by Glenn Beck. This would be a very good thing, if he told the whole story. History is usually told with huge gaps to reinforce the tellers’ point of view. The so-called Christian conservatives bend history one way, and the Progressives would rather ignore history altogether.

If you have watched Glenn Beck for any appreciable length of time, you have seen him bring several people on to argue that we are a Christian nation, that nearly everything in the Constitution has a biblical foundation, and the proof for these claims lies in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. He and they make a compelling argument – at least to those who don’t know history.

It is true that the preamble of the Declaration of Independence refers to a divine power:

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.

The  Constitution, however, created a very explicitly secular government, and those that would argue otherwise try to re-write history to hide the transition from a government that derives its power from a higher power to one that derives its power from the consent of the governed.

Glenn Beck and the “Christian Conservatives” would have everyone believe that the Declaration of Independence founded our nation, and that the Constitution was written with the Declaration as sort of a foundation. The question is, are they right? Let’s look at some history that they won’t tell us.

The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th, 1776, formally declaring the independence of the 13 colonies from Great Britain, but did it create the United States of America? The answer is no, the United States of America was created by the Articles of Confederation, which created a binding agreement of government between the 13 original colonies. The Articles of Confederation were not ratified until March, 1781. Until the Articles of Confederation were ratified, the United States of America was just an idea. But wait a minute, why doesn’t anyone mention the Articles of Confederation? Probably because the Articles of Confederation created a government that failed in short order. The Constitution that we have today was originally ratified on September 17th, 1787, creating our current form of government.

The “Christian Conservatives” would have everyone believe that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written virtually side-by-side; in fact they are frequently published this way. The question is why would they want to ignore the 11-year gap? The answer is that the Constitution is a secular document. But, if we can be convinced that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written side-by-side, then an argument can be made to declare the United States of America a “Christian nation”, which opens the door for a biblical lens to view the Constitution through; even though the separation of church and state is an undeniable concept that is spelled out in the Constitution, and further explained by Thomas Jefferson in his letters to two separate Baptist organizations (see here and here).

Christians will argue that the intent of the founders was to create a Christian nation because Christianity was (and still is) the major religion present in the United States. But, if that was their intent, why not spell it out? Why would the founders specifically state that there will be “no religious test for office” (Article 6, paragraph 3 of the Constitution), or that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” (1st Amendment)? The answer is obvious: the founders wanted to create a secular government. Not only did they not state that there was a federal religion, they specifically banned it! In fact they went even further than that, and banned congress from making any law that RESPECTED the establishment of a religion, meaning that not only would the government not create a religion, or declare a national religion, but that the government would not even formally recognize religions.

Of course, the secular argument has a few problems: for instance, it is traditional for congress to open with a prayer, which would seem to contradict the Constitution itself, and honestly, it does. So, how can this be explained? Hypocrisy, plain and simple. If there is one constant in the history of this nation, then hypocrisy is it. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both outspoken critics of slavery, yet both owned dozens of slaves. No one today will argue in favor of slavery, even though several of the founders owned them. Yet, there are many who would argue for legislation based upon the bible or other religious texts rather than the Constitution simply because most of our founders identified themselves as Christians.

In the Declaration of Independence, there are three mentions of a higher power, they are: “Nature’s God”, “Creator”, and “Divine Providence”. None of these three terms are innately Christian, and the use of the terms is as an authority to separate from Great Britain. The United States of America is mentioned at the end of the document, but as I stated earlier, this was an idea; the United States of America was not formally established until the Articles of Confederation were ratified. Independence from Great Britain, and thus international recognition as a nation was not achieved until the end of the Revolutionary War by the signing of the Treaty of Paris on September 3rd, 1783.

In the Articles of Confederation, there are three references to a deity. Two of those references are “in the Year of Our Lord”, which was the common language for stating a date, not a reference to any divine inspiration for the government being created. The third reference is found in Article 13, the first sentence of the second paragraph states: “And Whereas it hath pleased the Great Governor of the World to incline the hearts of the legislatures we respectively represent in congress, to approve of, and to authorize us to ratify the said articles of confederation and perpetual union.” “Great Governor of the World” is an obvious allusion to a higher power, but not specifically to a Christian deity.

Nonetheless, the “Great Governor of the World” is the authority that is used to create the government under the Articles of Confederation. So if  the United States of America were still governed by the Articles of Confederation, the Christians would have some proof that we were founded as a “Christian Nation”. But as The Articles of Confederation created a very weak and very flawed government which soon failed, it can be stated that the government formed as a direct result of the Declaration of Independence was a failure. The founders of our current government knew that several changes needed to be made.

Within the Constitution, there is only one reference to any higher power, and that reference is in the date, which as stated above, was the common way of declaring a date “in the Year of Our Lord”. That reference is at the end of the Constitution, just before the signatures. There are several very important differences between the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Articles of Confederation.

The first, and largest difference, is that the Constitution does not claim any authority from a higher power, whereas both the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation did. Instead, the Constitution boldly proclaims “We the People” as the authority to create the government and all that comes with it. This runs in direct contradiction to the “Christian Conservative” claim that our rights are not given to us by the government, but by the Christian God (which was not specifically mentioned in any founding document). This puts a large hole in the “Christian Conservative” argument, but the Constitution does not stop there.

Within the Constitution, there are three specific bans on the co-mingling of religion and government. These bans are found in Article 6, paragraph 3, and in the 1st Amendment. The Constitution clearly states that there shall be “no religious test for office”, at either the federal or state levels, and that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” This suggests very strongly that one of the many lessons that the founders learned from the Articles of Confederation was that the mixing of religion and government does not work.

So while in principle I agree with “restoring America” as the Tea Partiers and Glenn Beck advocate, I say let’s restore it to a government run by the laws set forth by the Constitution. While we’re at it, let’s restore the Pledge of Allegiance to how it was before 1954, when the words “under God” were added. We can also take the words “In God We Trust” off of our currency. Those words were added first to coinage in 1864, on the two-cent coin, long after the founders died. Paper money wasn’t tainted with those words until 1957. Our national motto “In God We Trust” wasn’t adopted until 1956. All of the laws ordering these changes are unconstitutional because they all respect the establishment of religion. Let us abide by the Constitution, and restore the secular nation that the Founders intended.

On the eve of the new year, this is our Picture of the Year 2010.

At a US airport, a Muslim searches a nun for hidden weapons.

Nuns have been attempting to blow up planes.

One tried to light explosive material in her shoe, another in her underwear, while flying to America from Europe.

A nun put a bomb into a plane that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.

Nuns started hijacking aircraft and holding crews and passengers hostage in the late 1970s.

Never forget that 19 nuns hijacked four planes on 9/11, flew two of them into the World Trade Center in New York, one into the Pentagon, and crashed another, killing some 3,000 people, in the name of their Holy Trinity.

And those are only a few examples of a long list of their violent attacks, carried out or planned, in recent years.

Christians in general are waging a holy war against the rest of the world, using the method of terrorism.

Muslims are doing everything they can to defend their fellow human beings from this relentless onslaught.

A scene from the jihad in “pacified and democratized” Iraq:

On Sunday, October 31, 2010, nine al-Qaeda terrorists stormed the Syriac Catholic cathedral of Baghdad and murdered dozens of the congregation, including very small children. For a full account of what happened go here. Fifty-eight people were killed in addition to the suicide-bombers. Among the dead were some of the men belonging to the “unprepared and ill-led” security forces, who bungled a rescue attempt after some five hours.

Photos of the atrocity have not been widely published in the US, perhaps because they are too shocking, or perhaps for fear of provoking Muslim protest, so we are publishing them.

Some of the victims were beheaded, as can be seen in the bottom picture. It looks as if in this case the severing was done after the body was blown apart.