That seems to be the idea behind forming a council of key policy advisors, whose qualifications seem to be the fervency of their obeisance to an invisible man in the sky.

The move has been criticised by secularists who warned that it represented a worrying development.

However, Mr Denham argued that Christians and Muslims can contribute significant insights on key issues, such as the economy, parenting and tackling climate change.

Oh, really? How? I suppose tithing and refusing to allow money to be lent at interest are a kind of economic strategy…just not a very productive one. And I don’t quite see the point of consulting with a gang of grisly old virgins on parenting, or asking some bearded imam whose chief talent is the memorization of the Koran about what to do about carbon emissions. I wish Mr Denham had gone on with some specifics that he hopes superstition can address.

He does have a few general platitudes.

“Faith is a strong and powerful source of honesty, solidarity, generosity – the very values which are essential to politics, to our economy and our society.”

Ah, I see. I had no idea how different the government of the UK was from the government of the US. Here, honesty and generosity aren’t exactly common currency in government, or at least are in conflict. I suppose one could argue that Washington has been very generous to defense contractors, but they aren’t very forthright about it. I suppose there are principles of solidarity at work, with our most religious party, the Republicans, being monolithic in their opposition to equality, social support, and science, and Democrats straining to achieve some kind of unity — maybe they’d benefit from religious rigidity, too. I suppose if the UK government did model their political system after the Muslims and Christians, they could end up with a nice, pretty political system like ours, with Republicans and Democrats.

Maybe Denham should look more closely at our system. For instance, maybe he could pop over for the Bold Fresh Tour, and see how a couple of paragons of the idea of using religious principles in government represent honesty, solidarity, and generosity.

A sensible federal judge has struck down South Carolina’s plan to proselytize with license plates, pointing out that it violates the separation of church and state for the state to not only endorse religion, but a specific religious sect. Good work, except that it would have been such a useful marker for vehicles to avoid on the road — after all, their drivers could be raptured up into heaven at any moment.

I suppose there will be a compensatory over-reaction to help out, though. All the Christian drivers of the state are still welcome to slap on lots of bumper stickers and cover their dashboards with Jebus bobbleheads.

The man who slaughtered 13 unarmed people in Fort Hood, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was clearly mentally ill, and should have been treated and cared for before he snapped and went on a rampage. Unfortunately, there’s another factor that seems to be getting minimized in the press accounts: he was also a member of an Abrahamic death cult. Ibn Warraq has come out with a strong statement on the Islamic terrorism that motivated the attacks.

It is time to abandon apologetics, and political correctness. Not all Muslims are terrorists. Not all Muslims are implicated in the horrendous events of September 11, 2001 — or of November 5, 2009. However, to pretend that Islam has nothing to do with 9/11 or the Fort Hood massacre is willfully to ignore the obvious. To leave Islam out of the equation means to forever misinterpret events. Without Islam, the long-term strategy and individual acts of violence by Osama bin Laden and his followers make little sense. Without Islam, the West will go on being incapable of understanding our terrorist enemies, and hence will be incapable to deal with them. Without Islam, neither is it possible to comprehend the barbarism of the Taliban, the position of women and non-Muslims in Islamic countries, or — now– the murders attributed to Major Hasan.

Religion is not a mitigating factor. It is not an excuse or a defense. it is not a sacred principle that must not be questioned. Too often, it has a complex causal relationship to evil.

Wow. I thought our local vets were petty when they threatened to yank scholarships if they weren’t allowed to lead prayers in public schools, but now someone has topped them. Who, you may wonder? As if you couldn’t guess, the Catholic Church leads the way in small-minded extortion.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn’t change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health care.

The Catholic Church weighs the lives of tens of thousands of sick, homeless people against the chance to slap down the dignity of gay people again, and obviously the most important thing is to make sure the primacy of heterosexuality is preserved.

This is a charming local story for Veteran’s day. The American Legion post in Bloomington has been doing a little ceremony at the public schools for 40 years, and has also been giving scholarships to students. Last year, they surprised the school by adding a public prayer to their ritual; this year, the school asked them not to do that. Guess what their reply was?

To announce in a snit that they wouldn’t do the ceremony at all if they couldn’t make it religious, and that they’d also take their scholarships away.

Nice.

They have every right to do that, of course. I would have thought that they gave out the scholarships because they cared about students and wanted to help them get a good education, but I guess I was mistaken: it was really a bribe to force them to listen to Christian propaganda.

“We are not trying to push anything on kids or convert them, but we are a Christian-based country and a military based on Christian-based principles,” said Selle, who was an Army medic in Vietnam. “My opinion is that this is another example of America going downhill.”

Well, gosh, then…I guess Mr Selle ought to make his patriotism conditional, too, and yank away his support for America if everyone doesn’t say his Christian prayer with him. And they definitely are trying to push religion on kids, using their scholarships as a stick to compel them to obey.

I do wonder about this “military based on Christian-based principles” — do they turn the other cheek? Or are these those other Christian principles, the crusading ones that “did not come to bring peace, but a sword”?

The sentencing of a convicted murder, Khristian Oliver, should be an embarrassment to the state of Texas; the jurors consulted the Old Testament to see what should be done with him, found a bible verse they liked — “And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death” — and sentenced him to be executed.

Well, that was just fine with Governor Rick Perry. Oliver has been killed. Isn’t it nice to have the importance of biblical morality affirmed for us once again?

At first glance, I thought this story was good news: Oklahoma is going to build a Christian prison! About time, I thought, I can think of a few Christians who deserve a few years for faith-abuse. But no…it’s a prison to be administered by Christians to give Christian criminals special privileges. Not quite as appropriate, but more in line with what we’ve gotten used to from our dominant faith tradition.

We’re getting more of the same from Congress, too. Religion is being given permission to intrude on science once again, with the sanctimonious Orrin Hatch (abetted by a pair of Democrats, Kerry and Kennedy) sponsoring a provision in the mangled health care football to allow prayer to count as medicine. It’s specifically a sop to Christian Science, that nonsensical superstition that believes that medicine is a betrayal of faith and that wants to charge sick people money to pray over them…and also get reimbursement from the government. Let the Christian Scientists get a foot in the door and official recognition of mumbling to Jesus as a billable service, and you know the Scientologists and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Amish and Mormons and, of course, the Catholics will be surging through to take advantage of the opportunities.

I may just have to convert to Catholicism under this bill so I can charge the US and my insurance provider to cover my near-sightedness treatments at Lourdes. And the French Riviera.

You laugh. But look at the absurdity of existing loopholes.

The Internal Revenue Service, for example, allows the cost of Christian Science prayer sessions to be counted among itemized medical expenses for income tax purposes — one of the only religious treatments explicitly identified as deductible by the IRS.

Moreover, some federal medical insurance programs, including those for military families now reimburse for prayer treatment.

…

The Christian Science religious tradition has always emphasized the role of trained prayer practitioners. Their job, as outlined by the church’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy, is to pray for healing and charge for treatment at rates similar to those charged by doctors.

Practitioners are not regulated by the government, but many buy advertisements in a leading Christian Science publication. The publication requires an application process for the ads that includes the submission of patient testimonials, a practice that church leaders say is tantamount to a vetting process.

Davis has been trained as a practitioner and still occasionally treats the sick. “We’ll talk to them about their relationship to God,” he said. “We’ll talk to them about citations or biblical passages they might study. We refer to it as treatment.”

During the day, Davis may see multiple patients and pray for them at different moments. He charges them $20 to $40 for the day, saying, “I think that it would be considered modest by any standard.”

Modest in absolute terms, but relative to the quality of the “treatment”, that counts as a major ripoff.

We can at least hope that the bad publicity this provision is getting will lead to its removal…and even more optimistically, that it will lead to scrutiny of the unethical fraud of a secular government legitimizing any of these superstitious practices.

I hope the Oklahoma prison for pampered Christians is also found unconstitutional.