Why do they waste their time with these idiots? Barack Obama has been struggling against the guilt-by-association of having been a regular member of a lunatic’s church, this odious little ignorant rat-bag named Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Yet at the same time, McCain joyfully accepts endorsements from John Hagee and Rod Parsley…and if Wright is a rat-bag, those two are festering, reeking mountains of putrefying rat-shit. Does the media give a damn? No. They’re also white members of the televangelical racket, and ever since the anti-semitic backwoods babbler Billy Graham was canonized for introducing the appearance of delusional piety into the hypocritical Nixon White House, it’s become the habit to defer to the liars for Jesus who brag about bringing morality to government.

And yet, someone who refuses to sit quietly as these nutjobs rave, who refuses to endorse the lie of religion, who does not suffer through the weekly tedium of sitting in a pew to listen mutely to a know-nothing air his ignorance to a flock of sheep, cannot possibly be elected to the presidency. Meanwhile, if the press is antagonistic towards you, they will cheerfully take some stupid sermon you listened to and blame you for its contents (and if they don’t want to trouble your march to election, they’ll quietly ignore it). It’s a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation.

So why not just Kobiyashi Maru your way out of the whole corrupt situation and stop pandering to the churchies all together? That’s my advice to the candidates right now. You’re screwed no matter which way you jump, so you might as well take the rational route and announce that you’re washing your hands of the whole wretched lot of preachin’ scalliwags, whose faith-based advice doesn’t belong in government anyway. Be bold! Be free of gods, or at the very least, free of god-bothering liars.

(By the way, if you don’t know how vile Hagee and Parsley are, Revere has video clips.)

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Let’s not forget Hillary Clinton. She’s entangled with a far right-wing fellowship of fascists.

Sometimes, I am extremely annoyed with the principle of separation of church and state — it leads to absurdities, like this recent court decision that a gay student support group was was using unconstitutional tactics — it was using materials that mentioned that some religions are more tolerant of homosexuality than others. This is, apparently, an endorsement of particular religions and therefore violates church-state separation.

Well, yeah, it is — for specific subjects, like gay rights, science education, and pacifism, some religions clearly are better than others — yet because we have to mindlessly avoid any perception of preference for one over another at any official level, the more enlightened faiths must be lumped with the dumbest, vilest, crudest kinds of religions, and you are not allowed to distinguish between them. I’ve said it before: church-state separation is a principle that protects and privileges religious belief in the United States, and furthermore as we can see here, it isolates pathological, dangerous beliefs from valid criticism.

This decision could be of some concern for future court battles over creationism, too, because science support organizations clearly do have a preference for some kinds of religions over others, and actually do promote certain doctrines over others. This is a fight driven by religious ignorance by the creationists, so of course we’ve got to engage them on the wrongness of their stupid claims about science … but if they wrap those up in the protective mantle of their holy and sacred religious beliefs, this decision says criticism is violating their religious protection. Will we have to worry that someone in the court system will take seriously the claim that teaching that the evidence says the earth is 4½ billion years old amounts to belittling religions that preach that the earth is 6000 years old, and favoring those that are agnostic on the age of the earth?

At least I can take comfort in the fact that the Pharyngula strategy is still safely on the side of the constitution: I don’t favor any religion at all, I despise ’em all equally.

I think he’s due, but he’s not the only one. It’s like our entire army is being turned into a pocket theocracy.

When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.

But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.

Major Welborn told the soldiers he might bar them from re-enlistment and bring charges against them, according to the statement.

Ugh. Threats from a commanding officer over what our soldiers believe? Not that anyone will chastise him; the conversion of our military into a goon squad for the believers is coming along too far for that.

But Mikey Weinstein, a retired Air Force judge advocate general and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said the official statistics masked the great number of those who do not report violations for fear of retribution. Since the Air Force Academy scandal began in 2004, Mr. Weinstein said, he has been contacted by more than 5,500 service members and, occasionally, military families about incidents of religious discrimination. He said 96 percent of the complainants were Christians, and the majority of those were Protestants.

Complaints include prayers “in Jesus’ name” at mandatory functions, which violates military regulations, and officers proselytizing subordinates to be “born again.” After getting the complainants’ unit and command information, Mr. Weinstein said, he calls his contacts in the military to try to correct the situation.

“Religion is inextricably intertwined with their jobs,” Mr. Weinstein said. “You’re promoted by who you pray with.”

“Promoted by who you pray with”…that’s scary. We’ve got selection going on in the armed forces for uniformity of religious belief, and worst of all, it’s for the kind of religious belief endorsed by loud Christianist wackaloons.

Yesterday, two great pious leaders of the world met in Washington DC. President Bush has immense temporal power, leading one of the richest countries on the planet with the most potent military force. Pope Benedict is a spiritual leader to a billion people, with immense influence and the responsibility of a long religious legacy. What could they have talked about? Mostly, they seem to have patted each other on the back and congratulated each other on their commitment to superstition.

In remarks greeting the pope at the White House, Bush called the United States “a nation of prayer.”

Bush was interrupted by applause as he said, “In a world where some treat life as something to be debased and discarded, we need your message that all human life is sacred and that each of us is willed.”

Benedict responded by praising the role of religion in the United States.

“From the dawn of the republic, America’s quest for freedom has been guided by the conviction that the principles governing political and social life are intimately linked to a moral order based on the dominion of God the creator,” he said.

I am often told that religion is a source of morality. I’ve read the Bible myself; I can see that there were moral philosophers at work behind that book, that we have a tradition of law in the Old Testament, with a fellow named Jesus adding social justice and concern for the poor and weak in the New that are actually rather commendable. I also see a lot of myth and error and misplaced obsession with the supernatural that rational people are willing to set aside to focus on the core humanitarian message … or at least they do so in the best of circumstances.

Yet what I also see in modern religion is a re-prioritizing: the secular concerns that should matter, the egalitarian word of a religious tradition that valued the cohesion of the social fabric and demanded equal treatment for even the least of society is ignored, given a little lip service perhaps, but made subservient to the intangible theological nonsense of prayer, of an invisible god, of submission to dogma and hope in an unevidenced afterlife. It’s a religion that has shifted its eyes from a task to be done here on earth to an unearthly vision of a magical unseen world run by an ethereal tyrant who must be placated.

Bush calls us a nation of prayer — a depressing label that makes us a country of delusions. Worse, he claims that we respect life as sacred, a lie straight from his lips. How can George Bush claim our country does not debase and discard human lives?

As you well informed blog readers all know by now, last week ABC broke an interesting little story. It was about how Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, Colin Powell, George Tenent, John Ashcroft and other Bush “Principals” all gathered in regular meetings in the White House to discuss and approve of the various torture methods being used against prisoners held by the United States in the War On Terror. ABC interviewed the president a couple of days later and asked him if he was aware of these meetings and he said he was not only aware of them, but that he’d approved of them. Moreover, he specifically said he had no regrets about what was done to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who we know was tortured with simulated drowning — also known as “waterboarding” — which is considered by the entire civilized world to be torture.

The great pious Catholic Pope stands before this man, and what does he say? Does he mention that Jesus asked that we do to others as we would have them do to us? Does he remind him that they call their religious figurehead the “Prince of Peace”, and that he asked us to turn the other cheek when we were struck, or that he asked that we protect the poor and weak? Does he point out that the central event in their shared faith was the torture and execution of their prophet and god, and that the New Testament isn’t about emulating the heroic Romans?

No, of course not. An obscenely wealthy old man heading an organization that protects child abusers and advocates horrendous and ignorant social practices that harm the poor all around the world would look utterly hypocritical even trying to rebuke a war-monger and apologist for torture. So instead he stands there and tells him that they share common principles founded in fear of a nebulous god. Those are ‘principles’ I reject — they seem to be nothing but labile excuses for doing as you will to anyone who falls under your thumb.

There’s an evil tableau for you: the callous torturer stands up with blood on his hands and a lie in his teeth, while the priest draped in gilt reassures him of his righteousness. How often has that scene played out in history, I wonder?

Our press seems to be more interested in promoting the pomp of a papal visit than actually addressing the vileness that this administration prosecutes; we’ll see more of the pointless, self-promoting ceremonial nonsense of the mass in New York this weekend than we’ll see addressing the unconscionable evil these great pious leaders condone. I won’t be watching any of it. The sight of these two sanctimonious monsters makes me ill. How about you, Christians? These are your leaders, your paragons, your representatives of the power of your faith. Do you feel some slight tremor of shame that your values are on parade in an empty ritual in the foreground, and a brutal indifference to human life in the back?