• Fund a national crash program in public education that emphasizes critical thinking skills. Hopefully, this would render TV ministries less attractive to vulnerable, easily-exploited citizens by prosperity gospel preachers and other charlatans offering spiritual pie-in-the-sky with all the trimmings.

• Tax all church property and religious business enterprises.

• Develop enforcement capabilities to identify reasonable versus extravagant uses of charitable contributions and industrial- strength record keeping and public disclosure of all charities.

• Create a national secular board or agency with the power to identify, study and, if appropriate, prosecute mountebanks who run scams under the umbrella of religion.

What a sweet deal the Crouchs and other TV evangelists have at present. They do not and could not guarantee their product - believers can never prove they were Madoffed with promises of wildly improbable returns on investments. After all, those who experience less, not more prosperity for their donations can't seek refunds. And, when they die, they don't even discover that it was all balderdash. No heaven or hell, no gods or devils and no judgments. They'll never know it was all BS. They'll never know they were duped.

There ought to be a law - lots of laws or at least a more sensible tax structure to discourage donations to people like the Crouches and others mentioned.

But, I'll settle for massive reforms in the educational system at all levels to encourage more critical thinking because the rest is as unlikely as prosperity from supporting the Crouches.

I loved the Washington Post column by humorist Art Buchwald in which he imagined a prayer session between Mr. Colson and the grandmother:

Colson - Shall we kneel together?

Granny: Not me. I haven’t been able to kneel since you screamed at me, ‘Four more years’ and then put your Oldsmobile into drive.

My favorite assessment of Colson was expressed years ago by Americans for Separation of Church and State's Barry Lynn. Americans United brought lawsuits against Colson's Prison Fellowship - and won. It turns out that the Fellowship engaged in more dirty tricks than Nixn's reelection committees. Colluding with Right Wing evangelical political leaders and officials, Colson's new ministry pressured prisoners to convert to Christianity, in good part by arranging better conditions for those willing to come to Jesus, Lynn said: Colson never changed his methods, just his boss. Sadly, when he went from being Richard Nixon's hatchet man, he turned into a man who thought he was God's hatchet man. He literally turned his very formidable political skills once in the service of very far-right religious and political agendas.

Of all the Colsonian expressions that this character contributed to the world, my favorite would have to be this one: When you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. This worked for Colson in both careers, with slight variation. In the second, as recruiter for an imaginary friend, he added souls to hearts and minds. This seems appropriate, given that no evidence exists for souls, either.

I'm with Cenk. If the evangelicals kept their beliefs and actions to themselves, if they let the rest of us alone, what's there to worry about?

Ah, wouldn't that be lovely? Alas, it's not happening. Christian activists have not kept their beliefs and actions to themselves, not since the Reagan years. They want political power. They want policies and laws that support their beliefs and actions. They want to legislate policies and laws that requre the rest of us to conform to their traditions, beliefs and actions. They can't help themselves - evangelicals think they are called to proselytize. They are convinced that God needs them to spread the word.  They believe they can’t keep their beliefs to themselves - God wants them out there selling. To not do so is to risk missing out on the heavenly lottery and all that eternal exuberance winning it supposedly brings.

A new book details what politicians like Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry mean when they talk about their personal relationship with God. Entitled, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God by T. M. Luhrmann (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), the author describes evangelical Christian communities (known as renewalists) that comprise as much as 26% of the American population. These people believe that they have had a direct revelation from God of one kind or another. Both the Gallup and Pew polling organizations report that renewalists also claim to have heard a voice or had a vision on one or more occasions as a result of prayer. Rick Warren sold 30 million copies of his book, Purpose Driven Life describing how to become best friends with God.  It would appear that God or at least Rick Warren have been friended by 30 million or more evangelicals. Talk about social networking.

If this kind of thinking helps people deal with stress, avoid loneliness and otherwise get on with their lives, I say, bully for them. Or, have at it, Hoss.

But what, exactly, does a Christian renewalist get out of the friendship with God, besides eternal bliss in the next life? According to Mr. Luhrmann, having God as a pal offers a friend, imaginary or real, who can be asked for practical advice (e.g., when getting dressed, whether God prefers the black shirt or the blue one). In an Opinion piece about his book in the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Luhrmann wrote: They didn't treat God as different from the stuff of the material world—tables, chairs, other people. They talked about God saying, telling, prodding, encouraging, as if he were right there at the dinner table. And sometimes they put out a place setting. (See When the Almighty Talks Back, WSJ, April 6, 2012, p.A11.)

To a secular infidel rationalist heretic freethinker like me, this is total batdoodoo. It seems incomprehensible that anyone capable of functioning outside of an institution without supervision could possibly take such beliefs seriously. Yet, as noted, at least a quarter of the population behaves accordingly, assuming Pew, Gallup and author Luhrmann are not having us on. The optimist in me recalls Aristotle for small comfort: There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man and hopes that the rest of the space in there is more or less rational.

Once again, I want to emphasize that bizarre religious beliefs and inexplicable actions give no offense when practiced harmlessly. If such were the case, I would not protest or be alarmed. But, when politicians get godly, I get nervous.

And that's precisely why I do very much worry about Republican presidential candidates who make explicit claims that their candidacy is based on a directive from an imaginary friend. No fewer than four contenders for the GOP (God's Own Party) claimed that God told them to run for president. The four would be Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry. Good riddance, all. (No, I'm not making this up. For details on each candidates heavenly endorsement, see Dan Amira, Every Candidate Endorsed by God Has Now Lost to Mitt Romney, in the April New York Magazine.)

It should be obvious why a new rule (thanks Bill Maher) is needed here. Presidents have to make important decisions that affect us all, nearly every day. On some days, presidential decisions can affect the fate of the nation. Think of it - do we want a president under extreme pressure to react to say, North Korea or Iran's immanent use of a nuclear weapon by consulting the National Security Council and dozens of other key advisers, or falling on his knees in prayer, asking God to tell him (via a little voice only he can hear) what to do? Holy crappola - Frankenstein seems warm and cuddly compared with the prospects of an evangelical president.

Like Ingersoll (The Gods, 1872), We are looking for the time when the useful shall be the honorable; and when reason, throned upon the world's brain, shall be the King of Kings, and God of Gods.

In Mr. Dolan's interview, a mantra of deceit is seen in references to the church as a defender of "the rights of conscience," infringments on "religious liberty" and "moral imperatives."
Orwell would love it, no doubt.

Mr. Dolan implies that the president and "ideologues ... favor an ever-more-powerful secular government." Well, as opposed to what - a weaker secular government relative to the forces of theocracy, such as the U.S. Conference of Bishops?

In 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy promised a gathering of ministers in Houston - and the nation, that "my Catholic faith will not inspire my decisions in the White House." What does Dolan think of that? "That's worrisome," he stated.

Well, at least he did not throw up. Rather, the archbishop and the writer of the WSJ article take comfort from the fact that "devout Catholic Rick Santorum is running on the promise that his faith will inform his decisions" and that the U.S. Supreme Court ... has had a Catholic majority since 2006."

I suspect more than a few readers of even the WSJ take little comfort in the candidacy of Mr. Santorum or the composition and many rulings of the Catholic dominated Supreme Court.

Let freedom - and a more powerful secular government, ring. And prevail.

The candidates seeking the 2012 presidential nomination of the Republican Party have staked their prospects on a strategy of using their intellectual powers for sophistry. They are making monkeys out of themselves in the eyes of all who are not part of the evangelical Right Wing. The Republican candidates are caught up in a religious fervor; one declares that he nearly vomited reading the words of the Catholic Democratic candidate for president in 1960 to a convention of Protestant ministers:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I do not believe any Republican candidates or office holders over the years since Kennedy's speech have expressed any disagreement with that famous speech.  Not even popes over the last 50-plus years have objected. What possessed such an outburst from candidate Rick Santorum? This is what Republican Party politics has come to.

Let me summarize the nature of the Republican Party that I would like to expose with Pac ads that I would fund, if I had a few million to spare for this important purpose. It seems to me that Republicans prefer creationism over science, faith over reason, condemnation over tolerance, moralism over accommodation, patriarchy over equality and the status quo over reforms. The Party cares less or not at all about inequalities, poverty, discrimination, universal access to quality health care, safeguarding the environment, husbanding natural resources or supporting education. What they do seem to care about, passionately, is blocking access to abortion and contraception, stopping research on embryonic stem cells, keeping taxes low and making sure no gay people are allowed to marry.

I believe America needs a new Super Pac, and if I had the money, I would fund one. I would not coordinate with the Obama campaign (can't do that, you know), which is fine with me, since the Democratic strategists might not like the ads I would promulgate. All the ads would cover these three themes, which I believe to be true:

• The Republican Party has become an American Taliban. The extremist evangelicals embrace a messianic worldview as bizarre and oppressive to human rights as that of their Islamic cousins in Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan.
• A vote for Republicans supports faith-based policies leading to a theocracy.
• The Republican Party will bring about civil conflict as divisive as the gulf between north and south in 1860. To borrow a line from Thomas Henry Huxley ("The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species," 1880), their "irrationally held truths would, if translated into policies and laws, prove more harmful than any imaginable reasoned errors” by the Democrats.

Today's Republican Party is the Democratic Party before the Civil War began - the Party of censorship, oppression and patriarchy.

I want a Super Pac to say these things, because I support such a message.

It’s time to quit the Roman Catholic Church.

It’s your moment of truth. Will it be reproductive freedom, or back to the Dark Ages? Do you choose women and their rights, or Bishops and their wrongs? Whose side are you on, anyway?

It is time to make known your dissent from the Catholic Church, in light of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops’ ruthless campaign endangering the right to contraception. If you’re part of the Catholic Church, you’re part of the problem.

Why are you propping up the pillars of a tyrannical and autocratic, woman-hating, sex-perverting, antediluvian Old Boys Club? Why are you aiding and abetting a church that has repeatedly and publicly announced a crusade to ban contraception, abortion and sterilization, and to deny the right of all women everywhere, Catholic or not, to decide whether and when to become mothers? When it comes to reproductive freedom, the Roman Catholic Church is Public Enemy Number One. Think of the acute misery, poverty, needless suffering, unwanted pregnancies, social evils and deaths that can be laid directly at the door of the Church’s antiquated doctrine that birth control is a sin and must be outlawed.

A backer of the Roman Catholic presidential candidate says that if women want to avoid pregnancy we should put an aspirin between our knees? Catholic politicians are urging that the right to contraception should be left up to states? Nearly 50 years after the Supreme Court upheld contraception as a privacy right, we’re going to have to defend this basic freedom all over again?

You’re better than your church. So why? Why continue to attend Mass? Tithe? Why dutifully sacrifice to send your children to parochial schools so they can be brainwashed into the next generation of myrmidons (and, potentially, become the next Church victims)? For that matter, why have you put up with an institution that won’t put up with women priests, that excludes half of humanity?

No self-respecting feminist, civil libertarian or progressive should cling to the Catholic faith. As a Cafeteria Catholic, you chuck out the stale doctrine and moldy decrees of your religion, but keep patronizing the establishment that menaces public health by serving
rotten offerings. Your continuing Catholic membership, as a “liberal,” casts a veneer of respectability upon an irrational sect determined to blow out the Enlightenment and threaten liberty for women worldwide.

You are an enabler. And it’s got to stop.

If you imagine you can change the church from within — get it to lighten up on birth control, gay rights, marriage equality, embryonic stem-cell research — you are deluding yourself. If you remain a “good Catholic,” you are doing “bad” to women’s rights. You’re kidding yourself if you think the Church is ever going to add a Doctrine of Immaculate ContraCeption.

It is disgraceful that U.S. health care reform is being held hostage to the Catholic Church’s bizarre opposition to medically prescribed contraception. No politician should jeopardize electability for failure to genuflect before the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
(Question to ask your Bishop: Does he hold up an umbrella against the rain? Isn’t that just as “unnatural” as using a condom or diaphragm?)

Your Church hysterically claims that secular medical policy is “an assault against religious liberty.” You are savvy enough to realize that the real assault is by the Church against women’s rights and health care. As Nation columnist Katha Pollitt asks: Is it an offense against Jehovah Witnesses that health care coverage will include blood transfusions? The Amish, as Pollitt points out, don’t label cars “an assault on religious liberty” and try to force everyone to drive buggies. The louder the Church cries “offense against religious liberty” the harder it works to take away women’s liberty.

Obama has compromised, but the Church never budges, instead launching a vengeful modern-day Inquisition. Look at its continuing directives to parish priests to use their pulpits every Sunday to lobby you against Obama’s policy, the Church’s announcement of a major anti-contraception media campaign — using your tithes, contributions and donations — to defeat Obama’s laudable health care policy. The Church has introduced into Congress the “Respect for Rights of Conscience Act, ” a bill to place the conscienceless Catholic Church’s “rights of conscience” above the rights of conscience of 53 percent of Americans. That the Church has “conscience rights” to deny women their rights is a kissing cousin to the claim that “corporations are people.” The Church that hasn’t persuaded you to oppose contraception now wants to use the force of secular law to deny contraceptive rights to non-Catholics.

But is there any point in going on? After all, your misplaced loyalty has lasted through two decades of public sex scandals involving preying priests, children you may have known as victims, and church complicity, collusion and coverup going all the way to the top. Are you like the battered woman who, after being beaten down every Sunday, feels she has no place else to go?

But we have a more welcoming home to offer, free of incense-fogged ritual, free of what freethinker Bertrand Russell called “ideas uttered long ago by ignorant men,” free of blind obedience to an illusory religious authority. Join those of us who put humanity above
dogma.

As a member of the “flock” of an avowedly antidemocratic club, isn’t it time you vote with your feet?

Please, exit en Mass.

The letter is signed by Annie Laurie Gaylor, Co-President of FFRF.

If you wish to contribute to FFRF's campaign to fund the placement of
this ad in the New York Times and/or become a member of FFRF, go to
their website and do it. I did.

Isn't freedom of speech wonderful? Let's not lose it to another theocracy.

All good wishes.

It was George Washington. The remarks are contained in a letter dated June 22, 1792 that Washington addressed to Edw Newenham. (Source: United States Government Print. Off., 1931 - 1944. Volume 32, page 73.)

I do not think our first, or any subsequent president, with the possible exception of George W. Bush, would approve of positions expressed by Rick Santorum, the ex-senator from Pennsylvania who is currently the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination.

Santorum has been serving the farthest of the far right wing of the Republican Party a toxic brew of Dark Age philosophy. He makes frequent references to the Devil and biblical values. He  opposes many human rights (e.g., gay marriage, civil unions), contraception (!), stem cell research, prenatal tests, right to die laws, science in general (environmental protections, climate change) and secularism (church/state separation) in particular.

Santorum is great for comedians, but a potential disaster for the country. I can't imagine him as the nominee of the Republican Party, but then this is the Party that gave us George W. I certainly can't imagine that anyone not on the Far Side of the extreme right would vote for him, but one never knows.

As noted, he is a boon for comedians. The other night, Bill Maher said this: It just shows you how when someone is a nobody politically speaking -- as Santorum was in 2008 -- you can say any kind of crazy shit and it's not newsworthy. But when you are seeking the highest office in the land...in the world -- it really worries me that you believe in demons and a personified creature named Satan." Santorum, not Bill Maher in a comedy routine, declared that what Satan really wants is the demise of the United States. (Source: A 2008 speech at Ave Maria University in Florida. He did not explain how he came to this insight.)

Santorum has said that our rights trace not to the U.S. Constitution but from God, specifically the Christian god. He believes the American divide is not a culture war - it's a spiritual war: Our nation's way of life is falling to evil forces...If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? (Frankly, it has never occurred to me to ponder what I would do if I were Satan. But, now that I just pondered the matter a bit, I think I'd vote for Santorum.)

Santorum wants to defund public education - better to school children at home, as the Founders did then and he does now. Why is Santorum so against contraception? According to Bill Maher, Because there's a line in Genesis about not spilling your seed. A random brainfart from some desert dweller 3,000 years ago, before people knew about germs or atoms or round planets, and it gets written down and passed down and in 2012 people like Rick Santorum ... believe it.

So, if you are not Satan and won't be voting for Santorum or a registered Republican qualified to vote against him in a primary somewhere down the electoral line, what can you do? Probably not a lot. Hoping for the best will do as much good as prayer, rain dances or tossing a coin into a wishing well. Of course you can write letters to the editor or write an anti-Santorum blog, but wouldn't it be nice if there were another option, in addition to the usual ways of trying to make a little difference in your own way? 

There is. You can gather with like-minded, sensible folks and commiserate, laugh, strategize and in many ways enjoy a day on the Mall in Washington, D.C. You can make plans now to attend the Reason Rally on March 24!

The Reason Rally is co-sponsored by all the leading secular organizations. The day-long event is designed to unify, energize, inform, embolden and entertain secular people from around the country and throughout the world. There will be music, comedy and talks by luminaries of the secular movement. Everyone is welcome, including those not-so-secular. I'm sure even Santorum would be welcome. 

It may be the largest secular event ever. And its free.

Details about the Rally are here.

I'll end this with an observation about knowledge and reason as contrasted with faith from Arthur Schopenhauer: Faith and knowledge are related as the two scales of balance; when the one goes up, the other goes down...The power of religious dogma, when inculcated early, is such as to stifle conscience, compassion and finally every feeling of humanity...For, as you know, religions are like glow worms; they shine only when it's dark. A certain amount of ignorance is the condition of all religions, the element in which alone they can exist. (Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), cited in Who's Who in Hell compiled by Warren Allen Smith and Freethought of the Day compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor, February 22, 2012.)