But America’s Constitution is more than just a secular document; it’s literally godless. It doesn’t claim that the ideas it contains were the product of divine revelation. It states that governing power comes from the will of the people, not the commands of a deity. It doesn’t assert that God has specially blessed this nation or shown it special favor — in fact, it never mentions God at all. And it mentions religion in only two places, both of them negative mentions: in Article VI, which forbids any religious test for public office, and in the First Amendment, which forbids Congress from passing any law respecting an establishment of religion.

If America’s founders had meant to establish a Christian nation, this is where they would have said so. But they said no such thing. And this leads into a historical fact that the religious right would dearly love to forget: the godlessness of the Constitution was a point of major controversy in the debate over ratification. When it was drafted, the fact that it made no explicit mention of God or Christianity wasn’t a minor oversight. It was a major, deliberate omission that was obvious to all. Religious language was omnipresent in other legal documents and charters of the day, including the ones that inspired the Constitution in the first place.

Compelling.

Men and women in the South had higher rates of divorce in 2009 than in other regions of the country, 10.2 per 1,000 for men and 11.1 per 1,000 for women, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau. The national divorce rate was 9.2 for men and 9.7 for women.

Yeah, the Bible Belt has the most divorce. That’s pure comedy.

With all the porn use, STDs, gay Republican preachers, and divorce, I’m going to have to say that the South needs some God in their lives.

Just this past Thursday in New Hampshire, in response to a child’s question, Perry described evolution as “a theory that’s out there” and one that’s “got some gaps in it.” His latest statement is remarkably similar to what his office wrote to a Texas voter in 2006 when questioned about intelligent design: “Recognizing that evolution is a theory, and not claimed by anyone to be more than that, the governor believes it would be a disservice to our children to teach them only one theory on the origin of our existence without recognizing other scientific theories worth consideration.”

Don’t believe in evolution? Unfit for office. It’s that simple. A mastery of elementary school science should definitely be a prerequisite.

The fact that this woman is probably in physical danger makes her point for her.

But to understand just how non-capitalistic Christianity is supposed to be we turn to the first chapter after the gospels, Acts, which describes the events of the early church. Chapters 2 and 4 state that all “the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need… No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had…. There were no needy persons among them. From time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.”

Now folks, that’s outright socialism of the type described millennia later by Marx – who likely got the general idea from the gospels.

The pro-capitalist Christians who are aware of these passages wave them away even though it is the only explicit description of Christian economics in the Bible.

Here is what is peculiar. Many conservative Christians, mostly Protestant but also a number of Catholics, have come to believe and proudly proclaim that the creator of the universe favors free wheeling, deregulated, union busting, minimal taxes especially for wealthy investors, plutocrat-boosting capitalism as the ideal earthly scheme for his human creations. And many of these Christian capitalists are ardent followers of Ayn Rand, who was one of – and many of whose followers are — the most hard-line anti-Christian atheist/s you can get. Meanwhile many Christians who support the capitalist policies associated with social Darwinistic strenuously denounce Darwin’s evolutionary science because it supposedly leads to, well, social Darwinism!

Meanwhile atheists, secularists and evolutionist are denounced as inventing the egalitarian evils of anti-socially Darwinistic socialism and communism. It’s such a weird stew of incongruities that it sets one’s head spinning. Social researchers like myself ask, how did these internal conflict come about? And why are not liberals and progressives doing the logical thing and taking full advantage of the inconsistencies of right wing libertarianism by loudly exposing the contradictions?

This.

Earlier this year, Andrew Zak Williams asked public figures why they believe in God. Now it’s the turn of the atheists – from A C Grayling to P Z Myers – to explain why they don’t.

Click through to the article to read concise explanations for why various notables do not believe. It’s a good read.

Eviscerating.

This is very compelling, but I have a strong counterargument.

Essentially, if people start collecting behind the banner of reason and evidence, it will become inefficient and silently deafening to *not* have a term associated with this approach to finding truth.

Bundles of people who share similar ideas, and who join together to discuss them, seldom do this for long without assigning a name to said approach. Right now that’s called atheism because the main thing being opposed is false belief, and the main place to find that is within religion.

So what Harris is proposing here is that we do something that can’t be done — at least right now. People facing everyone believing in Alchemy will collect together and will become known as anti-alchemy. It’s the same for religion/atheism, and it’s the same for any group that promotes “reason and evidence”.

There will be a name given, and it too will develop the downsides that Harris correctly ascribes to the term “atheism”.

This doesn’t mean this argument hasn’t made sense to me — I may still abandon the label — I’m just saying the argument isn’t as clear and clean as he’s making it out to be.