mrs Du Toit had an excellent essay up a couple months ago about Atheism.

More recently, this moron has taken it upon himself to try to remove the prayers from the Inaugural ceremony.

Listen, Mikey: the tinfoil you are wearing to keep out the cosmic rays isn’t working.

If you follow the links around, and look at the “First Amendmist Church of True Science “, you will find what can only be the product of a group of deeply disturbed minds. People who need to be on either MAO inhibitors or lithium.

Mrs D handles the subject clearly, so I’m going to just take my spin on this:

If you choose not to pray during the inaugural, Nobody’s stopping you. Or forcing you. This isn’t Iran, nobody’s gonna state-sponsor any religion.

Which is the whole point. Removing prayer from the inaugural is by definition, placing atheism as the state sponsored religion. Wtih the prayer, you can choose to participate, or not, or pray to God, or Baal, or a piece of plywood, or a rock. Without the prayer, you’re specifically stating that prayer is not welcome.

Sorry, Mikey, you lose.

Here’s a couple of facts for you.
1: The universe is beyond your comprehension. Even without MAO inhibitors. If you choose to believe the universe came to being by cosmic accident, you are free to believe so.

2: Prayer harms nobody, and it does a great number of people a great deal of good. Even if only out of what an atheist might consider self delusion. if you don’t believe prayer has any effect, then you should not have concerns about it’s use.

Newdow speaks to the idea that on the one hand there is ‘god” and on the other hand, there is “science”. I’m amazed that someone can be so horribly wrong and not know it; (of course, a lot of people voted for kerry too) Anyone who has even done the most cursory examination of science has a feeling for the scale of creation. If that examination does not give you the specific feeling that the universe has a creator with a specific plan, frankly, I feel for you. Having had some brilliant theology professors in my life, I can safely say that the examination of the natural world with a faith based perspective is actually thrilling. My senior year philosophy professor didn’t drag out the work of other people, he invited us to look for evidence of the creator’s handiwork.

One of the ways I found this evidence was in math. Long before the Da Vinci code and any of that crap, there were mathematicians who figured out some fairly incredible things. Pi, for instance, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to it’s diameter: it’s a number we can not “know”, in other words, it’s an irrational number, but it can be calculated by a simple formula that a sixth grader can do:

p/4 = 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + …

and so on.

How is it that pi should work this way? How is it that there is such a simple way of expressing such a complex number? How is it that this method “happens’ to work in base 10 numbers, and not base 7? Is it coincidence that in Base 10, a pattern which would naturally be adopted by 10 digit creatures, works so well with this and so many other numbers? Pure mathematics is a difficult study; however, if you just look into the Pi formulas, the Fibonacci numbers, you begin to see the order in the complexity.

My professors believed that math and science were windows into the mind of the creator, and that science was the intelligence test that our Creator expected us to pass, to fully know him. When I saw that tiny glimpse, I believed it too.

I pity anyone who hasn’t had that moment of epiphany, I really do. I don”t judge them, I don’t care what they believe, I don’t think they are bad people for not believeing, and I don’t have any intention of ‘converting” them or even trying. I feel badly that they haven’t had the extra fulfillment that I’ve received from life by believing.