Jake: I don't think atheists in general are religious about their atheism. And what's more, since it's mostly a matter of opinion, versus faith, we're less likely to wage a crusade to exterminate believers (or to commit acts of terrorism on behalf of our disbelief! Check out Eric Rudolph for an example of the believer side of the equation).

Why? Because we lack any justification for such action -- without having God(tm) on our side, it's really silly to get violent about it, no?

Why did God smite Kansas with those tornadoes? Isn't that a red state? God's country, right? Why didn't those tornadoes hit New York, or San Francisco? Atheists have an answer for why it happened (something like "You live in an area that gets a lot of tornadoes, unfortunately."); what do believers say to explain it? That's the fatal shortcoming of the faithful, where it has always failed humanity -- the only faithful answers would be "They must have deserved it, those sinners!" or (for the more compassionate, if equally misguided believer) "God works in mysterious ways."

KDW: I disagree when you say...

Marxism isn't a religion. It's a political philosophy.

Tell that to the Shining Path! Tell it to the Religious Right! To this atheist, they follow very similar paths -- only belief in the supernatural God separates the ideological from the religious, and since I don't believe in God, I see them as very similar phenomena.

Don't fault political philosophies for coming about at a time when mysticism was waning as an organizing principle! The only thing lacking in a political ideology is outright mysticism or the supernatural -- and even that's something that can even be worked around, if a cult of the Leader can be well-articulated/propagandized. It's not the fault of Kings that (most of) the world outgrew them. But, as the Bush Leaguers have said enough times, power creates its own reality.

Certainly a state is a poor substitute for the spectral grandeur of an ineffable god, but within a totalitarian regime, that's hardly a consolation -- while God won't ever send angels to protect you, won't answer your prayers, the Party will surely send secret police to take you out and shoot you, if you get in their way.

Ideology feels like an evolution of religious thinking, meeting modern needs for purpose and direction, once the supernatural was banished from its place of primacy in human affairs.

The new gods on the block: Race, Nation, Party, State, and Market (I distinguish between Nation and State: the former as a glorified/idealized/mythologized sense of country and the latter as the actual apparatus of centralized government). New gods for new times, new rituals, new beliefs, new sacraments, new taboos, new prophets, new saints, new heretics. It's all there for the taking.

I mean, American dollars themselves are backed by what? Faith in our government's stability and solvency. Faith, chums. Faith in the Market. Deliver us from loss, that we may profit, accordingly.

The advantage of the new faiths is that they actually deliver something in this life, which matters to the modern person and their go-go lifestyle. Worship the Market, you might grow rich; worship the Nation, Party, or State, and you might grow powerful and rich; worship your Race -- well, that one's largely been thrown overboard in most countries, thankfully (at least by most -- there are still some holdouts for racism, unfortunately; bad ideas die slowly).

Sadly, religion doesn't deliver as much as it once did, so people turn to other things to deliver them from their misery. For example, I'd love to know how many Christians bought "The Secret." I mean, that book's a bestseller, something like 5.25 million copies. Certainly it spoke to believers, versus disbelievers.

Nicely done, Mr. Wolfe. You gave Falwell what he deserved. A man leaves the world no poorer for his absence from it. One thing I heard (on NPR) about him was his dad hated preachers, and his grandfather was (eek) an atheist -- so, I wondered if the hatefulness of his approach to faith was, perhaps, a vendetta against his own father. Honor thy father? Not Falwell, I guess.

One thing you wrote, of 9/11...

A sacred moment had been used for profane purpose.

I would never call 9/11 a sacred moment; I think Falwell took a profane moment in our country's history, and managed to make it more profane. In that, he creepily mirrored the fanaticism of Al Qaeda itself -- they could only look at the permissiveness of secular America and agree with Falwell's ham-handed assessment.

But, I do feel sorry for him; not in the dying (happens to everybody), but in how some deep wounds in his past led him to create a more ghoulish, hateful Christianity that so many Americans unfortunately took to.

You know things are bad when Ashcroft's wearing the white hat. Gonzales and Card, wow. When people talk about "a government of laws, and not men" -- you can only see how the Bush League consistently works the other way around, the odious "government of men, and not laws" in their practice. Laws are for suckers, Sucker!

Gonzo and Card's rushing to Ashcroft's sickbed to try to compel him to sign an illegal program authorization just reeks of that approach -- of thugs, courtiers, sycophants, gangsters. And for what? Expanding illegal state power.

Gonzales is worse than a hack, worse than a crony; he is a criminal. We have a criminal as Attorney General, hell-bent not only to enable and ignore, but also to aid and abet the criminality of this administration.

I'm so glad Comey testified. We need more people shedding sunlight on this shadowy government.