If I haven’t included your BAT post, please let me know!

I invited some of my fave bloggers to participate in the blogswarm. Here are two that did. I’m not sure whether they’ve been listed, but I sure didn’t want to leave these great posts out!

Hail Dubyas: Don’t miss the great cartoons at this site. “My own religious beliefs are delightfully confused, going from polytheist one day to Gnostic Christian the next and atheist the day after that. With this belief structure, I naturally take offense at ANYONE telling me what I should or should not believe. Now, imagine that it is the government that is … not telling me what I SHOULD believe, but making it advantageous for people who believe. Like we have in Mr. Bush’s government. Well, that’s not telling me NOT to believe something OR to believe something other than what I do believe. But it IS discrimination against my own beliefs–because it gives its favor to a different set of belieds. Discrimination–that’s simply the first step on the cliched, but nonetheless real, long slippery slope towards an established church and theocracy. We’ve already taken those steps through Mr. Bush’s “faith-based initiatives.” As we’ve gone along, schoolbooks have been rewritten to present evolution and “creation science” as hypotheses of equal footing, never mind the scientists who’ve been muzzled on environmental and conservation concerns, which while horrendous, are not part of the issue we’re discussing. Anti-abortion rhetoric has been enshrined in government-ssed handouts of advice to pregnant mothers. We’ve entered into a “holy Crusade”, theoretically against the foes of “freedom”, but which is simply a codeword for Muslims. Psigh–this is the kind of government you get when its leader believes that he has a special hotline to God. To theocratize or not to theocratize–this is not a question that belongs to liberals or progressives alone. Conservatives should also be intensely aware of the dangers. What, isn’t the tie between conservatism and that old time religion natural enough for me? But wasn’t it Ayn Rand who, in her most embarassing work “Anthem”, decried the stultifying effect of having a government that had to approve everything based on its own beliefs? Even the architectrice of the Church of the Individual was afraid of any Group ruled by beliefs from governing any secular state. And real conservatives would do well to heed her warnings as well.”

Prose and Thorn: “”The problem is we count on politicians to do right by us much in the same way some parents expect their children’s teachers to parent their kids. It is a responsibility we cannot, must not, abdicate to those in power. They will only do as much as they can get away with, and maybe slightly more if there’s enough money involved. God, like good character, starts in the home, not on Capitol Hill. Like past mistakes, one’s feelings toward God should inform one’s actions, not control them. If those who would put our necks to the sword could understand that, perhaps they would stop trying to control the rest of us.”