Thought I’d collect my favorite bits. I’ve gone from the first posted to the last, and taken my favorite piece from each. Yeah, this is going to take a while. Why 15? No reason, really, just a good chunky number. And no, I won’t be attempting to keep up with tags – sheesh. Here’s my own post, but I’ll excerpt my favorite bit later (grin).

1) Peace, order and good government, eh?: A recipe for hot cross buns, and this. “It was people of faith – often people of persecuted faiths — who understood most deeply why freedom of conscience matters and how serious an offence to conscience any state-authorized view of religion is. To those people of faith we all owe the most important clauses of our bills and declarations and charters of human rights and freedoms. Thought is free, and your mind is your own.”

2) Fitness for the Occasion: “The last thing we need as a country is to have one interpretation of one religion forced upon the rest of us. There is no need to force creationism into our schools, or to force homophobia into our marriage laws. There is no need to restrict a women’s privacy and her choices to those sanctioned by religious authorities. Laws that forbid commerce on certain days of the week, or that forbid certain sexual practices have no place in modern America.”

3) Rad Robin: “Well, just because I am pissed that you have been used by some very bad people and the consequences to humanity and the earth are devastating does NOT mean I hate your religion or you. Nothing could be farther from the truth. But it is incumbent upon me to say, WTF? Start thinking. Cause you are going down in the same ship that I am. I am responsible for not participating in a more organized way to stop the Christian movement. But you are responsible in aiding, funding, and espousing it. And I ask, when will sanity and a commitment to humanitarian goals that Jesus espoused return to this country? What would Jesus do today?”

4) Coffee Messiah: “No religious discrimination.
PRO End-of-Life Care (no more Terri Schiavo travesties)
Reproductive health decisions made by individuals, not religious “majorities”
Democracy not Theocracy
Academic Integrity
(like, a rock is as old as it is, not as old as the Bible says)
Sound Science
(good bye so-called “intelligent” design)
Respect for ALL families
(based on love, not sexual orientation. Hellooooo.)
And finally,
The right to worship, OR NOT.”

5) We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party: Travelogue and photos! “The free ride for the dinosaurs would come to an end at about 65 mya setting events in motion culminating in the rise of the mammals and such wonders as the British invasion, hockey (threw this in as tribute to Chairman for Life Bérubé), TV dinners, Brittany Spears, sliced bread, Enron, beer and me throwing out my sleeping bag on a small patch of Earth shaped by titanic forces through millennia to be awakened before dawn by the coyote’s howl. So far the southwest was looking pretty good.”

6) Thoughts in a Haystack: “Thus, by mostly different routes, premillennialists and postmillennialists came to share the goal of dominion over the civil state and began to make alliances. One of these, the Coalition on Revival, brought together Rushdoony, North, creationist Duane Gish, D. James Kennedy, Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association and the above-mentioned LaHaye. Other familiar names associated with the movement are David Limbaugh (Rush’s brother), former sitcom star Kirk Cameron, Chuck Colson and Tom DeLay. Howard Ahmanson, savings and loan heir and major funder of the Discovery Institute, the primary advocate for the Intelligent Design movement, has also been linked to Christian Reconstructionism. … Of course, many of those [76% self-identified American Christians] might discover, if the Christian nationalists get their way, that the nationalists’ definition is different than theirs.”

7) commander other: “No rational person even resents government officials being personally religious per se. It is only when one religious belief is specifically promoted, encouraged, or supported above others that the problems begin. Good people can do good things for their communities without any one religion being sanctioned to conduct any particular program. And in fact, the example provided by this administration in that regard is exactly the wrong one to be following. Its actions merely exemplify its disregard for the founding principles of this country and its inherent idealogical weakness. If you’re a religious person, do good deeds in the name of your Creator as you are bidden. But please don’t support legislation in your States and communities that would set one particular religion above another. Your contract with your God is unbounded by the dictates of your government, and the personal impetus is far more valuable than a state or federal sanction.”

8) One Act in the Eternal Play of Ideas: Wow! A treatment in fiction – well, sorta. “Now, you will still find some heresy in me. You see, I believe that the Reign of the Righteous began with the presidency of George W. Bush. Of course, he did not eliminate abortion or make the detention camps he established into true reformation centers. It is important to recognize, however, that he laid the groundwork for so much of what we now take for granted. Among other things, his administration fought for the government’s right to detain certain citizens, began the holy struggle against the false theocracies of the Middle East (though he couldn’t call it that), and began the slow process of turning charity initiatives over to churches. To the best of his ability, he put godly people into the executive and judicial branches. In all this, he was opposed by the remnants of the old judicial system and the legislative branch. … My progress in camp was considered quite rapid after my conversion and, within a few months, I left the building for the first time for my baptism in a nearby lake. A few weeks later, I was given my new life. I work as a receptionist for my ward’s church and live in the single-women’s dorm just a few blocks away, as I’ve no father to be returned to. We are supervised at all hours there by local matrons, and I thank God for their kind donation of time to protect women like me from lingering weaknesses.”

9) A Stitch in Haste: Three clips from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. “Each is directly related to the clash between dogma and science — the front line in the battle against theocracy.”

10) Tangled Up in Blue Guy: A detailed and clear-eyed post. Not easily excerpted, so read the whole thing. “I think that it is astonishing that we would have people passing amendments which restrict the rights of other citizens; and this is a clear contradiction of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and more documents written by the founders.”

11) This *is* it: “No amount of religous study can give a man higher morals. A mother’s love, the willingness to put others lives ahead of your own, the selfless love that causes animals to do things for no other reason than it’s the right thing to do. I have seen it. The conflicts caused by religious conservatives are not based on morality, they are based on selfish pride. Morality is a trait of life, not taught from a book. Attaching yourself to literal interpretations is not wise, nor necessary, for a believer.”

12) Pissed in NYC: “When I hear those who call themselves religious condemn those who don’t embrace their sense of morality, or who attack women who are sexually active or gays and lesbians, I get very angry. I can’t discuss the topic rationally, and I refuse to show the speaker and/or his or her followers any respect. It’s not because I think that all religious people are stupid or evil. It just that I know that the constant stream of condemnation has real world consequences, even for those who do not follow the speaker or believe the message. I know the heavy price that may be paid when self-proclaimed theocrats point their fingers at others and declare them to be shameful. My uncle died 20 years ago this June. He was only 43 years old. I miss him.”

13) The Learning Curve: “These classes, however secular they say they are, endorse one particular religion (the article notes that many such classes focus only on the positive influence of the Bible and ignore its negative influence). I would be less up in arms about a class on world religion that included multiple religious texts as sources, but I still feel that those are classes that should be reserved for college. Partly because I feel that finding teachers who are able to teach multiple religious texts in a balanced manner is difficult, but mostly because I feel like a lot of schools don’t have the resources to support core instruction, let alone a class that focuses on religion.”

14) Journeys with Jood: “On my drive home from work, I sometimes come around the Peninsula, and there is one house with a GIANT wooden cross facing the route. I mean this is one honking big cross. And I have jumped to the conclusion that this person is an angry, judgmental individual who condemns free choice, who believes that our current Administration is right to be fighting a war in Iraq, who hates Gays, or single women. I assume this because he has a giant wooden cross. Would I not be moving toward acceptance if I knocked on his door and said, ‘I want to have a dialogue with you, I want to understand your beliefs. I want to be open to hear your ideas.’ If I don’t want people to make assumptions about me, should I not also give up my own assumptions about others?”

15) Ron’s Blog: “But it’s interestingly disconcerting how deep somebody’s impulse (not the Principal’s, but some teacher or teachers’) to inject religious content into the school assembly goes here. And it’s hard not to think that teachers who do so in spite of information that actual parents of actual students are asking that they be more attentive to the diversity of their student population aren’t doing so from some sense of grinding a political axe. My expectation is that some fraction of the school’s faculty will come to resent us for getting in the way of their attempts to use their little corner of the public square to politically “educate” the kids to seeing an intrinsic bond between God and country.” (from “God at School“)

More to come…