damn good response letters.  well done, I especially liked the reversal of the "get off of our country" attack.

Yes they were proper god fearing christians and wanted us all to be christians and go to church 3 times a week. That's why they didn't add the separation of church and state/ free speech amendment. 

That and the fact that the Bible Belt has more than its fair share of social ills.

WOW! That opened my eyes. I forget sometimes that people can be very ignorant and bigotted. Nice they are still out there, keeps my reality in check, and gives me a good reason to challenge the people in my life (and around it!) who are ignorant and brainwashed.

I worked with children from a catholic school and a church of england school in the after school club. They weren't allowed to do halloween based activities, I got a informal warning over telling the kids about the origins of Halloween, about paganism and modern witchcraft and steroetypes and demonisation and persicution of witches.... The chairman and general manager was also the local reverend..... Ooops, I am glad I dont work there anymore!

Think of the irony if it happened though. Suddenly many of the best scientists and scholars would be unavailable for educational and economical purposes. The country would derail.

This makes me appreciate Australian politics. Religion has almost nothing to do with our politics, unless it actually does have something to do with religion.

I think we need to call the fire service and tell 'em to to bring the "Jaws Of Life" to help extract thee highly repugnent buffoons heads from their ailimentary canals where they appear to be lodged.... Furthermore lets call the veternarian to render them incapable of mating and breeding.... Such idiocy should not be allowed to continue evolving.

It saddens me to see that there are still folks like this using up the worlds resources - even worse, that any organ would give them space to spew their vile nonsense.

Martin Stebbing

Chicago

I say hell yeah! You pay for me to move and I'm gone. I think I've said this before, but I'll say it again, we should have our own country.

And as far as the immanent demise that would befall the country... Fuck 'em. Let 'em rot.

Well that's funny, I didn't know an omniscient being could not believe in something if the being knows the something exists.

How does a newpaper publish something like that without its editors being arrested for inciting violence, no way anyone would get away with that in the UK

I am against censorship. Let the crazies say what they like.

I get to say what I like too.

Seriously, Taylor, did you think that babbling would make your case attractive?

Wait, did you say "taste the Lord"? What?

Okay, okay: let's play "Is it a pick up line?". Let's start with "Taste the Lord!"

Why shouldn't the fundamental rights outlined in the Bill of Rights outlined in the Bill of Rights have the same weight today as it did in the late 1700s? Have the number of fundamental rights decreased since then? Only by shrilly demanding that our rights be respected and then protesting/rioting will they be respected. Unless politicians notice your outrage at the violation of your rights and feel that they could lose votes over the matter, they will continue to violate those rights. There are people who would gladly trample on every right you hold, be thankful some of us speak up against such abuses. Or is that just idiotic shrieking about some outdated document?

Isn't the UK censoring criticisms of religion now (and they censor or ban movies, video games, TV shows)? We all love the censors until we realize that they'll censor us just as much as they'll censor the people we don't like. Atheists are too few to trust censors. They will censor our unpopular views while allowing other more popular views to be spread againt our wishes. If you support censorship, be prepared to lose the ability to legally criticize popular groups and ideologies. And while you are at it, be prepared lose the ability to legally view media that the censors deem is unfit for you to watch.

Was that sarcasm?

Laws are laws. Their weight does not decrease with time. In fact, the Constitution holds more weight than almost all other laws since is the "supreme Law of the Land" and overrides other laws, including state and local. It's the arbiter, if you will.

The Civil War was not fought over slavery. I don't understand how this myth persists. There were slave states that fought for the Union. It was not free states vs slave states. It was Union vs Confederacy and some Union states were slave states. Lincoln surprised people by declaring that slavery was to be banned.

The inherent right for all citizens (except felons, no voting or guns for them) is a wise policy today. Those 'street thugs' buy illegal weapons and aren't going to let alterations to the 2nd amendment to stop them from buying their guns. Outlawing guns would prevent street thugs from owning guns the same way that outlawing drugs has prevented street thugs from owning drugs. If you want to create larger and more profitable criminal networks that sell illegal guns, then ban guns. I'm certain we can do to guns what we have done to recreation drugs in the US: we can create a multi-billion dollar per year criminal smuggling network that fuels gang profits and gang violence.

Gun ownership is a perfect example of what I was talking about. At this point most Democrat congressmen don't support a new assault weapons ban. Gun owners made a big fuss about the proposed ban and now Democrats realize that they will lose political power if they scare Americans with new gun restrictions. I know that they actually do want to pass the ban, but they want to hold a continued majority in the House even more. Gun owners shrilly crying out that Obama and the Democrats are going to legislate away our gun rights seems to have worked (at least for the moment). Enough Democrat politicians are convinced that anti-gun legislation leads to the Republicans getting voted into office. Getting mad and loud can actually work.

I fully support Fox New's freedom of speech (and CNN's and PBS's and BBC's and all other news sources). I don't support censorship even of outright disinformation. Like most news stations, Fox News is a propaganda machine who's purpose is to get people to vote and think a certain way. Fox is just very clumsy at being a vehicle meant to influence voters. Their lack of subtlety merely makes their attempts at manipulation more obvious than their somewhat more honest competitors. The WWII propaganda you mention was made by the government. If the 1st Amendment didn't protect dehumanization, the government would still have done it. The government doesn't need permission for the Bill of Rights to do something.

It still is a wise decision. There actually are caveats to it to stop the worse abuses such as clear and present danger, slander and libel. Unless your speach is very likely to cause immediate bodily harm at your current location or is using lies to harm someone's livelihood, it should be protected. I am lucky enough as an American to have a government that recognizes that right and a citizenship that responds with shrill cries of injustice when that right is violated.

We call our updates of the Constitution "amendments." It has not remained untouched for the past 200 years thanks to those amendments. The thing is, stripping away fundamental rights is not the kind of change to the Constitution that most Americans want. We get it that the the Bill of Rights is a tool that can be used against unjust laws. The Heller v. D.C. Supreme Court decision comes to mind. The only reason that the D.C. gun ban was overturned is that the 2nd Amendment exists. Someone basically said 'Hey, the 2nd Amendment says I get guns, D.C. says I don't. Make D.C. stop Supreme Court" And the Supreme Court agreed to strike down the unjust anti-gun law only because it was not consistent to the Constitutional right to bear arms as is granted by the Second Amendment. The examples of people appealing the Bill of Rights to get unjust laws struck down are too numerous to relate here. We would be stupid to deny ourselves that tool against bad laws. How would it benefit us to lose Constitutional protection of fundamental rights?

The Constitution isn't perfect. It is merely really, really good. It may not be perfect, but stripping away guarentees of rights in it isn't going to make it any better. Adding more protections against have the Government violate rights might improve it; but taking away protections isn't an improvement on it at all.

Nope. Owning guns doesn't stop wire taps, unjust wars or Fox News corresponents from lying. I don't remember anyone claiming that gun ownership was a vanguard against those things.

I don't understand what you mean. Why would I (or other gun owners) want to do that? Because they are liars? Because they started wars? Because they authorized other people to record phone conversations? I'll need an explanation of the rational behind wanting to kidnap Bush and Cheney to make sense of this.

We get it that guns aren't magic. My 'precious guns' don't somehow fix crappy governments or prevent Fox News from lying. Luckily, the Second Amendment is about private ownership of firearms for the purposes of self-defense (see Heller v. D.C. Supreme Court opinion) and not about doling out justice. My 'precious guns' are for having fun shooting at targets and for self defense shooting at intruders. I don't know if you are intentionally straw-manning me; but let's just say that you are arguing against views that I don't seem to hold.

It's those damn activist historians perpetrating the Liberal Hoax. They claim that Lincoln's campaign for the Republican Party that won him the 1860 election included prohibitions on the expansion of chattle slavery, that the deep southern states that were the first to secede had the highest number of plantations, that the number of platantations per state correlated with how likely a state was to secede and that politicians and editorials throughout the south were ablaze with fearful rhetoric that Lincoln was going to take away their slaves (though this was not actually the case at the outset) and so secession was their only choice.

Damn lying historians with their inconvenient facts and pieces of data that surely they must've forged as part of some grand conspiracy to support the myth of the link between slaveryand the civil war (everyone really knows that the civil war was fought because them pinko yankees were just jealous of the agricultural success that chattel slavery had brought to the good, decent Confederate folks).

:3

 The letter might have been a fake but it sadly represented many of the feelings people do have torwards atheists. I have no religion or no god i believe something is out there but i wouldnt say it's a god. I don't go to church but instead go to mexico every sunday and take clothes to poor families. I gives poor children food and when i come home i bring home a homeless animal and give them a new home. Am I evil because of this. I believe that instead of wasting my time on praying for something to happen i instead go out and do something to help better the world. Is that a sin? And also in the pledge of allegiance it's not one nation under god,, it's supposed to be one nation under citizens rule. because last time i checked it was not god who chooses our presidents, there is no divine right in our nation of america. But it is the people who run this country. Wow i am only seventeen but i understand alot of things. And what you people are saying about this is total segregation and discrimination. they guys are the nazis and the atheists are the jews. Do they want to kill the atheists too? i hope not. Stop attacking other people. Just because it makes you feel powerful. People become dictators this way. lets have peace...