Same chapter as Louis Freeh FBI) , Scalia, and Clarence Thomas.

This planet reeks of violent, sexually repressed, racist, and misogynistic cults of all sorts.

Fundamentalist belief systems, with or without gods, are the problem.

Most of my ancestors fled Europe for America to avoid this kind of bullshit.

it comes to being vile pricks.

The Invisible Man in the Sky serves as an unrebuttable justification for every kind of assholery.

So do political parties-- which also holds the same weight of reality as religion.

There's a rather large class of atheists I run into who have renounced the authoritarian fundamentalist religions of their families but keep the same patterns of thinking.

And then you've got people like me raised in liberal non-authoritarian religious families where another person's religion isn't a big issue unless they try to cut you with it.

In our family tradition a rebellious teen announces he or she is not going to church and all they get is an "that's okay dear, we're visiting family and friends after."

Most of my parent's weirdo family and friends were worth visiting. My parents are artists, if that explains anything.

Religious warfare within my own family was fading out by my grandparent's generation, but the entire lot of them were religious heretics and pacifists of various sorts anyways. My last immigrant ancestor to America was a mail-order bride to Salt Lake City. She didn't like sharing a husband so she ran away with, and later married, a non-Mormon U.S. government surveyor. He was her third husband, the husband left behind in Scandinavia never spoken of, and her brief marriage as a Mormon junior wife never recognized outside of Utah.

One of my grandfather's was a conscientious objector during World War II who was given a choice of prison or building Liberty and Victory ships. He built ships. One of my grandfathers was an Army Air Force officer.

As a kid I really didn't have any religion to rebel against because religion was an intellectual, spiritual, and artistic pursuit, as is everything in life.

Nobody ever beat me for heresies or blasphemies.

authoritarianism and formalistic puritanism of the USSR. What a shock, I tell you!

within a couple of yards of a field where both of my boys played Little League baseball.

he used all the time?