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You know, I could actually see that happening if the Democrats win control of the House and Senate in '06. W, knowing that he will soon be impeached (at least, I can hope), gets massively coked up and goes all Columbine on people in DC while singing "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park". Afterwards, Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, et al come up with tons of talking points to excuse the W's indiscriminate slaughter of people in DC.

e.g:
Coulter: Well, less than 10% of DC residents voted for George W Bush, so over 90% are un-American, godless traitors who have committed treason. The penalty for treason is death and Bush was simply carrying out his prerogative as head of the Executive branch by executing those traitors. And Bill Clinton is a rapist.

Reality threatens faith (believe without proof or evidence). "Godless" was one of the few things the Communists in China and the Soviet Union got right.

Paper books still have a permanence which

I still have a geography book from the 1970s which describes Russia or the USSR as a godless dictatorship and Iran as a friendly tourist destination and ally of the US. I've held 60-year-old children's textbooks from Nazi Germany describing Hitler as a brave Nordic warrior fighting against the "Dirty Jews", complete with cartoon drawings showing the 'evil' Jewish bankers (complete with stereotypically large noses and evil squity eyes) and landlords evicting the 'poor Aryan families'. I've read dozens of books and articles about Nazi history, but nothing has had the impact of that childrens schoolbook.

These objects are more permanent then an electronic copy. If a powerful group wanted to 'rewrite history', they could never destroy all of the old copies of these text. There are hundreds or thousands of copies of these same texts laying around in attics, closets and museums throughout the the US and Europe.

It is different with eBooks. Unless some effort is taken to preserve the old and pro old text, it may become impossible to find old versions of the text. The electronic text will be updated with a new version, copywright forbids unauthorized copies and distribution of the text, backups are lost, digital copies will degrade-- are there any digital archivists who are keeping a copy of these texts? In a decade, I doubt that there will be any surviving copies of this exact version of the text.

Perhaps the publisher may retain a digital copy on a CD in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard". Will this old text be available to historians or anyone who requests it?

Science is limited by the observability of phenomena - people are capanble of seeing God, but no one's been capable of measuring things that relate directly to God, only to other measurable phenomena that may have other explanations - hence the existence of God is falsifiable from science, and not a testable hypothesis.

Of course, though, science and measurable phenomena aren't everything - one of the reasons why a "God of the gaps" is pointless. People don't start out knowing what the want in life, or what good and evil are, or what they should do with their lives, and science (and engineering) have nothing to say about these - they can tell people good ways to achieve their goals, but not what those goals should be. Science and related fields do not deal with all that is, only all that can be measured. People turn to God (or other beliefs) because there are other parts of the world and themselves that they need to understand.

Science has good reason to be Godless - but that does not require or imply that the rest of life should be.

On the numbers above, by the very man that generated them:
(The chance of even a single living cell arising apontaneously is) "An outrageously small probability, that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup." And later: "If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by a scientific training into the conviction that life originated (spontaneously) on the Earth, this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court."
- Evolution From Space, by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, 1981, p.27
(and of course, Hoyle's pitiful attempt at an answer to this conundrum, Panspermia, is simply handwaving that moves the problem off-stage - he admits life clearly could not have spontaneously here, but the same exact logic says it can't have arisen anywhere else, either!)

"In spite of the genetic code being almost universal, the mechanism necessary to embody it is far too complex to have arisen in one blow."
-Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature, by Francis Crick, 1981, p. 71.
(In other words, it can't have happened, but I have to belive that what science tells me is false if I'm to retain my godless worldview. La la la...)

"One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task, to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible.... Yet here we are -- as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation."
- George Wald, Harvard University biochemist and Nobel Laureate, Scientific American, August 1954, p. 46
(Stunning refusal to accept objective science but rather to choose to believe on faith that spontaneous generation of life occured in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence arguing the opposite!)

"The only acceptable explanation is creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it. ...(After the publication of The Origin of Species,) evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all scientists have accepted it and many are prepared to 'bend' their observations to fit in with it."
-Physics Bulletin, "A Physicist Looks at Evolution," H.

With 1,000+ comments already down, I doubt anyone will see this. However, I have an on-topic anecdote I think is worth sharing.

The gf and I were walking on the beach yesterday when we came across a crab. We both noticed that it looked and moved like a spider, and so, wondered aloud if they (crabs and spiders) are related.

They are.

Then we sat on the beach and watched the sky turn pink as the sun set. Somewhere in the sky I saw the face of God. Of course, it wasn't a literal face, but rather, some sort of symbology that was picked up and processed somewhere in my primordial brain.

I felt loved.

I accept that God is my creator, and I accept that [S]He might have used a methodology such as evolution to create me. If God is "intelligent", it might be argued that mine is an "intelligent design"- but that is an issue for Philosophy class, not Biology class; I know of no way to objectively test this hypothesis.

But Godless science? What unmitigated nonsense! Einstein was godless? Newton was godless? It hurts my soul to see a force as powerful as God being whored to win elections. If Jesus does exist, and if he keeps a watchful eye on us (as his fanatics declare), I have to assume he is very disappointed in us right now.

Where is that? Even here in the "godless" Silicon Valley, there are plenty of literal creationists.

The problem with evolution is it has become a religion. I would reccomend Ann Coulter's book Godless to see how Evolution is basically supported by people who refuse to accept that there are species which appear and then disappear. Evolution has never been more than a fairy tale which asks us to believe that everything was all just an accident.

The only reason evolution is taught is because athiests think it disproves God. They are wrong in so many ways.

I'm utterly appalled at the way you make fun of America's growing surveillance system. What's wrong with sacrificing privacy for safety? Your opposition to the free market usage of your personal information smacks of Godless communism. What do you have to hide? Aren't you aware that surveillance is needed to defend our constitution from our enemies? And please stop making fun of the good people at the NSA, they only have your best interests at heart.

[end neo con parody]

Godless "plasma scientists" deny nature's 4-sided harmonious Time Cube!!!

See, I can link to crackpots too!

All that does is show the KR was more successful. If Hebollah got its way, they'd make KR's killing fields look like a picnic. That's not a disservice to those slaughtered by the KR, it should serve to remind everyone what godless hate can do.

"Anyone who thinks they could place the Khmer Rouge on higher moral ground than Hezbollah has no business criticising others for having agendas.

"You'd have to be a grandmaster of spin to credibly equate a terrorist group that has killed fewer than a thousand people in its 20+ year existence with a regime that executed hundreds of thousands of its own people (and caused the deaths hundreds of thousands more) in the space of a few years, and not have any regard for the disservice such an odious comparison does to the memory of those who died in the Cambodian genocide."

All that does is show the KR was more successful. If Hebollah got its way, they'd make KR's killing fields look like a picnic. That's not a disservice to those slaughtered by the KR, it should serve to remind everyone what godless hate can do.

The Nazis, Soviets, Chicoms, KR and other atheist groups are guilty for the murder of tens of millions combined.

Or is that just the earth? I always get those confused. In any case, it would have been really cool to be Adam and Eve, and get to ride around on jesus horses (what you hellbound godless sinners refer to as "dinosaurs".

I did, and this is what I found under the sub-heading Politics and culture,

Humorist Stephen Colbert frequently attacks bears as "godless killing machines mobilized against humanity" and "merciless assassins" on his satirical television program The Colbert Report. Bears frequently come in at number one on the "Threatdown" as the single greatest threat to the security of the United States.

So, the entry appears "unvandalized" overall, but the reference to The Colbert Report is there.

A good deal of Eisenhower's success was based on limiting spending and the size of government as a result of the unprecedented growth seen under Roosevelt.

It's not like the fear of Communism went away during Democrat presidencies and was brought back to life during Republican ones. It was an overarching theme present and understood in both parties.

While there are plenty of people that associate themselves with the parties and not the bases, it's the bases that by and large determine candidates.

(I don't really consider progressive to be the opposite of reactionary)

It suprising how skilled some groups of people are without any training. I mean, individuals with inherent skill crop up everywhere, but groups, not so much. I read about how people who grew up on military bases often have an unusual penchant for engineering, because as children they tended to get themselves underfoot in places where vehicles and machines were repaired. They could screw around with parts, figure how things went together, and construct strange godless machines that crossed lines man was not meant to cross. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that farm kids had a knack for electrical and mechanical work, and I'll bet more than a few take to chemistry pretty fast -- farming is remarkably chemistry-based. The biology side of farming is a no-brainer of course. Another surprising one? The children of clergy -- many church groups got into networking quite early, using BBSes and early list servers to get information around. Plus, nearly every church minister has to be a part-time desktop publisher to make all of the church's bulletains and whatnot, so clergyman had computers before a lot of people. So you can find church-brats that developed unusual aptitudes for computer technology.

What's someone supposed to do?

Instead of fantasizing about home invasions that just never seem to come along, why don't you fullfill the other gun-ownership rationalization-- armed rebellion... Kind of ironic that your armed uprising won't be against godless liberals, isn't it?

Anyway, my point is don't expect other Christians to agree with your notion of what is and isn't the Christian thing to do.

Oh, and a "state" can't act - only the people running it. I'd bet that most politicians are only superficially religious people. I don't think it's bad that they aren't religious, but it is bad that they pretend to be to make themselves more electable.

The US: the new banana republic. Generalissimo El Busho indeed and his legal enabler Gonzales. Congrats; Europe and Canada no longer consider you civil enough. How could bullshit like this fly with your voters? It only flies because you're not a civil enough nation. Not when most of your population take their voting fatwas regardless from the likes of Falwell and poverty is believed to be evidence of divine disapproval. What self-aggrandising fucks; "I drive an SUV because I deserve it!". Thank goodness I live in godless old Europe.

I don't think the Red Staters will be down with their taxes going to teach godless little green people.

Godless??? How do you think the Red Staters will respond to learning that the little green people, arriving in their brand new model 6006 JHVH craft, seeded all life on Earth - Thus making them our gods?

Enki forbid that their advanced civilization might have very neatly solved the whole abortion issue by promoting homosexual activity as a form of birth control... ;-)

I can hear their cute little heads popping right off their cute little red necks... Pop! Pop! Popopop!