Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum

A satellite image of yesterday's presidential inauguration -- The U.S. Capitol is at the top of the image and the Washington Monument is at the bottom; the brown splotches running vertically down the Mall are the human witnesses to history being made.


(Satellite image courtesy of GeoEye. Click here to view it in glorious high resolution.)

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama gave a wee tip o' the hat to atheists and agnostics:

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers."

Thank you, President Obama. My guess is that this reference to skeptics was one of your many historical firsts. At any rate, we've come a long way since 1987, when George H.W. Bush remarked,

"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

16.1% of the U.S. population is religiously unaffiliated but, to borrow a label from Steven Waldman of beliefnet, we are the political Untouchables. It wasn't always this way, however. There were no preachers or ministers delivering invocations at either of Abraham Lincoln's inaugural ceremonies; John Quincy Adams swore his oath of office not on a Bible, but on a book of Constitutional law. While he was a religious man, Adams actually believed in Jefferson's "wall of separation" between church and the state. Like Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Adams was savvy enough to know that

“...a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and degrade religion.”

In fact, it is heartening to note that our Constitution, the founding document of our republic, never mentions a god and even goes so far as to state (Article VI, section 3) that "...no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States," i.e., no elected official nor civil servant must profess a belief in any religion, or even a belief in any god, to hold their office. It's an ironic contrast to our most recent election, in which many of the candidates (especially the Republicans) tried to out-Jesus one other. Contrary to Fox News reports, these United States did not come together to form a Christian nation. In fact, many of our "founding fathers" actually wrote about the evils of religion in general and the Christian Bible in particular. Here are some representative quotations:

"One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian." -- Mortimer Adler

"Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man" -- Thomas Jefferson

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

"His [John Calvin's] religion was demonism. If ever a man worshiped a false god, he did. The being described in his five points is ... a demon of malignant spirit. It would be more pardonable to believe in no god at all, than to blaspheme him by the atrocious attributes of Calvin. -- Thomas Jefferson, Works, 1829 edition, vol. 4, p. 322, quoted from Franklin Steiner.

"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity" -- John Adams

Ben Franklin wrote "The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason" and that "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches".

James Madison, a Unitarian: "I would not dare to so dishonor my Creator God by attaching His name to that book (the Bible)."

And Thomas Paine, from The Age of Reason (1794): "What is it the New Testament teaches us? To believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith." and "The Christian system of religion is an outrage on common sense."

Again I thank you, President Obama. It is splendid to know that a modern president can have my back, too.

Why I will vote for Barack Obama on Tuesday

Although I view the Democratic nomination race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as a choice between a mediocre candidate and a truly worthy candidate, there are several key reasons why I cannot in good conscience cast a vote for Clinton. She reflects more mainstream Democratic positions and has endorsed universal health care for a decade, but she is also a war hawk, and there is not much sunlight between her and McCain on many issues. In fact, she is more conservative than McCain on several key issues, as evidenced by Ann Coulter's endorsement of Clinton over McCain. That endorsement should tell you everything you need to know, but here are five major points on which Clinton and I diverge:

1. She is in favor of maintaining the Patriot Act as it is, sections of which have been ruled unconstitutional multiple times by multiple U.S. courts, and is in clear violation of both our 4th and 1st Amendments.

2. She is in favor of military action against Iran, a country whose nuclear program we ourselves established in the 1950s, and for which no current evidence exists. In fact, our National Intelligence Estimates put the Iranians about 10 years away from developing a nuclear bomb and state that they shelved the idea of maintaining a nuclear arsenal about 4 years ago. Despite this, Hillary unapologetically goose steps with the Neoconservatives when Bush rattles his saber at Iran, displaying the same gullibility that led her to so enthusiastically follow him into war in Iraq.

I believe that Pakistan is a much more dangerous prospect, as it most likely still harbors the Al Qaida operatives who planned 9/11 and was one of only two countries in the world that recognized the oppressive Taliban regime as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan. But Bush has rewarded Pakistan by dropping the sanctions imposed by Clinton, selling them boatloads of military planes and equipment, and has given them 10 billion dollars in aid since 9/11. All this while the father of their nuclear program, A.Q. Khan, gave secrets of their nuclear technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran while riding back and forth from those countries on the aircraft we sold them. He now has been pardoned by President Musharraf and lives free in Pakistan. Agencies of our government are not permitted to detain him and to this day have not been able to even interview him. With key allies like Musharraf, who needs enemies? Clinton criticized Obama for stating that "...if we have actionable intelligence on Al Qaeda operatives [in Pakistan] including Bin Laden, and President Musharraf cannot act, then we should."

3. She is in favor of building a fence along our border with Mexico. This is the most inane idea in recent history. If you really want illegal immigrants out of the country, there is a cheaper solution: impose much stricter fines on the corporations, agriculture companies, small business owners, and contractors who employ them, and then enforce those fines. We might even be able to win back some of our budget surplus that Bush squandered on the Iraq invasion. Without available jobs, aliens will have no other option but to return to their home countries -- if there is no wall at the border to stop them. Of course, doing this would impose a huge financial burden on those American businesses, which would have to hire more expensive citizen workers. Many of them would suffer and even go bankrupt, but that's the cost of not having illegal labor in our country. So instead, let's just throw up another billion or two and build a modern Great Wall of China -- which didn't work for them, either -- because it looks impressive and we can all go back to eating our cheaply farmed food and working in our spotless office buildings.

Alternatively, if you're hankering for a large federally mandated construction project, why not build better levees in New Orleans? They currently are engineered to hold up against a Category 3 hurricane (Katrina was a Category 3.5), and the entire levee system is still sinking so over time it will be less and less effective. Coincidentally, Obama wants to protect New Orleans against even a Category 5.

4. She is in favor of the death penalty, while I believe that, with all the recent exonerations of death row inmates using DNA evidence, a moratorium on executions is needed to prevent the sanctioned murder of innocents who had bad lawyers. I also believe that for the guilty, lifetime imprisonment with one's conscience in a cage under armed guard is a far more effective punishment than the escape and quick release of an early demise.

5. She is in favor of torture. Simply put, Hillary Clinton supports the use of torture by American forces and intelligence agencies, while even John McCain does not. This is one of the reasons why Ann Coulter despises McCain.

Regardless of who you vote for, please vote on Tuesday. If you don't yet know who your candidate is, visit The Pew Forum's website, where you can choose an important issue and compare the candidates' views on that issue. Also, there is this nifty tool that allows you feed in your positions on a variety of political issues and then spits out a chart displaying the candidates which agree with you the most and enumerates the topics on which you disagree.