Tax Churches On Their Income and Real Estate/Property

Churches should be taxed the same as any other business. I say "any OTHER" because to call a church anything other than a business would be wrong.

And no, the first amendment to the constitution does not prohibit taxing churches. I challenge anyone to show a valid legal argument against this.

Tooth Fairy Agnostic--Richard Dawkins

A friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew who observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a Tooth Fairy Agnostic. He will not call himself an atheist because it is in principle impossible to prove a negative. But "agnostic" on its own might suggest that he though God's existence or non-existence equally likely. In fact, though strictly agnostic about god, he considers God's existence no more probable than the Tooth Fairy's.
Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence.
The list of things about which we strictly have to be agnostic doesn't stop at tooth fairies and celestial teapots. It is infinite. If you want to believe in a particular one of them — teapots, unicorns, or tooth fairies, Thor or Yahweh — the onus is on you to say why you believe in it. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not. We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so.

– Richard Dawkins, following a list of excerpts from hate mail sent to the editor of Freethought Today, after she won a separationist court battle, in "A Challenge To Atheists: Come Out of the Closet" (Free Inquiry, Summer, 2002)

Bumper Sticker

Know Gods, Know Wars

Missionary Adaptation

F. Tupper Saussy writes in “Rulers of Evil: Useful Knowledge About Governing Bodies” ©1999, Harper Collins Publishers Inc., 10 E. 53rd St., New York, NY 10022

[December 25th was the birthday of many pagan gods: Saturn, Jupiter, Tammuz, Bacchus, Osiris, Mithras...]

[Saturnalia, the season of drunken merriment and gift giving evolved into Christmas.]

This is one of the few books I have ever read twice. Oddly enough, I ran accross it in a public library in a small southern town. It isn’t a particularly scholarly work but it contains plenty of intriguing facts to make it worth the time. It is, however, becoming dated now. One would have to work pretty hard to update the list of Roman Catholic senators, Supreme Court justices and government agency heads.

Since reading it, I have read many more books on the subject of religious influence in society and government and have adopted higher standards of scholarship but Mr. Saussy deserves credit for re-kindling a passion for the subject which I first became interested in while serving in the military at Fort Hood, TX.

The author I have to credit with sparking interest initially is Karen Armstrong. No lack of scholarship there.