The following is a email exchange I've had with a comrade of mine (also atheist) regarding Obama. The first text will follow with ealiest to the most recent exchange on the bottom.

the Obama article:

http://www.religionandsocialpolicy.org/newsletters/article.cfm?id=7644

 My response:

"oh... his... god..." (pun fully intended)

Friend's response:

This post, written by Sara Robinson, originally appeared on Orcinus

I've been saying for a while now that the religious right in America finally and firmly jumped the shark over the past few years. But now that that big ol' shark's behind them, there's another bunch of critters looming ahead that may prove to be even more damning. It's that whole big flock of chickens that are finally coming home to roost.

I don't know how long they thought they were going to go on that way, all self-righteous and judgmental, blaming homosexuals and feminists for everything from 9/11 to the price of gas, ignoring the interests of the poor in favor of those of big business, and dismissing any kind of environmental stewardship as nothing more than a way to waste time until the Rapture comes. Clearly, the didn't see anything at all wrong with elevating the most spiteful and amoral among them as their national spokespeople, and rewarding them in direct proportion to the heat of their rhetoric. No, these folks were on fire (we're still not sure if it was Jesus or heartburn), and they weren't afraid to let their bilious light shine on the TV, in the streets, all the way to the White House. They did their best to set it high above the rest of the culture, where none of the rest of us could miss it if we wanted to.

From World Can't Wait - Drive Out the Bush Regime!

Got this article from Truthdig, it is very telling about the U.S. military today in the ever increasing threat of outright christian takeover.

By David Antoon, Truthdig
Posted on November 16, 2007, Printed on November 18, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/67385/
"I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. ..."

--Oath of Office
"Our mission is to educate, train, and inspire men and women to become officers of character motivated to lead the United States Air Force in service to our nation."

--Air Force Academy mission statement

The following is a reprint of an article from Revolution.

Here it is important to answer the argument that is not infrequently made—including by people whose stance is to oppose religion in general—that while all religious fundamentalism is bad and harmful, there is something particularly evil and dangerous about Islamic fundamentalism. This, for example, is the position of Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason and Letter to a Christian Nation; and it is the stand rather obviously and quite aggressively insisted on by Christopher Hitchens, whose recent book, and in a concentrated way its title, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, encapsulates the contradiction I am speaking to here. On the one hand, as expressed in the secondary part of the title, Hitchens' book is a broadside against religion in general; but the first, and main, part of the title involves—and is no doubt meant to involve—a very definite salvo directed against Islam in particular: it is a "negative echo," so to speak, of the common Islamic invocation: God is Great. It is not hard to see how this position dovetails rather neatly with that of the Bush regime and the U.S. imperialists in general with their "war on terror" and its declared target of "Islamic extremists."

The following began with a myspace bulletin that provoked a cousin of mine to chime in with defense of his bullshit. I reposted an article from here with the blatantly provocative title "CHRISTIANS ARE RETARDS". His text will be quoted.

So you believe in this stuff? Did you actually read any of the below before making judgment on whether or not I "offend lots of family members with stuff like this"?

By "stuff like this" do you mean logically questioning obvious fair-tale-like childish thoughts? Do you ACTUALLY think there was an Ark... a whale that ate someone (and that someone living inside the whale -Matthew 12:40)... a virgin birth?

I received the following myspace bulletin from a family member of mine:
-------
" A girl went to a party in Sexy clothes and she ended up staying longer than planned, her boyfriend got drunk and passed out and had to walk home alone. She wasn't afraid because it was a small town and she lived only a few blocks away around the corner of 4th & 16th.

As she walked along passing "MacDonalds" Mary asked God to keep her safe from harm and danger. When she reached the alley, which was a short cut to her house, she decided to take it. However, halfway down the alley she noticed a man standing at the end as though he were waiting for her. She became uneasy and began to pray, asking for God's protection.

If "sin" is defined as deviation from the way of god, then objectively there is not and never has been any such thing, because there is not and never has been any god. I think that, when the point is reached where the material and ideological conditions exist for humanity to voluntarily and consciously change itself and the world, then there will also be no subjective basis for "sin", because there will no longer be a need or basis for belief in god. At that point and into the future, there will of course still be right and wrong, good and bad --in the sense that of what does and does not conform to objective reality and does and does not contribute to forging freedom from necessity and enhancing the ability of society and the individuals who comprise it to continue developing in an all-around way. Then there will no longer be the notion of "sin."