Steve and Alex,

I'm glad you're willing to grant point three to others. In general, that's not been my experience. It's been my experience that Xtianity, particularly fundamental Xtianity, resolutely demands rights for itself, and demands the right to insert itself into public life in this country, and demands that it be allowed use of public facilities to further its own message because "we're taxpayers."

Great argument. I'm also a taxpayer and I don't want to either see my money go to an organization which has no raison d'etre other than self-perpetuation and no basis other than faith. When people tell me to have faith, I tell them I'll wait until the check clears, and then I'll ship....not bloody well before. I also don't want my taxes coming back at me in the form of some publicly-subsidized religious exercise which someone in gov't has decided is sufficiently of merit to be allowed to attempt to instruct me on the error of my ways.

I don't like ANY religion in the public sphere. My take is that if you want to believe something, that's fine. But if the belief is based on faith rather than objective reality, it doesn't belong in public policy at any level. There's too much room for abuse in the name of faith....as witness the Crusades, the Inquisition, a variety of Islamic jihads, and certainly a great many others that I can't list. Social policy should be based on close observation of human nature, which I submit is basically as Hobbes described it -- I'm not an optimist -- understanding that we need to adapt to minimize the harm caused by our basic primate urges.

Steve, what did you mean by this: "You want to know about salvation? try this: save your breath. "