Quote of the day:

Private, quiet faith is one thing. But when the guy holding the launch codes believes the end of the world could come any day and that’s a good thing, those who believe lives are limited to one per customer have a problem.

This article, in the Otawa Citizen,  has a very high density of good lines. Here are just a few:

Those making this case have been dubbed the “new atheists.” They have also been called fanatics who are dogmatic, zealous and intolerant of other views — the mirror image of religious extremists. As one English university dean said in the Guardian, Richard Dawkins is “just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs in the Tube.”

Less Olympian thinkers have portrayed strident atheists as hacking away at the bonds of morality, which must inevitably lead to various forms of depravity ranging from the sexual to the genocidal.

Don’t you know Stalin was an atheist? That’s the way it goes. First you read Richard Dawkins. Then you have an abortion. Then you’re putting a fresh coat of paint on the Gulag.

So the new atheists are just as fanatical as the people who fly planes into buildings?

 Then there’s the problem on the other side — among the atheists such as Richard Dawkins who have been labelled “fanatics.” Now, it is absolutely true that Dawkins’ tone is often as charming as fingernails dragged slowly down a chalkboard. But just what is the core of Dawkins’ radical message?

Well, it goes something like this: If you claim that something is true, I will examine the evidence which supports your claim; if you have no evidence, I will not accept that what you say is true and I will think you a foolish and gullible person for believing it so.

That’s it. That’s the whole, crazy, fanatical package.

You’ll have to go read the article yourself to find out his opinion on stuffing olives up the noses of sodomites and why he thinks that Ringo was the greatest Beatle.