“It’s a free country. If these people need to practice their holy rites of atheism, they can do so, as long as they are in clearly-marked encampments far away from the rest of us.

While they’re in their Heathen Zones, they’re free to dance naked around the fire, brand the mark of the Devil on their flesh or whatever else they want to do. Of course, if they step one foot outside the electrified fence we shoot them between the eyes. Two or three times, just to be sure.”

“Our Founding Fathers declared we are, “One nation under God,” and you better believe I’ll fight like mad to keep it that way. I can tell you from experience, there are no atheists in foxholes. We are the land of the free because of the brave. Many people don’t know this, but when you survive a near-death experience [as Johnson did when he was a POW in Vietnam, TF], you realize that the only thing you had to hold on to was your faith in God.”

I kept talking about Heaven on Earth, Heaven on Earth, but nobody's catching my Heaven on Earths:

The media is talking about the shutdown in mostly secular terms. Big mistake. This is a religion story and to ignore that aspect is like trying to report on the Taliban without mentioning Islam. The media blame the Tea Party and call them crazy. But the media has missed the real story. It’s not about the Tea Party’s politics, it’s about what made the Tea Party’s politics so crazy to begin with. This is a religion story to end all religion stories.

The reason we don’t get the straight story from the media is because of undue respect for religion on the one hand and a refusal to believe that religion is still so important on the other hand. Deference waits upon scorn. And between these two attitudes the real story gets ignored.

I wondered why everybody's ignoring my Heaven on Earths,...