"School sponsorship of a religious message is impermissible because it sends the ancillary message to members of the audience who are nonadherents 'that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community." US Supreme Court - Santa Fe Independent Sch. Dist. v. Doe
"Families entrust public schools with the education of their children, but condition their trust on the understanding that the classroom will not purposely be used to advance religious views that may conflict with the private beliefs of the student and his or her family. Students in such institutions are impressionable and their attendance is involuntary." US Supreme Court - Edwards v. Aguillard
"The beginning of wisdom is to say that all these three sides need to be condemned to death and to hell. These people seriously want us all to die, if we won't adopt their faith. They look--they think of us, they think of you, all of us, as dispensable, as mere extras, as digits in their cosmic horror show. They look forward to the day when Armageddon comes. They look forward to the day when all the achievements of human civilization are cast into a pit and they have all that in common with one another and this is the perfect demonstration case and it's right before our eyes and you can read about it every day and that's how far we've got from the Age of Reason as well as The Rights of Man, because when reason dies, the rights of man are so obviously and so clearly and so utterly negated." - Christopher Hitchens
“I can’t help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the ‘Christian fascists.’ He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.” - Chris Hedges, Harpers magazine
“What is unique today is that the radical religious right has succeeded in taking over one of America’s great political parties - the country is not yet a theocracy but the Republican Party is and they are driving American politics, using God as a battering ram on almost every issue... What’s also unique is the intensity, organization, and anger they have brought to the public square. Listen to their preachers, evangelists, and home grown ayatollahs: Their viral intolerance their loathing of other people’s beliefs, of America’s secular and liberal values, of an independent press, of the courts, of reason, science and the search for objective knowledge has become an unprecedented sectarian crusade for state power.” - Bill Moyers, Union Theological Seminary
“I am persuaded we face in our country a movement that is trying its best to hijack this nation in the name of a set of ideals and values it claims to be Christian but which, on examination, are the very antithesis of the Gospel that our Lord preached and by which we, as Jesus disciples, are challenged to live our lives in the world. If this movement is successful if it is not stopped in its tracks it will transform the United States into a political and cultural nightmare that not only turns its back on two hundred years of American history, it will also be one that leaves this nation unrecognisable from all that we have been and all that we might aspire to be as a democratic society.” - Dr Hubert Locke, Afro-American theologian
Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages -- and loses -- both necessary and unnecessary wars. Sam Harris - Palin: average isn't good enough