I picked up some quotes collected by Brian Robinson. they make scary reading.
On British TV soon we have Richard Dawkins picking up the cudgels to fight with the men of religion. He would not get a platform in America. He should get one here.
It is a pity he is such a very fundamentalist sort of atheist.

I guess that is too much to ask of this mad mad world.


Quotes of the Week
ARE AMERICANS AT LAST WAKING UP THE DANGER THEY ARE IN?

“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)