“The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion.”

True. What is either but what a man believes in or free thought? Where the problem lies is the many must be moral or ethical regardless of belief. Today too many are neither.

We're arriving. The religion issue is just but one of the markers attesting to waning freedoms.

I think we Christians tend to miss that important lesson. Christ didn't teach that we should use the force of earthly government to beat the sin out of non-believers. Much of the animosity directed at Christianity today isn't because we act toward them like Christians - with love, compassion and forgiveness, but because we don't. When we abdicate our positive responsibilities to the poor, elderly, infirmed and imprisoned and instead, focus on ways to force a corrupted world to "act" righteously, we do much more harm than good. Sometimes I believe that next to Satan himself, we Christians are Christianity's worst enemies. Like Paul, I am the chief of all sinners. We have enough of our own sins to work on, to worry about those of others.

I think it was Dickens who said that missionaries always leave a country worse than they found it. Probably a slight over statement.

Well said Jim!!

I don't know what Mike is smoking again because many commentators world wide see America as one of the most religous countries in the world.

Though I am an atheist I would fight for your freedom to practice your religion