If you want to stay in for the long haul, and lead a life that is free from illusions either propagated by you or embraced by you, then I suggest you… - Christopher Hitchens

The truth of matter is, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, brothers and sisters, religion has it very much its own way in this country of ours. It's in the pledge of allegiance, thanks to a stupid intervention of President Eisenhower; it's on the money, it's in the opening of Congress every day, it's at the , it's when the delinquent president summons his advisors and his spiritual team in order to fend off what should have been inevitable, it's when Al Gore can't bring himself to criticize a decision of the Oklahoma school board, and it's high time that that situation was reversed and we developed a proper immunity to it, and made sure that religion can only be self-inflicted.

America is actually the country to which people came in the most of a hurry, to try and find if that life could really be lived as a society. Some of them came to practice their religion freely. Many came to escape from persecution by other religions. Some came to be free from religion altogether, and that's why the Constitution is godless and doesn't mention the word, but it was not written by atheists. It was written by democratic theists and secularists, and that's why the meeting at Philadelphia, which decided these matters and decides them still for us, was a godless one, if not an atheist one. And that's why I think modern America should be a lot more anti-religious than it is. It should pay less respect, and make much less reverence toward religion, than its mass media... presently do.

Intervention, whether moral or political, is always and everywhere a matter of the most exquisite timing. The choice of time and the selection of place can be most eloquent. So indeed may be the moments when nothing is said or done. Mother Teresa is fond of claiming to be not so much above politics as actually beyond them, operating in a manner that is transcendental. All claims by public persons to be apolitical deserve critical scrutiny, and all claims made by those who affect a merely “spiritual” influence deserve a doubly critical scrutiny. The naive and simple are seldom as naive and simple as they seem, and this suspicion is reinforced by those who proclaim their own naïveté and simplicity. There is no conceit equal to false modesty, and there is no politics like antipolitics, just as there is no worldliness to compare with ostentatious antimaterialism.