With all due respect to Pope Francis, his philosophy regarding money sounds like a typical socialist/communist rant demanding a worldwide redistribution of wealth from the have’s to the have not’s; the producers to the takers; the hard working to the lazy; and the ambitious to the complacent.

But it is religious social conservatives who, with misplaced faith have glorified, empowered and bowed down to the state as a divine instrument for imposing morality.

In doing so, they have helped create a rod for their own backs. Now, the masquerade is being lifted to reveal the raw tyranny of the secular state. This was always the end result of the social conservative message and why it is and always has been a losing message.

Religion is the problem.

Everyone knows that the problem is religion, but no one wants to mention it.

We’re still fighting the crusades of the Middle Ages by proxy in the 21st century. If you take the imaginary man in the sky out of the equation all the problems would be solved.

The Islamic countries – the Muslims-- have to get over the fact that Israel is a legitimate state. The Jews and the Christians have to reconcile the fact that the Muslims still have to some extent a legitimate claim to parts of Jerusalem.

Diplomacy is the one and only answer.

Religion is the elephant in the room.

I stand up for people's religious views, and their right to hold those views, on a regular basis. Even though I think it is silly to believe in things that are beyond any sort of detection, experimentation, or objective observation.

But, I see a fairly common trend that disturbs me. It is when someone who views liberty through the lens of their particular religion demands that everyone view it the same way. Or when some aspect of the State only disturbs them when it ruffles their religious feathers. Such a narrow focus is dangerous.

Here are the facts, put in terms that even a God-besotted, crazed rabbi can understand. Earthquakes happen every day. They happen all over the world, every day. They happen in places that hate gays, the way the Rabbi demands, and they happen in places where people don't hate gays. Today we had significant earthquakes in Toga, Peru, Turkey, Mexico, and Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not a tolerant place for gay people nor are Peru and Toga known for their "gay scene." There were three large quakes today in the Norwegian Sea, which is hardly a hotbed of gay activity. All that happens there is shipping, fishing and oil rigs. God hates herring!

Now then, what about my political views? It's quite simple, really. Since I serve the Lord Jesus Christ, who not only made the heavens and the Earth, but humbled Himself to come down in human form and be tortured to death for our sakes, then you can see why I'm not so hot on George W. Bush or Barack Obama.

Coming back to Gene Callahan's point: I reject the modern State because it rests on a fundamental hubris, namely that a bunch of men (and women) can declare laws by fiat. No they can't. Not a group of experts, not even 51% of voters, can make something legal that should really be illegal. This includes "taxation" (which is an antiseptic word for theft) and "regime change" (which is an antiseptic term for mass murder).

The question is, can you confront the abuses and injustices that come along with religion in a way that doesn’t betray that tolerance for the beliefs of others? I don’t know, but shouldn’t that be the ideal?

Like the pagans of old thought they could appease the angry gods or win their favor through sacrificing the things most dear to them — their livestock, and if that didn’t work, human beings, even their own children — so it appears that Global Warmingism demands that we sacrifice. And it’s not really sacrifice because it’s moral or sensible or good for us, but sacrifice to appease the offended ecosphere.

It’s the old, old thought process of: “Bad things are happening and we don’t know why. How can we stop these things? How do we control what we don’t understand? We must be to blame. We must do something, anything, to make amends.”

It doesn’t matter that our efforts don’t have any demonstrable connection to the problem, or that they don’t do a thing to improve our situation but instead cause even more harm. All that matters is that we do something, and the bigger and more painful it is the better.

This new justification that American Christians have relied on for supporting the killing of people in Iraq turns on an arithmetical calculation. The idea is that Iraqis who survive the invasion and occupation are better off today with democracy than they were under dictatorship and, therefore, the killing of countless Iraqis to accomplish that goal is morally and theologically justified.