"There is a feeling that religion is being forced on an unwilling public, and now people are beginning to speak out against what they see as rising Islamic and Christian militancy," Sanderson said.

. . .

"Where religion is weak, people don't feel a need to organize against it," said Phil Zuckerman, an American academic who has written extensively about atheism around the globe.

He and others said secular groups are also gaining strength in countries where religious influence over society looms large, including India, Israel and Turkey. "Any time we see an outspoken movement against religion, it tells us that religion has power there," Zuckerman said.

The majority of nonbelievers say they are speaking out only because of religious fanatics. But some atheists are also extreme, urging people, for example, to blot out the words "In God We Trust" from every dollar bill they carry.

Gaining political clout and access to television and radio airtime is the goal of many of these groups. With a higher profile, they say, they could, for instance, lobby for all religious rooms in public hospitals to be closed, as a response to Muslims demanding prayer rooms because Christians have chapels.

Wright, 59, said he was overwhelmed by a feeling that religion had become a negative influence in his life and the world. Although he once considered becoming an Anglican vicar, he suddenly found that religion represented nothing he believed in, from Muslim extremists blowing themselves up in God's name to Christians condemning gays, contraception and stem cell research.

But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

-Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

Words to live by. As are these:

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"

and its corollary from libertarian thought

"No one has the right to initiate force against anyone or their property, or to delegate the initiation of force to others. One may only use force in self-defense."

Boiled down, these two sayings are the messages of every religion - the rest, as the old story goes, is commentary.

. . .

Religion is a private, personal matter. It is the guide to the individual, because when it comes right down to it, you can only control yourself and not others. Not without tyranny. This is the kind of religion as practiced by the majority of Christians - learning the lessons taught by their faith, applying them in their personal lives. Living by example, not by force. This is also how the vast majority of Muslim live. And Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists - all religions.

. . .

Indeed I suggest you consider looking at it this way: so long as you or your property are not harmed or taken, what other people do or believe makes no difference to you. Live and let live.

This is the creed I try to live by. I am an atheist and, frankly, think any belief in a God or gods is ridiculous. But I have many religious friends that I get along with just fine, because their belief and practice of their religion "neither breaks my legs nor picks my pockets." I have no problems with my Sikh neighbours, my Muslim friends or my Christian wife. We live in peace and harmony, thank you, and have no need of your "Christian" government or desire to live under it.

But I suspect, deep down, this is not really about something personal like religion anyway. Its really about power and authority. Your religion is merely a vehicle to power, so you may take control of the state, in order to force upon us your religious views, to coerce us and enslave us to do your bidding. You aren't religious, you are totalitarian, authoritarian dictators in waiting, dressed in preachers clothing. You want to rule over us for your own selfish reasons, even though you will certain say "its for our own good". You are, for lack of a better term, evil.

You are the Canadian equivalent, in every way, of the Taleban - the "Christaleban". The only difference between you and them is the length of the beards and the colour of the clothes.

So let me put this as simply and straight forward as I can:

You will not win. You will never be "ON THE WINNING SIDE in the culture war that is being waged today for the soul of Canada." You are advocates of slavery, not freedom and you will be fought at every turn.

I personally promise you that you will be fought and defeated by any means necessary. I have every right and every intention of defending my family, my property and my liberty from attack. I will defend these things with every peaceable means available, but through violence if necessary. I will not sit back and let you tell my daughter she does not control her own body, or tell my wife she cannot do any job she wishes. I will never be subjugated by those who would condemn me or my friends because we choose not to believe your religious nonsense. I will not stand by while my neighbours are oppressed and forced to convert, or have their personal religions destroyed.

The only person qualified to know what "is for my own good" is me, not you. Not your church and not the 2000+ year old writings of long-dead Middle Eastern mystics.

First you will be ignored. If that does not work, you will be defied. And if that does not work, you will be fought, to the death if need be.

Is that clear enough? Do you understand?

The choice is now yours. You can choose live in peace and freely practice and believe you religion side by side with the rest of us. We will not bother you if you do not bother us. Or you can choose this route of culture war and attempt to use the power of the state to enforce your narrow views on everyone. The first is open and tolerant, the second is authoritarian and enslaving.

I am willing to live and let live, are you?

Choose wisely, and let me assure you, you will not prevail.

In a nationwide poll last year by University of Minnesota researchers, Americans rated atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants and other minority groups in "sharing their vision of American society." They also associated atheists with everything from criminal behavior to rampant materialism. According to a recent USA Today/Gallup Poll, more than half would not vote for an atheist for president.

"Forty-eight hours duration, hitting 2500 aimed points to take out their [Iranian] nuclear facilities, their air defense facilities, their air force, their navy, their Shahab-3 retaliatory missiles, and finally their command and control. And then let the Iranian people take their country back," the general said describing the campaign, adding it would be "easy."

The killing fields that are stocked with Saudi jihadists now include not only Iraq, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, but Somalia, Malaysia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sudan, the Philippines, Yemen, and, of course, Saudi Arabia itself.

The main funding source for every radical Islamist movement in the world today, from the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas, has Saudi origins, and their funders include the country's billionaire businessmen and its royal family.

ABC's "World News Tonight," anchored by Charles Gibson, got it right on the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks with an impressive segment documenting how Islamist terror begins — and ends — with Saudi Arabia, its people, and its government.

The Conservatives say the declaration is flawed, vague and open to broad interpretation. Provisions on lands and resources could be used "to support claims to broad ownership rights over traditional territories, even where rights … were lawfully ceded through treaty," says a synopsis of Canada's position on the Indian Affairs website.

. . .

In fact, documents released to Amnesty International under the Access to Information Act show that the government fought the declaration despite advice from its own officials in Foreign Affairs, Indian Affairs and National Defence, all of them urging its support.

. . .

Canada has over the last year aligned itself with such countries as Russia and Colombia in its bid to derail the declaration.

"We are working with like-minded countries to make positive changes to the document and we will determine our position on voting at a later date depending on the outcome of our talks," Yeomans said.

Ole Simel, of Kenya, suspects the real root of opposition can be traced to the lucrative timber, minerals and other deposits that are on or beneath disputed lands.

But Strahl said the government is moving ahead on "making an actual difference" in improving the daily lives of aboriginal Canadians, instead of offering "empty promises and rhetoric."

"We have conducted 23 polls all over the Muslim world, and this is the most disturbing one we have conducted," said Ken Ballen, the group's head. "Pakistan is the one Muslim nation that has nuclear weapons, and the people who want to use them against us -- like the Taliban and al Qaeda -- are more popular there than our allies like Musharraf."

The other problem legislators have recognized is there really isn't much of a problem.

More than 80,000 Canadians voted in the last election by mail-in ballot, no facial recognition required.

As numerous Muslim groups have been quick to point out in the past few days of controversy, there are maybe 50 women in all of Quebec who wear the eyes-only niqab.

And all of them, we are told, are used to showing their faces at banks and other places that require official identification.

Lift the veil on this issue and the problem is entirely in the eyes of beholders.

"I profoundly disagree with the decision," Harper reportedly said at the end of his recent meetings with Pacific Rim leaders in Australia.

"I have to say that it concerns me greatly because the role of Elections Canada is not to make its own laws, it's to put in place the laws that Parliament has passed. So I hope they'll reconsider this decision."

Otherwise, the PM warned, "Parliament will have to consider what actions it's going to take to make sure that it's intentions are put into place."

. . .

One of the reasons ordinary folk might be confused is that most of the aforementioned commentary from Harper et al is at best misinformed.

Elections Canada didn't "decide" anything new.

In response to inquiries from reporters covering the federal byelections, the agency simply reiterated the government's "statutory requirements regarding the identification of electors wearing face coverings."

Far from the federal electoral office "making its own laws," as the PM claims, it is simply enforcing changes to the Elections Act passed by Harper's own government last year.

. . .

If the prime minister "profoundly" disagreed with that decision, as he now says, he forgot to mention it at the time his government was passing the legislation.

Cynosure though he will be today, Petraeus in fact has only a limited role to play in seeing to it that the US continue its mad engagement. The stars of that dispiriting drama will be the phalanx of foreign policy experts based in Washington, who will, in the wake of the general's testimony, fan out across the cable channels and op-ed pages, arguing that giving the surge one more chance is the only "serious" option.

These, you see, are the "serious" foreign policy people. It's good work if you can get it. You may be thinking that you become a serious foreign policy person by often being right about foreign policy. But this just shows how little you know about how these things work.

No - you become a serious foreign-policy person in Washington by dint of meeting two criteria. First, you should adopt the most hawkish position you can plausibly adopt, so that you come across as appropriately "tough-minded". Second, you must note what all the other serious foreign policy people are saying and take care to ensure that your position is sufficiently indistinguishable from theirs for you to be lumped in with them when the time comes for the Washington Post to write a group profile of Washington's serious tough-minded foreign policy people.

In the beginning were the War Hawks, and much did they counsel the powerful to do battle against the evildoer Saddam. Then came the war, and the looting, and the Heritage Foundation hordes, and the hawks lamented exceeding loud and many soon repented of their ways. Yea, verily, they presently transformed themselves into Pottery Barn Hawks, eager to fix the disaster they had helped create and thus redeem themselves in the eyes of the faithful. In the fullness of time, though, the disaster ripened and flowered and became impossible of resolution, and the hawks despaired. Success had become unachievable, yea unto their own generation and the generation to come after them. In short, life sucked.

So what's a Pottery Barn hawk to do? The answer, lately, is: become a Chaos Hawk. First, admit that Iraq is hopeless, thus demonstrating that you're not completely out to lunch. After all, the surge has produced only tiny gains in a few highly localized areas and has no chance of replicating those successes on a wide scale. The Iraqi government is dysfunctional, the police forces are dysfunctional, the army is years away from competence, militias are engaged in a ruthless campaign of sectarian cleansing, infrastructure is declining, and refugees are fleeing the country at a rate of thousands per day.

Having admitted, however, that the odds of a military success in Iraq are almost impossibly long, Chaos Hawks nonetheless insist that the U.S. military needs to stay in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Why? Because if we leave the entire Middle East will become a bloodbath. Sunni and Shiite will engage in mutual genocide, oil fields will go up in flames, fundamentalist parties will take over, and al-Qaeda will have a safe haven bigger than the entire continent of Europe.

such is the war in Iraq as seen through neocon lenses. Mistakes are always in the past. The current policy is always working. When the mistakes are being made, those who point out the mistakes are tarred as near-treasonous. Then, after another year or two of pointless, futile bloodshed, it's conceded that mistakes were made in the past. But now we're right on track. And the liberals, once again, just don't get it.

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

Researchers got the same results when they repeated the experiment in reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when a W appeared.

Dr Corell, director of the global change programme at the Heinz Centre in Washington, said the estimates of sea level rise in the IPCC report were based on data two years old. The predicted rise this century was 20-60cm (about 8-24ins) , but it would be at the upper end of this range at a minimum, he said, and some believed it could be two metres. This would be catastrophic for European coastlines.

He had flown over the Ilulissat glacier and "seen gigantic holes in it through which swirling masses of melt water were falling. I first looked at this glacier in the 1960s and there were no holes. These so-called moulins, 10 to 15 metres across, have opened up all over the place. There are hundreds of them."

This melt water was pouring through to the bottom of the glacier creating a lake 500 metres deep which was causing the glacier "to float on land. These melt-water rivers are lubricating the glacier, like applying oil to a surface and causing it to slide into the sea. It is causing a massive acceleration which could be catastrophic."

The glacier is now moving at 15km a year into the sea although in surges it moves even faster. He measured one surge at 5km in 90 minutes - an extraordinary event.

Officials from the Transportation Safety Board will speak to WestJet to find out why a Thursday evening flight dramatically plunged 300 metres, injuring nine passengers.

After the flight landed safely at Halifax Stanfield International Airport shortly before 7:30 p.m., three passengers were taken to hospital by ambulance and six others were treated at the scene.

A quick summary of the facts tells us that the Iraqi military is broken, the police force is even worse, we have ceded the south to the Shi’ites, Anbar province is under the control of the Ba’athists, our military is stretched to the breaking point, corruption is the norm, there is a cholera epidemic, high levels of violence against the civilian population, we can not provide basic services (like, for example, electricity or water), and the national government is squabbling (when not on vacation) and led incompetently by a man Bush thinks is under his tutelage (that alone should scare the hell out of you).

The sole force doing well in Iraq are the American contractors.

Personally, I blame the liberal media, and clearly it is time to bomb Iran.

2) Maybe there’s an attack in the works - why wouldn’t there be? But this is a man feeling threatened because of the production values of a web video. The soundtrack has sirens and gunshots. Ooh!

Some Democrats have concluded that their decision earlier this summer to thwart votes on alternatives left them open to criticism that they were being intransigent.

The first minutes after passing the border were overwhelming. Overwhelming relief and overwhelming sadness… How is it that only a stretch of several kilometers and maybe twenty minutes, so firmly segregates life from death?

How is it that a border no one can see or touch stands between car bombs, militias, death squads and… peace, safety? It’s difficult to believe- even now. I sit here and write this and wonder why I can’t hear the explosions.

I wonder at how the windows don’t rattle as the planes pass overhead. I’m trying to rid myself of the expectation that armed people in black will break through the door and into our lives. I’m trying to let my eyes grow accustomed to streets free of road blocks, hummers and pictures of Muqtada and the rest…

How is it that all of this lies a short car ride away?

The report builds on a May discussion of the Harper cabinet's powerful priorities and planning group, and lists two sets of options to advance the "Northern Agenda."

The first would consolidate and implement initiatives in stages, while the second approach contains "signature federal initiatives," including unspecified "symbolic demonstrations of Canada's sovereignty."

Experts say they are "stunned" by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as the UK disappearing in the last week alone.

So much ice has melted this summer that the Northwest passage across the top of Canada is fully navigable, and observers say the Northeast passage along Russia's Arctic coast could open later this month.

. . .

The new figures show that sea ice extent is currently down to 4.4m square kilometres (1.7m square miles) and still falling.

The previous record low was 5.3m square kilometres in September 2005. From 1979 to 2000 the average sea ice extent was 7.7m square kilometres.

The sea ice usually melts in the Arctic summer and freezes again in the winter. But Dr Serreze said that would be difficult this year.

"This summer we've got all this open water and added heat going into the ocean. That is going to make it much harder for the ice to grow back."

the Hadley Centre researchers said that the influence of natural climatic variations were likely to dampen the effects of emissions from human activities between now and 2009.

But over the decade as a whole, they project the global average temperature in 2014 to be 0.3C warmer than 2004.

On a recent run from Boston to Cape Cod, I test drove the 2008 Honda Accord, the latest version of this family favorite. The new Accord boasts an environmental first: a six-cylinder gasoline engine that's cleaner than many hybrid systems.

There's only one catch: You can't actually buy this ultra-green Accord, or the four-cylinder version that also produces near-zero pollution. That is, unless you live in California, New York or six other northeast states that follow California's tougher pollution rules. Only there can you buy this Accord, or the roughly two dozen other models that meet so-called Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle standards, PZEV for short.

Not only can't you buy one, but the government says it's currently illegal for automakers to sell these green cars outside of the special states. Under terms of the Clean Air Act—in the kind of delicious irony only our government can pull off—anyone (dealer, consumer, automaker) involved in an out-of-bounds PZEV sale could be subject to civil fines of up to $27,500. Volvo sent its dealers a memo alerting them to this fact, noting that its greenest S40 and V50 models were only for the special states.[Emp. added]

Canada already dishes out more service medals than in WWI, WWII and Korea combined. Our soldiers have always tried not to get wounded, and kept casualties low. If a medal is authorized for being wounded, that tradition may be about to end, with some individuals seeking light wounds in order to get a medal.

To award a medal to the wounded of Afghanistan could be interpreted as a slight to those thousands who were casualties in WWII, Korea and on UN peacekeeping missions.

More likely though, Anbar was chosen because it's seen as the clearest place where some success has been evident. But Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq expert, tells the NYT that Anbar isn't really exemplary of a successful American strategy since any progress there has more to do with the local frustration with al-Qaida in Iraq. Although Bush tried to bring both sides together yesterday, there is clearly still distrust between the Shiite central government and the Sunnis as many doubt the Anbar model can be exported to other areas.

But that is exactly what the new U.S. strategy in Iraq has become, reports the WSJ in a Page One piece. The paper says that "after almost four years of trying to build Iraq's central government in Baghdad" the United States has concluded that "what appears to work best in the divided country is just the opposite." In other words, the United States is increasingly trying to prop up local leaders and the WSJ suggests this might amount to dividing the country into different areas, a strategy that sounds a lot like the "soft partition" that several Democrats have been advocating for some time. The thinking is that the United States should worry a bit less about the central government and hope that the country will remain united in the long run because local leaders will still depend on Baghdad for money.

And, wait a minute, isn't that a strategy shift from the stated goals of the "surge" that was supposed to give some breathing room for politicians in Baghdad so they could make progress and create a model democracy in the Middle East? The "big change in the debate has come about because the surge failed, and it failed in an unexpected way," points out the NYT's David Brooks (subscription required) who says there is now a consensus that "peace will come to the center last, not to the center first.”

Many years ago, I came across a book, which claimed to explain “Israeli terrorism” in the light of the Hebrew Scriptures. It was full of photos showing Israeli soldiers attacking and harassing Palestinians, and presented huge captions that included verses from the Old Testament, and especially the Book of Joshua. If the Israelis were breaking the bones of a Palestinian youngster — a globally notorious scene from the ‘80s — then the caption would include a verse with something like “Thou shall break their bones.” The book's argument was blunt and simple: The Israelis were torturing a nation because that was what their religion ordered them to do.

The more I learned about the Old Testament and the politics of the Middle East, the more I realized that what the book presented was not analysis but anti-Semitic propaganda. It is true that Israel's 40-year-long occupation is a pretty brutal one, and that the Old Testament included some belligerent passages, but the reality was much more complex. I noticed that Jewish religious sources also include many words of wisdom and compassion, and that there are so many Jews who are willing to have peace with their Arab neighbors.

In recent years, I often recall my experience with that anti-Semitic book and the way it misread the Hebrew Scriptures, because I see that more and more people are doing the same thing with the Koran. When Islamic terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda bomb innocents, or when some fringe imam in a radical mosque preaches hatred toward non-Muslims, these greenhorn “Islam experts” find some passages in the Koran, which apparently justify such extremists. No wonder that these extremists themselves refer to similar passages in the Koran or other Islamic sources. The situation is very similar to the strange agreement between the anti-Semites and the Jewish terrorists on the wrong notion that Judaism justifies carnage.