I ♥ Imodium.

Ruben Bolling's Tom the Dancing Bug, dated for publication 2005.07.23 (but which appeared in Salon earlier this week:

Ted Rall's editorial comic, written last week and dated for publication 2005.07.23:

Click on either image for the full-page version at the ucomics.com site (the images will eventually stop working). And while you're over there, sign up for the MyComicsPage.com service for $12 per year. That's a buck a month for access to tons of comics. If, like me, you don't subscribe to a newspaper, it's a great way to get the comics you want directly from the syndicate so that they know which cartoonists deserve more love.

From OkieDoke's Okie round-up for the week, we find this entry from No Blog of Significance, discussing the passage in Oklahoma's constitution that prohibits spending public money for the benefit of religious purposes. Without getting into that specific subject, I found the ending most interesting:

The whole discussion is absurd--this passage of Oklahoma's constitution was rather obviously not intended to bar simple public recognition of the fact that there is a God.

It's true enough that Oklahoma is home to a wide variety of religious beliefs and practices, and the state is not in the business of deciding which of them is most doctrinally correct. But that does not make atheism the default "neutral" position.

Two paragraphs, two points:

1. "There is a God" is a religious belief, and not a provable fact of any kind. Many debates would be a lot simpler if religious beliefs could be proved or disproved, but they can't - that's why they're beliefs.

2. If "atheism [were] the default 'neutral' position," the state would be spending money to tell people that there is no God. Refusing to put a display of the book of Genesis on state property is not supporting "atheism" - it's just not supporting Genesis. The fundamentalist perspective is that the state must support their views or it is somehow against them, and we've already seen how this "you're either for us or against us" attitude works when applied when writ large.

I agree that the whole discussion is absurd - but not for the same reasons.