I was hoping that this story was about the president of Sudan standing up to the mad mythologists and the invisible cloud-daddy and saying, "Enough already," but it looks more like he bowed to international pressure rather than reality. From the stories I can find searching the intertoobz, he simply signed the pardon papers, without making any public statement whatsoever. That means he's either pissed off or frightened. And either way, the religious craziness in that country is going to continue unabated.

These are the stories that make me glad I live in the USA. Even with dubya's grand experiment in empire building on credit, and the resulting loss of our international reputation, it's still a lot better place to live than Sudan and so many others like it. Places where religion has become government, where, as a free thinker with a mouth, I would quickly find myself separated at the neck. For me, freedom is pretty much a state of mind. To live in a place where state of mind is mandated by centuries-old theology would be my personal definition of Hell. I'd probably ask them to cut off my head.

That's probably why our own fundamentalists drive me crazy. How can anyone advocating creationism and prayer in our schools and the posting of 10 Commandments in our government buildings not look to places like Sudan and connect the damn dots? Those countries embody government by the religious right; intolerance and anger are the law of the land.

In late spring and summer of 1787 our founding fathers met to write the US Constitution. A grand opportunity lay before them; to create a country that would endure and grow into the great, largely unexplored land stretching westward. An opportunity of a lifetime for the greatest minds of their time; Franklin, Washington, Madison and Hamilton among them. Over a period of abut 4 months, these 55 men, the vast majority of them religious men, sat down and wrote a document creating a republic in which religion played no part. It did not happen by accident.