In honor of Independence Day, I've decided to make today the official launch date of In Bob We Trust. We're delcaring our independence from humbug today. We all know that humbug takes many forms. From outright fraud, to misunderstanding, to just plain ignorance, humbug has many different homes.

Perhaps none is more common or more dangerous than religion. As George Carlin once pointed out: "When it comes to bullshit--big time major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of religion."

Right now, Christianity is the most popular religion in America, by a very wide margin. The fact that a great deal of the Christian faith is demonstrably false has little bearing on popular opinion. This is why the masses are overwhelmingly religious, while the intellectual elite are overwhelminly atheist.

The majority of Christians are mostly harmless (I say mostly harmless for a reason) moderates, but their greatest crime is to allow the others--the fundamentalists--to thrive.

Here in America, once the greatest bastion of freedom in the world, the religious right has been staging a very well planed and amazingly well executed attack on this people.

Homosexuals and atheists are openly discriminated against. This discrimination also frequently includes violence. Abortionists are murdered to save the life of an embryo that is less complex than the household fly; less complex than the vegetables we all eat, and certainly can't be considered a human life. Indeed it may be considered a potential human life, but every cell in your body is a potential human life, and these cells are certainly nothing worth murdering another person for.

Science is under attack, even in the public schools, where the religious seek to have creationism taught in addition to or instead of evolution.

The religious are guilty of a preventable genocide of sexually transmitted disease, due to their fascist opposition to the use of condoms. The religious are guilty of genocide due to their moral opposition to stem cell research.

Today we seem to think that witch burnings are a thing of the past. And indeed, it would seem to be that way. Yet I've heard the religious people cheering the witch burners of the past for doing god's work. If killing thousands of innocent women, some as young as two years, is god's work, then we should devote all our strength to the overthrow of this god, even against all odds.

Books are banned in public schools for religious or political reasons. Book burnings are becoming popular again in highly religious communities, where some churches have parties to burn copies of the Harry Potter books. As the band XTC once pointed out, "...Where they burn books / people are next..."

Youth in the religious communities are being trained to lay down their lives for Jesus. Children are being taught that martyrdom is a sacred virtue, rather than an obscene superstition.

Religious frauds, such as faith healers, are able to continue their work against humanity, often causing the deaths of their victims, simply because the religious lobby is too powerful for the government to take action to protect the people from force and fraud.

History is under attack by the religious, who want us to believe that America was founded upon the Christian religion, when in fact, it was not (the Founding Fathers were not all Christians--some were, others were Deists, others yet were Atheists, and so on).

Indeed, America, this great nation which we all love so dearly, is in grave danger. Unless the religious can be stopped, the republic will not survive. We must make every attempt to stop the religious lobby from gaining any more political power. We must make every attempt to refute the religious claims that simply can't stand up to scientific scrutiny. We must make every attempt to reach out to and rescue the children of religious fundamentalists.

It's not too late to save America, but soon it might be. And if America falls due to religion, soon the world will follow.

As we celebrate this Independence Day, I ask you to reflect on what America really stands for. Not religion. Certainly not Christianity. But rather, freedom and Liberty. I ask you to declare your independence from religious humbug and all other humbug, and join us in this fight to reclaim the republic.

It's true we may have little to gain. But if we don't stand up and fight before it's too late, we have everything to lose.