When you look at a picture of Osama bin Laden, you can't help but notice the aura of divine serenity that he exudes. Few are willing to say so openly, but bin Laden is obviously a very religious man -- meaning he is the kind of guy God likes. What jealous, angry, vain God wouldn't like someone like bin Laden? Just look at the total commitment, the ruthless willingness to do anything to ensure total obedience to God's law. In a word, bin Laden has faith. Remember Abraham and Isaac? God told Abraham to kill his only son, and Abraham, being the committed Godist that he was, said "Sure thing, God. Anything you say." God has a hard-on for followers who will mindlessly obey orders to kill the innocent, and to kill themselves in the process. Is there any better test of pure faith?

Islam figured that one out better than anyone. That's why they pray five times a day, instead of just three, or one. That's why they call themselves "slaves to God" and will never speak of the future without adding the qualifier "God willing." God just totally eats that kind of thing up. And God rewards his followers with success. Not total success, but success in Godly things like slaughtering those unclean infidels that God hates: freethinkers, liberals, materialists, sexual deviants, women with jobs. Pretty much everything that makes America great is on God's list of sins. Go smoke a bowl, or snarf on the genitals of someone you only kinda like, just because you can, and guaranteed you will piss off the Taliban, not to mention our home-grown equivalent, the Christian Coalition. Hell, just go have a nice vodka martini with a couple olives and a little lime twist, and the fundamentalists will be plotting your death. And God will hate you for it too.

Oh, sure, go get your Derrida and your Foucalt and deconstruct scripture any solipsistic way you like to make your version of the Bible say just what you want it to say. That doesn't change the fact that the reason fundamentalists are called fundamentalists is that they take the words on the page of scripture as simple facts and don't try to shoe-horn them to fit some modern, hip lifestyle.

But so what? Let the Taliban have their blind, stumbling, idiot-child God who needs constant worship and sacrifice, like some attention-deprived hyper-active two-year-old with fetal alcohol syndrome. Let them have all the help they can get from their primitive God who guides their hand on the controls of our hijacked airliners. This is the same God who allowed his own divine beings to inter-breed with man, then got all bent out of shape about it and decided to destroy the world with a flood. But then this "infallible" God turns around and changes his mind, and acts all sorry like he didn't mean it, and promises to never do it again. What kind of leadership is that? And if, like me, you notice the classic pattern of a domestic partner abuser in God's behavior, you are on to something for sure. Do we really want this God on our side at all? Let our enemies ally themselves with this capricious, hot-headed God. We're better off with Him helping them and not muddling up our plans with unpredictable and bitterly ironic Acts of God.

We're America. We can handle the fascist fundamentalists of the uncivilized world, and their little God.

Godists will always be primitive, backward, and frankly stupid people. Talk to any religious nut you know to see what I mean. Even God won't be able to help those troglodytes get into the cockpit of our airplanes once we bolt the fucking door. We just aren't dealing with that sophisticated an enemy. We Americans showed everybody, including this God , in WWII that once we set our minds to a task, nothing can stop us. God can send a couple smart bombs astray here and there, and of course send us his usual crappy weather, but that only delays the inevitable.

And then what? Then we show once and for all that civilized, educated, free-thinking humanists --people who know how to have a good time, unlike certain boring, puritanical God freaks I could name-- were right to begin turning away from God centuries ago. We turned away at the same time that Islam was taking kowtowing to the Divine to a whole new level. Now we'll show them where that gets you.

Maybe it all sounds a little arrogant and overconfident to claim that we can kick God's ass, but ask yourself, who is really the arrogant one here? Us, or God? I say God. God is, and always has been, the most over-inflated, self-centered, fantastically overconfident and arrogant Deity we have ever seen. Sure, maybe Americans have had their episodes of hubris here and there, but when it comes to hubris, it is God, not us, that takes the cake. And therefore is God and certainly not us, who is due to be taken down a notch or two.

And then, given God's predictable infantile passive-aggressive behavior pattern, we are going to see God come crawling back to us, wanting us to take Him back and act like nothing ever happened. We've seen God pull this stunt plenty of times before with every tragedy and disaster God has visited on us, from the Flood to the Plague to World War I. Typically, once God has made a mess of everything and left it to some responsible party like the U.S. to clean up, God is out of the picture until it is all over. Then, here comes God again, wanting to make up, and shockingly, demanding again that we give Him our faith. Yeah, sure, look what happens to those who have faith. Look how your buddy bin Laden ended up, God. Are we going to fall for that?

Think about all those innocent people that God killed. Are you going to sit around and let him get away with that? Not me, sunshine, no way is God getting off the hook this time.