Penny for your insanity

Some people are feeling a kind of smug delight at the increasingly hysterical dementia of the religious right. I'm not delighted at all, nor do I count them out. In fact they thrive on persecution and so much so that they usually invent it when they can't actually provoke it.

The latest piece of insanity to arrive in my inbox seems hysterical enough, but of course it was written as a cold, calculated attempt to push the nut buttons and release another wave of irrational religious anger toward supporters of the US constitution. Nothing works quite so well for so long as the endlessly repeated threat that "They" are trying to take God off the money, where God so longs to remain.

We are due for a new series of Lincoln Cents this year, which is the year Honest Abe turned 200. The reverse side of the coin will contain scenes from different parts of his career. There will be four versions. The obverse side will remain the same as it has looked since 1909 when Victor D. Brenner designed it to replace the "Indian Head" coin to honor Lincoln's 100th. There are no plans to remove "In God We Trust."


The viral e-mail of course only shows us the plans for the reverse side, but belief addicts never ask, do they? They just believe. They just have to have the adrenaline, the feeling of belonging that believing brings. Of course we went through this with the Presidential Dollar Coin series and of course the fact that each and every coin in that series had God engraved on it never affected the beliefs of the gibbering Republican idiots who still have palpitations over the outrage. I've had shopkeepers refuse to accept them and one refused to be shown that In God We Trust was indeed there for fear, no doubt, that the Devil would drag him down to hell for looking.

The fact that the supply of attempts to restore our coinage to what it was before the Civil War when politicians needed to use religion to get people to kill their own countrymen, has long exceeded the demand and so the Liars of the Lord have to invent more. Worse, they have to heap fallacy upon fiction and invent an entire paranoid fantasy to inflame the three chambered hearts of their devotees.

It's because of the ACLU of course, along with the Atheists, the Jews, the Liberal stooges thereof -- and continuing down the slippery slope of fallacy: if they can take God away from the penny they surely will outlaw prayer in Churches, have the word God eliminated by fiat from the English language and forbid the sale of Bibles. No, I'm not making this up, they are.

Ignore them at your own peril.