This July 4 comment is adapted from my book What's So Great About America. For more information on that or my other books, go to dineshdsouza.com

America is today the most loved society in the world--and the most hated. At a time when we are constantly lectured about our nation's flaws, it is useful to be reminded of the other side of the story. This July 4 weekend, it's worth thinking about what this country does right. The forgotten truth is that America is still the most attractive society in the world, and its appeal is felt even by the children of the America-haters.

Whatever the flaws of American policy and American culture, let's remember that immigrants from every continent continue to brave dislocation and hardship to come to America . Why do they do it? The conventional wisdom is that immigrants come to for one reason: to make money. This notion is conveyed in the "rags to riches" literature on immigrants, and it is reinforced by 's critics, who like to think of America as buying the affection of outsiders through the promise of making them filthy rich. But this Horatio Alger narrative is woefully incomplete; indeed, it misses the real attraction of Ameica to immigrants, and to people around the world.

There is enough truth in the conventional account to give it a surface plausibility. Certainly America offers a degree of mobility and opportunity unavailable elsewhere, not even in Europe . Only in America could Pierre Omidyar, whose ancestry is Iranian and who grew up in , have started a company like eBay. Only in America could Vinod Khosla, the son of an Indian army officer, become a shaper of the technology industry and a billionaire to boot.

In addition to providing unprecedented social mobility and opportunity, America gives a better life to the ordinary guy than does any other country. Let's be honest: rich people live well everywhere. In fact if you are very rich, my advice to you is not to live in America . The reason is that in most countries, but not in the United States , money buys you the pleasure of aristocracy-the pleasure of being a superior human being. Americans, however, share a social ethic that is deeply egalitarian. Americans believe that no matter how much money Bill Gates has, he is not better than they are.

America's greatness is that it has extended the benefits of affluence, traditionally available to the very few, to a large segment in society. America is a country where "poor" people have television sets and microwave ovens, where maids drive rather nice cars, where plumbers take their families on vacation to Europe . Recently I asked an acquaintance in Mumbai why he has been trying so hard to relocate to America . He replied, "I really want to move to a country where the poor people are fat."

The typical immigrant, who is used to the dilapidated infrastructure, mind-numbing inefficiency, and multi-layered corruption of developing countries, arrives in America to discover, to his wonder and delight, that everything works: the roads are clean and paper-smooth, the highway signs are clear and accurate, the public toilets function properly, when you pick up the telephone you get a dial tone, you can even buy things from the store and then take them back. The American supermarket is a thing to behold: endless aisles of every imaginable product, many different types of cereal, fifty flavors of ice cream. The place is full of numerous unappreciated inventions: quilted toilet paper, fabric softener, cordless phones, disposable diapers, and roll-on luggage.

So, yes, in material terms America offers the newcomer a better life. Still, the material allure of does not capture the deepest source of its appeal. Recently I asked myself how my life would have been different if I had not come to America . I was raised in a middle-class family in India . I didn't have luxuries, but I didn't lack necessities. Materially, my life is better in the United States , but it is not a fundamental difference. My life has changed far more dramatically in other ways.

Had I remained in India , I would probably live my entire existence within a modest radius of where I was born. I would undoubtedly have married a woman of my identical caste, religious and socioeconomic background. I would face relentless pressure to become an engineer, like my father; a doctor, like a couple of my uncles; or a computer programmer. My socialization would have been almost entirely within my ethnic community. I would have a whole set of opinions on religion and politics and society that could be predicted in advance. In sum, my destiny would to a large degree have been given to me.

By coming to America , I have seen my life break free of these traditional confines. At Dartmouth College, I became interested in literature, and switched my major to the humanities. Soon I developed a fascination with politics, and resolved to become a writer, which is something you can make a living doing in America, and which is not easy to do in India . I married a woman of English, Scotch-Irish, French, and German ancestry. Eventually I found myself working in the White House, even though I was not an American citizen. I cannot imagine any other country allowing a non-citizen to work in its inner citadel of government.

In most of the world, even today, your identity and your fate are largely handed to you. This is not to say that you have no choice, but it is choice within given parameters. In America , by contrast, you get to write the script of your own life. What to be, where to live, whom to love, whom to marry, what to believe, what religion to practice-these are all decisions that, in America , we make for ourselves. Here we are the architects of our own destiny.

Some critics, both in and abroad, have noted that this freedom to shape one's own life is not an unmixed blessing. Freedom can be used well or badly. Some Americans do indeed make mistakes with freedom, as the country's high divorce and illegitimacy rates suggest. These are unfortunate social trends, but we should remember that while freedom allows vice its scope, it also gives greater luster to virtue. It is no great achievement for an Indian couple to keep its marriage together, because the social stigma against divorce is prohibitive. By contrast, American couples who stay married deserve greater credit because they have chosen the good when the good is not the only practical option.

Those who have tasted the exhilaration of freedom-which entails responsibility for one's own choices and one's own life-can hardly imagine living in any other system. The core American idea is the "pursuit of happiness," which means that happiness is not a guarantee, but that you have a chance to find it for yourself. No wonder that so many young people throughout the world are magnetically attracted to what America represents: they find irresistible the prospect of being in the driver's seat of their lives. So, too, the immigrant discovers that America permits him to break free of the constraints that have held him captive, so that the future becomes a landscape of his own choosing.

Just about every four years, we hear about how this election is going to be a transformational election and how the direction of the country is going to be permanently changed and how our children and grand-children will be affected by what we decide now. In reality, transformational elections are rare and this election doesn't look like it's going to change much no matter who is elected.

History shows that America is a one-party state. What I mean by this is that one party tends to dominate and the other party tends to be a "me too" party. In the early nineteenth century, the Democratic Party established itself as the majority party in the era of Andrew Jackson. That lasted about forty years until the Civil War, when the Republican Party under Abraham Lincoln seized majority status. The GOP dominated American politics from 1865 until 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt inaugurated an era of Democratic hegemony. For most of the twentieth century, from the thirties until 1980, the Democrats controlled the government. Reagan's election in 1980 began our current epoch of Republican and conservative domination.

How do we know that this has been a conservative era? Not just by the number of Republicans who have occupied the White house. We also know by looking at the behavior of Democrats who have managed to get elected. Today Bill Clinton goes around boasting, "We won the Cold War." "We fixed welfare." "We signed the free trade agreements." "We put the lid on spending." Remarkably all Clinton's accomplishments are conservative accomplishments. At least one of them, welfare reform, was signed reluctantly because of GOP pressure. None would have been possible without conservative support. Clinton's liberal ideas, such as gays in the military and national health care, went down in flames. In sum, Clinton was dragged by the conservative tide and basically governed as a moderate Republican.

Is the conservative era now finished? Many of the pundits say it is, but I see no sign of it from the actions of the three presidential candidates. McCain of course has largely pleged to "stay the course." His independence is genuine but it does not constitute a departure from Reagan principles. Mostly McCain is a temperamental departure from Bush. Interestingly Hillary seems to have tempered her erstwhile radicalism. As a senator she has generally occupied the right flank of the Democratic party, voting for example to authorize the use of force in Iraq. Even in the campaign Hillary has sounded cautious notes, warning of the danger of negotiating with Iran, promising a staged rather than precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, an so on.

That leaves Obama, who sounds transformational in his rhetoric. But where is the actual change that Obama is proposing? Basically Obama's argument is that he is different because he grew up in many different places, has a black father and a white mother, and because his grandmother lives in an African village. Obama claims to be different because of his name and his background. So is Obama going to radically overhaul the tax system? No. Is he going to change America's longtime alliance with Israel or our special friendship with Great Britain? No. Does he have any new ideas for reshaping race relations in this country? If so he has kept them entirely to himself. Even Obama's tiresome repetition of the need to change the way Washington does business is unaccompanied by any concrete strategies for changing the modus operandi in the nation's capital.

One of these days we will have a transformational election, as we did in 1932 or 1980. But so far this doesn't look like one at all. The long shadow of Reagan still hangs over American politics, shaping the way the presidential candidates see themselves and the world.

Barack Obama keeps referring to himself as a black man. Indeed he goes out of his way to stress that he is "African American." His parents as well as his friends all called him "Barry" when he was growing up, but Obama insisted on being called by his African given name: Barack. For two decades now he has attended a church which describes itself as authentically"black" and unashamedly "African." If this seems strange when you consider the fact that Obama has one black parent and one white parent, it is.

Obama's racial self-definition is derived from the famous, or infamous, one-drop rule which continues to hold sway in America but nowhere else. In other countries, say the nations of South America or Africa, if you have mixed blood you are considered mixed-race. It would be absurd to call a person who is 50 or even 70 percent white a "black" person. Why then does the United States use this weird rule according to which a single drop (or any visible presence) of blackness makes you automatically "black" and "African American"?

Many people think that the one-drop rule is a product of slavery. Not true. During slavery, the general rule was that slave status passed through the mother. In other words, if a white slave master had sexual relations with a female black slave, the offspring would automatically be considered a slave. By contrast, in the relatively rare case that a black slave produced a child with a free white woman, the offspring would be legally counted as white and therefore free. Obama has a white mother and a black father: in the antebellum South his racial status would pass through his mother.

The one-drop rule was a product of segregation and Jim Crow, not slavery. It developed in the postbellum South as a way to enforce a strict line of demarcation between black and white. Without such a rule an intermediate class of mixed-race mulattoes would make segregation increasingly difficult to enforce. Consequently the Southern ruling class mandated that even a modest trace of African heritage was sufficient to count as "black."

Strangely the one-drop rule has outlived segregation and is today embraced by the very groups the rule was designed to subjugate. Today the NAACP and the Black Caucus live by the one-drop rule, defining as "black" and "African American" anyone who has any discernible evidence of black ancestry. Reading Obama's The Audacity of Hope and his recent speech on race, I see no awareness of these ironies and no attempt to intelligently grapple with them. He is content to maunder about "complexity" and the need to "come together" despite our differences.

The deep question for Obama is not merely "how can America transcend race while continuing to have race-conscious policies?" but also "how can America transcend race as long as the one-drop rule remains intact?" Far from producing answers, Obama shows no recognition that these are even questions that need to be addressed. Meanwhile, Garry Wills in the current New York Review compares Obama's race speech to one of the great speeches of Abraham Lincoln. When I read this on the plane I almost lost my peanuts!

How embarrassing it is to see intellectuals like Wills and sophisticated magazines like the New York Review of Books and the New Republic fawn and grovel over Obama! You can be sure that if a white political candidate mouthed Obama's vague and vacuous nostrums, these liberals would not be issuing such hosannas. In this sense Geraldine Ferraro was right, not so much about Obama as about his white "amen corner." They are giving Obama something he has never asked for as a presidential candidate: intellectual affirmative action.

When did Martin Luther King die? It's been four decades since that event, but let's ask the question in its broadest light. Reflections on King's death are focusing on what he accomplished. Basically King led the movement to secure legal equality for African Americans and, by extension, all Americans. As a nonwhite immigrant I have benefited from the civil rights movement, and have never forgotten my debt to King. Without him America would have had Brown v. Board of Education but not the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act or the Fair Housing Bill. King accomplished a lot.

But he failed in one key respect. King's dream was for America to become a color-blind society where we are judged not by the hue of our skin but by the content of our character. A telling phrase: many conservatives celebrate King's concept of a merit-based society. Yet King didn't say we should be judged by our merits; he said we should be judged according to character.

What happened to King's idea of a color-blind America? It has been stifled not by the Ku Klux Klan or the Southern segregationists. Remarkably it has been abandoned by the very civil rights activists who fought alongside King. Note that the greatest African American leaders, from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King, argued for a century that blacks wanted nothing more than to be treated equally under the law. Yet almost immediately after this legal equality was secured, through King's leadership, the NAACP and the other civil rights groups gave up on the idea of color-blindness and began to demand race and ethnic preferences.

The new civil rights orthodoxy was expressed in Cornel West's book Race Matters. West's argument is that it is naive to have color-blind laws and policies in a society where race till matters. Since race matters, we have to institutionalize race as the basis of public policy. Since race matters, we no alternative than to fight racial discrimination with state-sponsored racial discrimination.

The great irony, of course, is that when you institutionalize race in order to combat racism, you move further and further away from the ideal of a society where race ceases to count. First the civil rights movement fought for decades to get race out of university admissions, job hiring and government contracts; then after King's death, it fought to put race back. Yes, the argument was that "benign discrimination" is better than "invidious discrimination," although let us remember that all discrimination is benign to the one who benefits from it, and invidious to the one who pays for it.

King had his flaws, but in an age of racial charlatans like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright, Americans of goodwill continue to wonder: where are you now, Martin Luther King? Have we lost your kind forever? Perhaps the best way to celebrate King's legacy is to recall and attempt to restore the color-blind ideal that he fought and died for.

Martin Luther King was gunned down on the balcony of his hotel 40 years ago. But he really died when his dream of a color-blind society was killed by his own followers.

The historicity of Christ, including his death by crucifixion, is a fact that about as well attested as any in the ancient world. The evidence for Christ's existence is much stronger than that for Socrates, Alexander the Great, and numerous figures of ancient times whose historicity no one doubts. Historians are unanimous that Christ was born, that he developed a following, that he antagonized the Jewish and Roman authorities, and that he was put to death. But what about the resurrection?

"If Christ had not been raised," Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:17, "our preaching is useless and so is your faith." The resurrection is the most important event in Christianity. (For this reason, Easter is actually a more important holiday for Christians than Christmas.) Other religions such as Judaism and Islam may feature miracles but miracles are not central to their theology. Christianity, by contrast, is based on the miracle of the resurrection.

Who is the greatest African American of the past hundred years? Who was the most prophetic about civil rights concerns for the twenty-first century? Not Martin Luther King. I would have to rank him second or third. The greatest and most prophetic figure was Booker T. Washington. To see why, we have to revisit an early twentieth-century debate between Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. Although the debate focused on black Americans, it is relevant to the question of how any group starting out at the bottom can advance in society.

DuBois, a distinguished scholar and co-founder of the civil rights organization NAACP, argued that blacks in America face one big problem, and it is racism. Washington, who was born a slave but went on to become head of the Tuskegee Institute, countered that blacks face two big problems. One is racism, he conceded. The other, he said, is African American cultural disadvantage. Washington contended that black crime rates were too high, black savings rates were too low, there were too many broken families, blacks did not have enough respect for educational achievement, and so on.

DuBois insisted that these problems, if they existed, were due to the legacy of slavery and racism. Washington did not entirely disagree, but he insisted that, whatever their source, these cultural problems demanded attention. What is the point of having rights, Washington said, without the ability to exercise those rights and compete effectively with other groups? To put the matter in contemporary terms, there is little benefit in having a right to a job at Microsoft if you don't have the skills to get and perform the job. Washington further implied that if these cultural deficiencies were not remedied, they would help to strengthen racism by giving it an empirical foundation.

The civil rights movement, led by the NAACP and later Martin Luther King, fought for decades to implement the DuBois program and secure basic rights for black Americans. This was a necessary campaign, and ultimately it was successful. The laws were changed, and blacks achieved their goal of legal equality and full citizenship. Other minorities (and I count myself in this group) also benefited from the doors that King and his fellow activists opened. Obviously issues of enforcement remain, but by the late 1960s the early civil rights agenda represented by DuBois and King had been largely achieved. At this crucial juncture, the civil rights movement should have moved to embrace the Booker T. Washington agenda.

Unfortunately this didn't happen. It still hasn't happened. Even today Jesse Jackson and the NAACP continue (in the famous words of Frederick Douglass) to "agitate, agitate, agitate" for black progress. But now there are hardly any Bull Connors and Southern segregationists to fight, and so the activists are reduced to fighting "covert racism" and "institutional racism" and "racism that has gone underground" and basically racism that is only visible to them and to no one else. Most significant, these fights do little to help the blacks who are the poorest, the group that sociologist William Julius Wilson termed "the truly disadvantaged."

Meanwhile, there is another group that is following the Booker T. Washington strategy, and that is the nonwhite immigrants. I don't just mean the Koreans and the Asian Indians; I also mean black immigrants--the West Indians, the Haitians, the Nigerians, and so on. All are darker in complexion than African Americans, and yet racism does not seem to stop them. The immigrants know that racism today is no longer systematic, it is episodic, and they are able to find ways to navigate around its obstacles. Even immigrants who start out at the very bottom have shown that they are make rapid gains. These groups are surging ahead of African Americans and claiming the American dream for themselves. West Indians, for instance, have established a strong business and professional community and have achieved income parity with whites.

How is this possible? The nonwhite immigrants don't spend a lot of time meditating about the hardships of the past, nor do they blame their circumstances on society. They recognize that education and entrepreneurship are the fastest ladders to success in America. They push their children to study, so that they will be admitted to Berkeley and MIT, and they pool their resources and set up small businesses, so that they can make some money and move to the suburbs.

Thus we find that any group trying to move up in America is confronted with two possible strategies--the DuBois strategy and the Washington strategy---and it is an empirical question as to which one works better. A century ago, when segregation was still the rule, clearly the DuBois strategy was better. In this sense, Booker T. Washington was wrong during his day. But today it's clear that the man was ahead of his time. So far the evidence is overwhelming that the immigrant approach of assimilating to the cultural strategies of success is vastly better for group uplift than the tired old strategy of "agitate, agitate, agitate."

Martin Luther King nobly led the first phase of the struggle, but he only dimly saw the next stage. At the time of his death King was peddling all kinds of impractical schemes for sharing the wealth and he also became unnecessarily involved in the anti-Vietnam movement which diluted his currency as a civil rights leader. Even so, there were moments when King was prescient about the future. At one point he said that ultimately every man must write with his own hand the charter of his emancipation proclamation. I take him to mean that we all have the right to be treated equally under the law. We have this right, but we don't have any more rights than this. What we do with our rights, what we make of ourselves, the script that we write of our own lives, this finally is up to us.

Postscript: This article has been loosely adapted from my book What's So Great About America. The issues it raises are exhaustively treated in one of my earlier books, The End of Racism.

Today is the 7th Anniversary of our favourite online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Using this wonderful website I decided to peruse and cherry pick other relevant events have happened on this according to the Wikipedia page dedicated to January 15th.

588 bce: Nebuchadrezzar II of Babylon invaded Jerusalem and eventually destroyed the Temple of Solomon, from what I hear the region hasn't seen much peace since. You can watch this segment of Iraq History presented by the History Channel.

Isn't it remarkable that atheists, who did virtually nothing to oppose slavery, condemn Christians, who are the ones who abolished it?

Consider atheist Sam Harris, who blames Christianity for supporting slavery. Harris is right that slavery existed among the Old Testament Jews, and Paul even instructs slaves to obey their masters. During the civil war both sides quoted the Bible. We know all this. (Yawn, yawn.)

The Iowa Caucuses finally arrive tomorrow, January 3rd. While political junkies are excited for the results of the first significant votes in the Democratic and Republican Presidential primary seasons, and everybody is planning to watch online coverage by The Young Turks (starting at 7pm ET / 4pm PT), I would like to remind everybody why I have so much disdain for the Iowa Caucuses:

Asked by a British member of Parliament if he is one of those atheists who wants to get rid of Christian symbols especially during the Christmas season, atheist Richard Dawkins replied that he is not. Dawkins said that he himself sings Christmas carols and that he considers himself a "cultural Christian." Just as many Jews regard themselves as Jewish, defend Jewish interests and cherish Jewish culture while not participating in Jewish religious rituals, Dawkins says that he respects the fact that the history and traditions of the West are shaped by Christianity. Dawkins says he's not one of those who wants to purge the West of its Christian traditions. The main threat to Christian symbols, Dawkins argues, does not come from atheists like him but rather from Muslims and members of other faiths.

Now this is quite remarkable. In The God Delusion, Dawkins portrayed the Christian God as a wicked, avaricious, capricious, genocidal maniac. Dawkins even blasted Jesus for such offenses as speaking harshly to his mother. Yet if the Jewish and Christian God was such a monster, what sense does it make for Dawkins to embrace the cultural influence of that deity? It would be like someone saying, "Hitler was a murderous maniac, but I am a cultural Nazi. No, I don't embrace the specifics of Nazi doctrine, but I appreciate what fascism has done to shape German culture. Let's give up the specifics of the Hitler program, but let's also keep Nazi culture along with the fuhrer's imagery on our coins and monuments."

Dawkins is not an unintelligent man, so what's going on here? One possibility is that Dawkins now recognizes that today's atheists who want to get rid of Christian symbols are just as intolerant as Christians who in the pst sought to deny atheists a voice in the public arena. So Dawkins' statement can be read as a critique of intolerance and political correctness.

A second possibility is that Dawkins now sees the Muslim threat to the West--and especially European culture--as more serious than the prospect of a second Christian Inquisition, so he has decided to ally with the Christians against the Islamic radicals. Other atheists like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens are now admitting that atheist attempts to equate Islamic extremism with Christianity are bogus. The real threat doesn't come from Presbyterianism or Anglicanism but from a radical Islam that wants to obliterate Western civilization.

I suspect that these two factors may have played a role, but the main reason for Dawkins' remarkable self-identification as a cultural Christian is that he has slowly come to realize that even the values that he cherishes--values such as individual dignity, science as an autonomous enterprise, the equal dignity of women, the abolition of slavery, and compassion as a social virtue--came into the West because of Christianity. I have been hammering this point in my debates with leading atheists, and it's possible that one of the Oxford historians came up to Dawkins and said, to his horror, "You know, Richard, that D'Souza chap has a point."

Okay, so let's give this biologist credit for learning a little history. Still, the deeper question remains. If the God of the Old and New Testaments is such a bad character, how come his cultural influence is so positive? Absent a good answer to this question, we must reconsider the premise: perhaps the God of the Old and New Testaments is not the evil figure portrayed in atheist propaganda. On the contrary, perhaps all our Western notions of good and bad derive from no source other than this Christian God. This certainly was Nietzsche's view, and he knew a lot more about the subject than Richard Dawkins. Wouldn't it be interesting if Dawkins continues his intellectual growth and reverses his old misunderstandings? Then he can reissue his book: Overcoming My Delusions: Confessions of a Cultural Christian.

Lord Baden Powell, the founder of the Boy Scout movement, would have been surprised! He wanted his Scouts to be troopers for the British empire. Young British boys and girls, learning the techniques of survival and camaraderie and civilized behavior even in stressful conditions.

While watching the Top Standup Videos of the 2007, you will find currently sitting in third place is this comedic gem about Nationalism from Doug Stanhope.

Careful, strong language.
Enjoy.

Not sure if this deserves third place? Well Mr. Bean on an invisible drum kit is sitting in fourth...also very amusing.

Have you heard the one about how the dumb, ignorant Christians for centuries regarded the earth as flat until brilliant scientists like Galileo came along with their new telescopes and other inventions to show that it is round? This account of scientific progress can be found in textbooks and it has also cemented itself in the popular mind.

The only problem with the story is that it is entirely false. It is a made-up yarn that is supposed to illustrate the so-called war between science and religion. This paradigm of an unceasing battle between science and religion is a product of nineteenth-century propaganda and has been discredited in the historical scholarship; even so, it continues to be spouted by poorly-informed atheists who continue to think of themselves as champions of "reason" and "evidence." As we shall see, it is not so.

The educated population of medieval Christendom knew that the earth is round. Read Dante's Divine Comedy and you will see that it is based on the model of a spherical earth. In fact, the ancient Greeks also knew that the earth is round. They didn't need Galileo's telescopes to figure this out. You just have to watch a ship go over the horizon and you will see that the hull and the mast disappear at different times. Even more telling, during an eclipse you can see the earth's reflection on the moon and, hey, the image is round! Aristotle knew that he earth is round and so did many others in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.

My book What's So Great About Christianity debunks a whole series of atheist myths like this: the myth that Galileo was tortured by the church, the myth that Galileo uttered the defiant words "And yet it moves," the myth that Huxley humiliated Wilberforce in their debate over evolution, the myth that the scientific community rallied behind Darwin while the religious community rallied against him. It's buncombe piled on top of buncombe. As with my expose of the flat-earth myth, my arguments are entirely based on evidence and history, and the atheists have responded with...well, with nothing better than unsupported assertions and personal abuse. Whether from debate opponents or from critics of my articles and of my blog, I have yet to encounter a single factual refutation.

So much for the party of reason! Witnessing the sorry performance of their twenty-first century acolytes, the great Enlightenment skeptics, from D'Holbach to Hume, must be turning in their graves. That is, unless they are otherwise preoccupied in a lengthy conversation with their Maker.

Postscript: No sooner did I post than the atheists were in there, seeking to divert attention from their Flat Earth myth by claiming that Galileo is actually famous for being the first to demonstrate the truth of heliocentrism. Even here, they are wrong on two counts: a) It was Copernicus who advocated heliocentrism more than a half-century before Galileo and b) Galileo's proofs of heliocentrism were mostly wrong. For instance, Galileo argued that one reason we know the earth goes around the sun is because of the ocean tides. Galileo thought it was the earth's motion that caused the water in the oceans to slosh around! Actually, the tides are the result of the moon's gravitational force acting upon the earth. So Galileo was right about heliocentrism, but largely for the wrong reasons. Count on our "enlightened" atheists to keep getting their facts wrong.

Don't forget, today is Remembrance Day in the commonwealth and Veteran's Day in America.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

-By John McCrae