I had to chop up my comments in order for them to be accepted. Here's the last paragraph:

And we have all of this taking place while Republicans in particular are trying to gut the social safety net because we supposedly can't afford it, and calling taxes on the wealthy class warfare. That is the heart of what OWS is all about, bringing attention to a system that is geared towards screwing the poor and the middle class while enriching the wealthy.

All of the Occupy movement starts with the premise that we all owe them everything.

Everything Gingrich says is wrong because his basic premise above is wrong. The Occupy movement is about opposing a structural inequality in our tax and fiscal policies that is skewed towards the wealthy because the wealthy influence our politicians to make it that way. The NY Times recently had an article about how Mitt Romney has an arrangement with Bain Capital that he still gets income from them even though he left them years ago. Plus, the income is taxed at a lower rate, and a lot of Bain's profits were made from buying companies and then laying off workers and selling the companies for a profit. Oddly enough, Gingrich even alluded to this when a reporter mentioned to him that Romney said he should return the money he made from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Whiffle, that's from the movie Spartacus. Gracchus and a young Julius Caesar are in a Roman market. Gracchus gives some religiously themed greeting to a vendor and then Caesar expresses surprise, being under the belief that Gracchus is a non-believer. Then Gracchus replies similar to what you said, but IIRC, the order was different, "Privately, I believe in none of them, in public I believe in all of them."

Suffering is a fact of life. But it doesn't mean that it should be reveled in. I thought it was supposed to be Catholic doctrine that witnessing the suffering of others inspires us to be caring. I guess this means that if Santorum is ever in a hospital and suffering from excruciating pain, he won't mind if the hospital staff refuses his requests for pain medication and tells him to just deal with it because it builds character.

When it comes to In God We Trust, all I can think is "What's this WE shit?"

They should have put up billboards featuring a fertilized egg with a caption that reads THIS IS NOT A PERSON. Then next to it a picture of a woman (with different billboards showing women of different ethnicity) in her home with a visible harried expression on her face, bills piled up on the table (with the implication that she is having a tough time paying them) and one or more children in the background behind her, with a caption that reads THIS IS A PERSON. DON'T MAKE HER LIFE HARDER. VOTE NO ON PROP 26.

Man, something really bad must have happened to you.

It's been my observation over the years that people turn to religion because something really bad happened to them, usually a problem of their own making.

Generally, it is someone raised with some religion in their background, but they might not be much of a churchgoer. But still, it's there. Then they have a moment of crisis in their lives, and then they remember the religion they were brought up in and they think "Maybe I ought to give this a shot." Most of the time, the crisis passes, but since they happened to turn to religion at the right moment, they credit the religious belief to things getting better.

I love this line: In fact, atheists actually do have an image of a supreme being. It is Man...

Actually, it is theism that suffers from what I call human egocentrism. In this vast universe filled with billions of galaxies, religions like Christianity and Islam posit that a being that created all of that is primarily concerned with the behavior of the species homo sapiens on planet Earth, that we are so special that we are created in this deity's image, and that our world is the central front in a cosmic war between the forces of good and evil.

Remember, this is the same CNN that several years ago on Paula Zahn's program bashing atheists without having a single atheist on the panel. Then after the outcry, they did an interview with Richard Dawkins that lasted maybe 5 minutes.

I really like the "God-LESS America" message, but I'm less than thrilled with the claim that atheism is patriotic.

I thought of a Godless America bumper sticker. Don't care for Atheism Is Patriotic either, because it's not. What's patriotic is supporting freedom to believe in any religion or no religion at all.