A better title for this article would have been "Open Source is Not an Ideology or Religion".
religion
"Such descriptions may well be accurate, and they also betray the extent to which social class can influence religious beliefs".
"Rosen's mother, like many of the Christians in the book, comes across as something of a parody."
Talks about her religious education, creation science, and fundamentalism.
Though I'm on his side about Christianity and its effect on the environment, I'm not sure I agree that China's one-child policy is as praiseworthy as John Gray claims it to be.
Richard Dawkins on a world without religion: “We'd all be freed to concentrate on the only life we are ever going to have. We'd be free to exult in the privilege -- the remarkable good fortune -- that each one of us enjoys through having been being born. An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of the tiny minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. The world would be a better place if we all had this positive attitude to life. It would also be a better place if morality was all about doing good to others and refraining from hurting them, rather than religion's morbid obsession with private sin and the evils of sexual enjoyment.”
“It is simply creationism camouflaged with a new name to slip [...] under the radar of the US Constitution's mandate for separation between church and state.” Also: “When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.”
Dean Esmay: “It's easy to get caught up in that fear when everyone you know seems to share it, but I think a lot of people are as unafraid of such a bogeyman as I am. Americans, in my view, always get the big issues right sooner or later. We've never been a theocracy, and are farther from one today than we ever have been--indeed, some of us think we've gone so far in the opposite direction it's getting downright psychotic.”
While it's technically true that the United States has never been a theocracy, both before it came into existence and after pockets of theocracy existed: Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded on “[t]he idea that theirs was a holy community shaped life [...] making it imperitive that colonists legislate morality, enforcing marriage, church attendance, and education in the Word of God as well as relentlessly seeking out and punishing sin and sinners” and Utah before entry into the Union. Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896 looks like an excellent resource, but it's unfortunately unavailable at both my school's library and the local public libraries.
