In Monday's Herald, Kevin Brooker wrote a column about how atheists like him viewed Barack Obama's inauguration celebration -- filled as it was with mentions of God and Jesus -- with some glee, hoping that Christianity "would revert more to a private choice" and would stop being mentioned in the public square in the United States. Yeah, like that's going to happen, and why should it? More than 80 per cent of Americans declare themselves to be Christian. Apparently, Brooker believes they should shut up, and people like him and Christopher Hitchens et al. should be able to impose their ethic on the majority.

Brooker writes: "The separation of church and state may be enshrined in the U. S. Constitution, but look how long it took for that statue of the Ten Commandments to be removed from the Alabama legislature."

In other words, look how long it took for the minority to get their way in a state where likely more than 90 per cent of the population believes in the Good Book. So who's imposing their morality on whom?

What's more, Brooker displays his ignorance about what the separation of church and state means. It is actually a Christian idea that comes from Christ Himself, wherein He said: "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."

As Dinesh D'Souza wrote in his excellent book, What's So Great About Christianity, "somehow freedom for religion has become freedom from religion."

The First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution -- the document that Obama swore on Abraham Lincoln's Bible to uphold and protect -- is designed to shield religion from the tyranny of the state, not the other way around.

Or as U. S. President Ronald Reagan stated in a radio address on Feb. 25, 1984, "Sometimes I can't help but feel the first amendment is being turned on its head. . . . Can it really be true that the first amendment can permit Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen to march on public property, advocate the extermination of people of the Jewish faith and the subjugation of blacks, while the same amendment forbids our children from saying a prayer in school?

"When a group of students at the Guilderland High School in Albany, N. Y., sought to use an empty classroom for voluntary prayer meetings, the 2nd Circuit of Appeals said, 'No'. The court thought it might be dangerous because students might be coerced into praying if they saw the football captain or student body president participating in prayer meetings."

Reagan continued: "Former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart noted if religious exercises are held to be an impermissible activity in schools, religion is placed at an artificial and state-created disadvantage . . . and a refusal to permit them is seen not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism."

Exactly. In Brooker's column, he says Obama's reference to " non-believers" can be considered a "slur," but at least they were acknowledged. "In fact," writes Brooker, "to thoughtful people, being atheist is every bit as much spiritual work as being a Roman Catholic."

Well, hallelujah and amen! Finally, an atheist who admits his world view is a religion. Atheists have very strong beliefs. They're not "non-believers." They believe there is no God and therefore no absolute Truth. They believe in relativism.

As DeSousa writes: "The effort to teach our children hostility to religion, and specifically to Christianity, is especially strange considering that Western civilization was built by Christianity." Western rule of law, for instance, is based on the premise that all people are created equal in the image of a loving God. There are no castes in Christianity -- no untouchables to God or Mother Teresa.

Just this past week a story coming out of Springfield, N. B., broke. A parent found out the principal of Belleisle Elementary School had stopped the children from singing O Canada every morning because two parents complained. Wanna bet they're atheists who object to the word God in the anthem?

Brooker goes on to write that "throughout history most of the world's conflicts seem to have had religious input."

Nice try, Kevin. The atheist ethic has killed more people than any religion by a staggering margin. Fascism, Nazism and Communism have murdered many tens of millions of people. Think of the former Soviet Union, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Nazis, Communist China etc. Mao Zedong's regime alone murdered 70 million countrymen. Stalin, 20 million. Their successors millions more. To this day, Falun Gong and Christians are jailed in China and then killed to harvest their organs.

It's no coincidence the freest, most prosperous nations in the world are virtually all Christian-based, not atheist or even Muslim, Buddhist or Hindu. As the Bible says: "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

With the exception of Japan, which had its democratic system imposed on it by the U. S. after the Second World War, and Israel, which is Jewish, no non-Christian country is truly free.

Atheists make up a very small minority of the "believers" in our society and yet it is their religion that is constantly being rammed down the throats of the majority.

They better be careful what they wish for. So should all people who love freedom, regardless of what they believe.

lcorbella@theherald.canwest.com