After the welcome news of the UC-Calvary lawsuit's dismissal, I'm happy to say I have two other pieces of good news to report on this week:

• The Alberta Human Rights Commission, a group of petty bureaucrats who make it their mission to censor people's thoughts, has dismissed the charges against Ezra Levant that I wrote about last January, in "In Defense of Free Speech". The commission decided that Levant's republication of the Mohammed cartoons was journalistically reasonable, dismissing a complaint filed by a Canadian imam named Syed Soharwardy.

I'm not hailing this as a victory because Levant was acquitted. As Levant himself says, to applaud this decision would be to give legitimacy to the underlying principle: that an arm of the government can punish people for voicing ideas which others disapprove of. I do not grant legitimacy to that principle. No democratic government should ever dare to harass, charge, or punish people for exercising their free speech. Even if this commission has arrogated to itself the power to do that, it does not have the right.

Even if these bureaucrats graciously decline to punish someone for speaking freely on one particular occasion, that does not change the fact that their mere claim to possess the power to do that is tyrannical, immoral and illegitimate. Unless we specifically have the freedom to say things that the government does not want us to say, we do not truly have free speech.

All that said, I'm cheered by this decision for a quite different reason: because the commission's acquittal of Levant may well be a sign that they realize they've overstepped their authority and are fearful of a public backlash. As always, fighting back against bullies is the best course of action. An attempt to punish someone who's so outspokenly opposed them might shine the spotlight on their actions in a way they would not want, and so perhaps they've dismissed this case in an effort to make that unwelcome scrutiny go away. Regardless, I hope that scrutiny only mounts, until this tyrannical bureaucracy is torn down for good. I'll provide further updates on this as they arrive.

• Also, the University of Central Florida has decided it will not suspend or expel Webster Cook. As you may recall, Cook's great crime was failing to abide by Roman Catholic rules for how an ordinary wafer of dry bread should be treated. As a consequence, he was physically assaulted, received a flood of violent and profane threats, was accused of kidnapping and hate crimes, and was impeached from the student senate at his university. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, who makes his living harassing people who won't fight back, demanded the UCF expel Cook for his imaginary crime of failing to bow down to religious dogma. Happily, the disciplinary panel voted unanimously to reject that demand, which was the only rational response given the circumstances.

This just and fair decision won't undo the harm Cook has already suffered from deranged Catholics who've threatened his life and dragged his name through the mud. If any of them are students at UCF, the case for expulsion is far stronger against them than it ever was for him. But at least the UCF, to its credit, has realized that it is a secular body and that it has no role acting as the enforcer of theistic dogma. This case, like Levant's, is a welcome reminder that no religious group has the right to demand that all of society abide by the rules it has voluntarily chosen for itself.

This past April, I posted an update on the UC-Calvary lawsuit that I first discussed in February 2006. I have another update to report, and I'm happy to say it's very good news indeed.

As you'll recall, the private Calvary Chapel Christian School sued the University of California in a bid to force UC to grant college credit for courses that taught creationism and were otherwise biased toward Christianity. Calvary Chapel filed two challenges, one facial - that the UC's college credit policy was intrinsically unconstitutional - and one as-applied - that the UC's policy had been illegally applied in a discriminatory way. At the April hearing, UC won summary judgment against the facial challenge. Now it's won summary judgment against the as-applied challenge as well, meaning that the lawsuit is dead in the water and Calvary has lost.

The judge's full ruling not only methodically dismantles all of Calvary's claims, it paints a clear picture of their amusing legal ineptitude. For instance, the judge disqualified most of Calvary's expert testimony because they submitted it only after the deadline for submitting such evidence had passed. As the judge says:

At oral argument, Plaintiffs conceded that they did not prepare for the as-applied challenges because they did not expect the Court to reach those claims.

In other words, Calvary was so smugly certain they would win summary judgment on their facial challenge that they never even gathered evidence to substantiate the rest of their arguments. When the facial challenge was rejected, they were caught unprepared and scrambled to submit additional testimony, but the deadline had long since lapsed by that point. The ruling shows that the court accepted many of UC's expert testimonial assertions because Calvary made no attempt to rebut them.

A major part of the as-applied challenge was that UC had shown unconstitutional animus toward religion, although it seems that Calvary's lawyers were unfamiliar with the relevant legal terminology until the judge explained it to them:

Defendants argue that Plaintiffs waived any animus argument when Plaintiffs' counsel stated "We do not intend to argue the case based on proving animus" at the hearing on the parties' first round of summary judgment motions. Plaintiffs dispute this argument, explaining that they did not intend to argue animus until this Court used that term to describe the punishment of disfavored viewpoints...

And when it comes to their actual courses, Calvary's preparation seems little better:

Defendants could not confirm that the proposed text, World Religions by Dan Halverson, existed...

In fairness, there is a book called The Compact Guide To World Religions - by Dean Halverson. Its Amazon page describes it as "a manual designed to arm proselytizing Christians in their attempt to confront Buddhists, Moslems, Hindus, Taoists, Jews, Marxists, and other faith believers with the inconsistencies of their faiths and to ring them into Christianity," which makes me suspect this is the one that they wanted to use. But if Calvary was so slipshod in its course syllabus as to get both the name and the title of the book wrong, I doubt UC is under any obligation to try to guess at what they might have meant.

Since Calvary presented no evidence of the UC's animus against Christianity, and failed to offer any response to UC's expert testimony explaining why the rejected courses were academically unsuitable, it's no wonder their lawsuit went down in flames. The fact that they filed it in the first place, despite being so manifestly unprepared to back up their claims, suggests that they expected to receive deference from the court and be granted a no-effort victory just because they were Christian. Hopefully they have now been disabused of that notion - although I strongly suspect they'll fail to learn any lesson from this, and will instead add a distorted, favorably edited version of this story to the fundamentalists' repository of urban legends about how they are persecuted by society.

I apologize for it having taken this long, but I have important news to report: I've finished editing the complete rough draft of my book, and I think it's now in a form ready for publication. If you've read any of the chapters so far and would like to see the complete draft, e-mail me or leave a comment in this thread.

In its current form, the book is approximately 78,000 words. This compares favorably with the current atheist bestsellers, while still being short enough to be read fairly quickly. (In my experience, religious believers are unlikely to even consider picking up a brick of a book.) There are ten chapters, plus a prologue and epilogue, which address the following topics:

Prologue: Unapologetic: Why write this book, and what I hope to accomplish

Chapter One: Fossil Fuels: The real-world danger posed by religious belief

Chapter Two: A Book of Blood: The argument from scriptural immorality

Chapter Three: All Possible Worlds: The argument from evil

Chapter Four: One More Burning Bush: The argument from reasonable nonbelief

Chapter Five: The Cosmic Shell Game: The argument from religious confusion

Chapter Six: Life Without Superstition: The virtues and benefits of being an atheist

Chapter Seven: Shattering Stereotypes: Debunking popular false conceptions of atheism

Chapter Eight: Universal Utilitarianism: A secular, rational basis for objective morality

Chapter Nine: Stardust: An atheist's response to death

Chapter Ten: Into the Clear Air: The process of becoming an atheist; the effort to organize atheists politically

Epilogue: Looking Ahead: Is there hope for humanity to free itself from supernatural beliefs?

Most of these chapters are based on the essays of the same titles at Daylight Atheism or Ebon Musings. People who've read those essays will recognize the overall argument and layout of the chapter, though each one also has substantial new material that I've never previously published. In any case, I intend to make sure the original essays will always be freely available.

In Federalist no.10, James Madison wrote a famous passage about how a democratic republic must watch for the danger of becoming a "dictatorship of the majority":

Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.

A democratic government is a major step forward over monarchy and other forms of dictatorship, but it isn't a panacea. For an unpopular group unfairly oppressed by the state, it scarcely matters if the source of oppression is a dictator or a mob. For atheists, this truth should hold special resonance, considering how many fundamentalist groups would love the chance to bar us from civic life. Fortunately, America's founders recognized this problem and set out to frame a truly just society in which dissenting voices had a chance to be heard.

How to achieve this end? America's solution was to divide the powers of government among three branches, and to create an independent judiciary, insulated from the vicissitudes of popular passion, that could check the other branches by nullifying any act which violated constitutional guarantees of equal rights for minorities.

Contrary to certain right-wing pundits, this was the design from the beginning. Consider Alexander Hamilton and Federalist no.78:

The complete independence of the courts of justice is peculiarly essential in a limited Constitution. By a limited Constitution, I understand one which contains certain specified exceptions to the legislative authority... Limitations of this kind can be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void. Without this, all the reservations of particular rights or privileges would amount to nothing.

Conservative politicians and demagogues endlessly bemoan "judicial activism", which they take to be the courts overstepping their authority and striking down popular, widely-desired laws. But just because a law is popular does not mean it obeys the limits which the Constitution places on government power. To the contrary, many of the laws desired by the American right - official state endorsement of their religious beliefs, legalized discrimination against gays and other minorities, a government that invades the privacy of its citizens and monitors their personal lives - constitute precisely the kind of mob majoritarianism which the founders were afraid of. The judicial branch was created to thwart the very kind of takeover that the right wing desires. When they complain that the deck is stacked against them and the courts treat them unfairly, what they are really complaining about is that the American political system has repelled their autocratic aims precisely as it was designed to do.

Some landmark court cases from American history show very well why the judicial branch is needed. Consider some of the familiar and fundamental guarantees of liberty, now taken for granted, that were originally won only through court decision:

• Evidence obtained illegally may not be used at trial (Weeks v. United States, 1914; Mapp v. Ohio, 1961)
• State governments prohibited from abridging freedom of speech (Gitlow v. New York, 1925)
• The state may not deliberately exclude minorities from juries (Patterson v. Alabama, 1935)
• Students may not be forced to salute the flag (West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 1943)
• The state may not outlaw films deemed "sacrilegious" (Burstyn v. Wilson, 1952)
• Ending racial segregation in public schools (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954)
• All people charged with crimes have the right to a defense lawyer (Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963)
• Adults have the right to purchase and use birth control (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965)
• People must be read their rights when arrested (Miranda v. Arizona, 1966)
• The state may not outlaw interracial marriage (Loving v. Virginia, 1967)
• Students have the right to stage peaceful political protests (Tinker v. Des Moines, 1969)

These precedents, and many more like them, all struck down laws that most people of today would justly find outrageous. If we had not had a judicial branch to nullify laws that violate the rights of minorities, American legal and social progress as a whole would be greatly set back, and many egregious legal evils would persist.

I grant that, in some of these cases, progress in society's attitudes might eventually have achieved the same result in the end. But even under the best assumptions, that is a slow, imperfect and faulty method of delivering justice, and some of these laws might still be in force today. In many cases, it can be argued that the courts' decisions striking down invalid laws were themselves the catalysts for meaningful societal change.

If a judge's decision is bad - if it is poorly reasoned or in conflict with the Constitution - then it can be criticized on those grounds. But to raise the complaint of "judicial activism" is a meaningless whine, indicating nothing other than that the speaker disagrees with the decision. In most cases, it's just a plea by the advocates of unconstitutional, anti-American laws and policies that the judicial branch not examine their conduct too closely.

Today's Poetry Sunday features one of the classics of Western literature, written by one of its greatest and most fearlessly freethinking poets. Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792 and wrote at the zenith of the English Romantic period. In 1811, while enrolled at Oxford, Shelley and his fellow student T.J. Hogg published a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism (a title that's given much inspiration to others). This was a major scandal, and when Shelley refused to recant, he was expelled. Two years later, he included an expanded version of the tract as an introduction to his long poem Queen Mab. Another of his works was titled "Refutation of Deism".

Today's poem is said to have come about as the result of a bet between Shelley and his friend Horace Smith, who both wrote on the same topic (Smith's poem did not stand the test of time as well). The narrator tells of meeting with a traveler from the "antique land" of Egypt, who witnessed the ruin of a colossal monument raised to a long-dead ruler. (The ruler in question was a real person: "Ozymandias" is an alternate transliteration of the name of Ramesses the Great, one of the most powerful pharaohs of the Egyptian New Kingdom era. His mortuary temple, the Ramesseum, may have been the inspiration for this poem.) In sparse, haunting imagery, Shelley memorably conveys the inexorable grinding of time and the foolish hubris of those who seek to outlast it. The implicit conclusion is that every empire, no matter the heights of greatness it attains, ultimately falls into ruin and obscurity and becomes nothing more than shadowy memories and scattered remnants of the past.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Other posts in this series:

• Poetry Sunday

A few months ago, I signed up for the mailing list of a site that has the chutzpah to call itself "Real Magic Spells". Practically every single day since, I've gotten a highly entertaining e-mail from the site's proprietor, one Frank Stevens, who endlessly boasts about how he's the real deal, how his voodoo spells really work (unlike all the other fraudulent sites out there), how much labor and danger he had to go through to learn this, how the powerful elders of voodoo magic are furious with him for revealing their deepest secrets, and so on. His offer to teach the world to cast genuine black magic spells is complete nonsense, of course, and I'm sure he knows that quite well. But if he ever wants to consider an alternative career, I'd bet he could make a good living as a screenwriter or a fantasy novelist.

Here's an excerpt from one of his letters, which begins with the subject: "Lift a Car with One Arm!"

Question: Can we human beings tap into this type of super-human strength on command?

Answer: Yes and no.

Yes, we can do seemingly incredible things at will. Yes, we can improve whatever we are doing - and do so instantly.

Yes, we can make what appear to be quantum leaps forward.

But no, we cannot make these leaps unless we learn how to harness the power of mental pictures and ....

Harness the power of magic.

And if you sign up right now, there's more:

* Bonus 1: Beginners Love Spell.
You can successfully perform this love spell after you only been studying for about 1 hour!!!

* Bonus 2: Financial Improvement Spell
You can get rid of your money worries TODAY.

* Bonus 3: Voodoo on Non-Believers Special Report.
You can easily do spells on people who do NOT believe in Voodoo.

* Bonus 4: Some of the best sources for Information on Voodoo in the world.

* Bonus 5: Voodoo Defense.
Learn exactly how to defend your self from other peoples attack magic.

* Bonus 6: Revenge Spell.
I am still considering taking this one out of the course because it is too powerful.

* Bonus 7: Horse's Healing Spell.
This healing spell regularly performs miracles.

Another e-mail along the same lines claims that, if "you want $500 for that new air conditioner," you can perform the "Financial Spell" and "proceed to find $500 in 3 minutes flat". I have to admit I'm curious. Plenty of magic believers claim they can acquire wealth supernaturally, but even so, the claim is usually that it arrives through mundane means in due time. But in three minutes? How does this work? Do bags of money just materialize next to you, or do they drop from the sky on command? (Also, do "Voodoo Defense" and the "Revenge Spell" cancel each other out? What happens if one person performs one and the target performs the other?)

As usual, there are dismissive words for the skeptics:

The main reason people do not test their belief in magic is because they are afraid that it is NOT real. OR...

They are afraid that it is real and that they will have to give up their excuses for failure.

Are you brave enough to take the power of real magic and make it your own?

One might think Mr. Stevens is going out on a limb by making such specific and testable claims about his supposed magical powers, but I assume the risk is small. There will always be those who think that the confidence with which a claim is advanced is a reliable guide to its truth. And those who deeply invest their identity in any kind of supernaturalism will always find excuses and rationalizations for the method's failure - "it was my fault for not believing enough" is a perenially common one. To take advantage of a promised refund in the event of failure would be admitting to themselves that what they trusted and believed in is not real. Most fervent believers would rather give up a few dollars than face that upsetting truth. No surprise, there are plenty of con artists who make a handsome living by skimming off the top of that tendency.

A few weeks back, I came across a charmingly nasty site called "Christian Cross Talk" whose author devoted his every entry to explaining in depth how and why he hates atheists and blames us for every problem in society. (Sadly, the site has apparently disappeared in the interim, or I'd give a link.) One of his posts presented itself as a point-by-point refutation of my atheist's creed. Quoted below are some of his responses to various points of the creed:

Through the use of reason and conscience, we can perceive morality, defined as the principles of behavior, which produce the greatest happiness and the least suffering both now and in the future.

For who? Happiness for who? For me? For you? Why should I care about you, unless God is real, and He is.

The only ethical form of government is democracy. Every society has both the right and the obligation to revolt against and overthrow any other system.

Ha! SAYS WHO! Why do atheists act all moral and make statements of moral absolute when they have no moral foundation whatsoever. Right and wrong imply an authority that makes it right or wrong.

Human beings possess fundamental rights and freedoms upon which no one may infringe. Among these are freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, freedom of association, the right to privacy, the right to an education, the right to live in peace and safety, and the right to seek happiness.

Says who? If it isn't God saying it, who cares what he thinks is right?

What's ironic about this is that, as you can see, this apologist doesn't actually disagree with most of what I have to say. He just thinks that I shouldn't be allowed to make statements about right and wrong because I'm an atheist, which is why he punctuates his response with grade-school-like chants of "Says who? Says who?"

He's not the only one, either. As we've all seen, this is a common response of theists to atheists who offer principles of ethical behavior: the claim that, because we do not believe in an absolute Authority, we have no way to justify the principles we propose.

But morality cannot be a matter of "who". Plato showed why over two thousand years ago in the Euthyphro, and his dilemma still stands: Does God command something because it is good, or is it good because God commands it? If it's the former, then there is an absolute morality that is not the creation of God, and the question "Says who?" becomes irrelevant - morality exists regardless of what anyone says. If it's the latter, then there is no morality at all, merely the exercise of God's whim.

If you assume that morality is a question of "says who" - that what constitutes morality is defined by the decrees of some authority figure - then you must believe that that authority figure could change the morality of an action by mere fiat without changing any of the relevant facts. Could the very same act be either good or bad, based purely on how God chooses to view it? This is clearly absurd.

Treating morality as if it had to be the decree of someone is the theistic conception, not ours. We should decline to play their rigged game. Instead, rather than a matter of "who", we should argue that morality is and must be a matter of "why". That is, rather than something imposed by an external authority, morality should be viewed as a set of rational principles which intelligent agents freely agree to abide by - not because they are commanded to do so, but because reason prescribes it as the best course of action for the benefit of all. This rational, humanist worldview, not a list of arbitrary commands decreed by fiat, is the only philosophy that truly deserves the name of morality.

I've resisted commenting on this until now, but I have to give in. I'm sure you've all heard the story of Webster Cook, an unsuspecting college student who got himself into a great deal of trouble because he took a consecrated communion wafer home with him from church rather than eating it. On cue, professional victim Bill Donohue of the Catholic League and his legions of squalling bigots descended on Cook's school, some demanding he be punished or expelled, others threatening his life.

The ever-irascible PZ Myers heard this story and was exasperated, as well he might have been. In a post, he offered to show the world some real blasphemy if someone would send him a communion wafer. This precipitated a second wave of hate mail targeted at him, with many letters fantasizing about committing violence against him and his family. One particularly stupid individual got his wife fired by sending PZ a death threat through her work e-mail account. But none of this deranged lunacy availed, as PZ did indeed receive a wafer and carried out his threat. Not surprisingly, his university declined to fire him for exercising his First Amendment rights.

I probably wouldn't have commented on this, but PZ recently posted on a statement from some group called the "Confraternity of Catholic Clergy" that's so ridiculous I couldn't let it pass:

We find the actions of University of Minnesota (Morris) Professor Paul Myers reprehensible, inexcusable, and unconstitutional.

Unconstitutional?! Unless the U.S. Constitution has recently gotten a new amendment I haven't heard about, I rather doubt that. It's true that there are amendments protecting the rights of women, blacks, and minorities, but this is the first I've heard of an amendment protecting crackers.

...Attacking the most sacred elements of a religion is not free speech anymore than would be perjury in a court or libel in a newspaper.

...The freedom of religion means that no one has the right to attack, malign or grossly offend a faith tradition they personally do not have membership or ascribe allegiance [sic].

I'm left almost speechless by the ignorance of this. Attacking others' religions is not free speech? Wrong! You don't get any wronger than that! That's what makes speech free - that we can say what we like, and other people cannot forcibly silence us just because they dislike the message. If we don't have the right to say things that upset, anger or offend other people, then we don't have free speech, we have censored and restrained speech that is kept in check by the prejudices of the majority. This should be too obvious to need pointing out.

The desire to control all speech in order to prohibit criticism and satire is an old, recurring desire of organized religion, one that's bred into the bone of nearly every church and sect. It's not just the Catholics who are throwing hysterical fits over people criticizing them; Muslim nations know how to play this game too, as witnessed in their recent demands for the Netherlands to permit them to punish Geert Wilders for saying things they don't agree with. It's not just Wilders who's been targeted in this way, either. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes in her book The Caged Virgin:

...when I initially spoke on the immoral practices of the Prophet Muhammad, more than one hundred fifty complaints were made against me to the police and the government. Four ambassadors visited my party leaders - ambassadors from Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Pakistan, Malaysia. They carried a letter attached to which was a list of twenty-one countries belonging to the Islamic Conference... that supported the letter.... Death threats followed against me and also against the leader of my party when he refused to take seriously this complaint and evict me from Parliament.

No matter how allegedly enlightened, liberal, or tolerant the church, these naked desires for censorship and inquisition rise right back to the surface as soon as the religious authorities see any way they think they can impose them on others. The violent rages that erupt among both Catholics and Muslims when their respective dogmas were disrespected underline, in the clearest possible way, why the church needs to be kept separate from the state and why no religious group must ever be allowed to gain control over any society's government.

Theists have intentionally misunderstood what it means to be "respectful". What it really means is that we will respect your right to hold the beliefs of your choice. Instead, apologists act as if we were obligated to respect the beliefs themselves, which would mean obeying the same rules and edicts as the believers. If Catholics treat the Eucharist as sacred, atheists and non-Catholics must treat it in the same way. If Muslims believe that criticism of Islam is a sin, then no one is permitted to criticize Islam.

This is not a demand for respect, but for submission, and I for one will not take them up on that bad bargain. To these people, I say that you can live by whatever rules you like - but I am not a member of your sect, and I will not obey your rules as if I were. If you expect me to treat your edicts and proclamations as binding, you are going to be disappointed. (And it goes without saying that "respect" is not a two-way street: the fanatics expect everyone else to respect their beliefs, but never extend atheists the same courtesy in return.)

I'll give no ear to cries that I not do something because it would be "desecration". As an atheist, I have no sacred symbols, and hence I cannot commit an act of desecration. Sacrilege is just another imaginary crime. I don't go out of my way to offend believers' sensibilities - but I will live my life as I see fit, and I will not heed rules that are not based on reason. Not all the pleas or threats in the world will convince me otherwise.

I usually talk about heavy subjects on this weblog, but sometimes it's nice to shift gears and have a laugh. Here's one of my favorites, from an old post on the Usenet newsgroup alt.atheism:

While on a business trip to Rome, the CEO of Tyson Foods manages to be granted an audience with the Pope at the Vatican. After receiving the papal blessing, he says to the Holy Father, "Your Holiness, I've come with a business proposition for you. Tyson Foods is prepared to donate 100 million dollars to the church if you'll change the Lord's Prayer from 'Give us this day our daily bread' to 'Give us this day our daily chicken'".

Taken aback, the Pope responds, "My son, we cannot do that. The prayer is the word of God. It must not be changed from how it is written in the holy scriptures."

"Well," says the Tyson man, "we anticipated your reluctance. For this reason, we'll increase our offer to 300 million dollars. All we require is that you change the Lord's Prayer from 'Give us this day our daily bread' to 'Give us this day our daily chicken'".

Again, the Pope replies, "It is simply not in our power, my son. As I have said, this prayer represents the immutable word of God and cannot be changed under any circumstance. Not one jot or tittle may be altered."

Finally, the Tyson president says, "Your Holiness, we at Tyson Foods respect your adherence to your faith, but we do have one final offer. We will donate 500 million dollars — that's half a billion dollars — to the great Roman Catholic Church if you would only change the Lord's Prayer from 'Give us this day our daily bread' to 'Give us this day our daily chicken'. You don't have to give your final answer now, but please consider it." With that, he leaves.

The next day the Pope convenes the College of Cardinals. "There is some good news," he announces, "and some bad news. The good news is that the Church is about to come into 500 million dollars." "And what is the bad news, Holy Father?" asks a Cardinal.

The Pope replies, "We're losing the Wonder Bread account."

The winter of 1777-1778 was a bad time for the American revolutionary army. General George Washington had encamped his army at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania - an excellent position tactically, but a source of terrible misery and suffering for his weary, poorly equipped troops. The Continental Army was assailed by bitter cold and plagued by chronic shortages of food, shelter and warm clothes. Almost a fifth of the soldiers died of frostbite and disease, and the survivors' morale sank to its lowest point in the fledgling nation's first battle, to the point where Washington himself feared that it would collapse entirely.

It was at this, the lowest point of the war, that Washington had the following passage read to his men:

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

These immortal words, the opening argument of Thomas Paine's revolutionary pamphlet The Crisis, are famous to this day. In the blackest depths of despair, he offered us a way forward and a reason not to lose hope. Did Paine's words give American patriots the spirit to fight on? Did he provide the breath to kindle those dying embers of independence back into life and flame? History is rarely susceptible to such simple, unicausal explanations... but we did fight on, and in the end we won an astounding victory, the triumph of some ragtag colonial militias over one of the reigning powers of the world.

Or consider Frederick Douglass. Born a slave in antebellum Maryland, he escaped his cruel owner at a young age and made it to the North and freedom. There, he joined an anti-slavery society in Massachusetts. His inaugural address, from all accounts, was historic:

His very appearance and demeanor destroyed the then-prevalent myth of the "natural servility" of African-Americans. By all accounts his eloquent analysis of the evils of slavery was one of the most brilliant debuts in American oratorical history. William Lloyd Garrison, the leading abolitionist of the day, sat in the front row. When Douglass finished his speech, Garrison rose, turned to the stunned audience, and challenged them with a shouted question: "Have we been listening to a thing, a chattel personal, or a man?"

"A man! A man!" the audience roared back as one voice.

"Shall such a man be held a slave in a Christian land?" called out Garrison.

"No! No!" shouted the audience.

And even louder, Garrison asked: "Shall such a man ever be sent back to bondage from the free soil of Old Massachusetts?"

And now the crowd was on its feet, crying out "No! No! No!"

Douglass lived the rest of his life a free man, and lived to see his fellow blacks liberated as well. Again, however eloquent his oratory, his contribution may have been a small one, just one thread in a vast and tangled skein of causality... but he was there, he spoke those words, and the world they described was the one that came into being.

One remarkable fact about human history is that every tyranny, every dictatorship, every autocracy - without exception - censors speech which criticizes its rulers or otherwise upsets its preconceptions. The medieval Catholic Church - and indeed, the modern Catholic church - has its Index of Prohibited Books. In its heyday, the Soviet Union had samizdat, the underground copying and distribution of literature banned by the Communist regime. Modern China is infamous for its censorship of the Internet. And the Nazis burned books en masse.

If you think about it, this is remarkable. Why would a dictatorship bother to burn books and censor speech? Why should those rulers care what the common people think about them? If they have the guns and wield all the power in society, one would think their position is unassailable. Why not let the masses say whatever they want and stew in the knowledge of their own helplessness?

The answer is that, fragile as they seem, words are a more powerful weapon in the long run than swords or guns. Though words can be burned, they can also rebound and burn their persecutors - by exposing crimes and misdeeds, bringing the truth to light, and inspiring people to devotion in the service of a better cause. Dictators and tyrants know full well the power of words, which is why censorship has been the watchword of every autocratic society since time immemorial. They hope - and so far, in every case, this hope has proven futile - that by forbidding those words from being spoken or written, they could erase them from inside people's minds.

What person today is speaking words that burn? Whose speech is cast into the flames by vicious tyrants wishing futilely to keep the truth silent? Whose speech leaps into people's hearts to kindle a different kind of flame, one that rises and sweeps entrenched powers away? It might be Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who speaks against the repressive and barbaric Islam that has taken root across the world:

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

Or, perhaps, democracy activists like Wei Jingsheng, whose manifesto The Fifth Modernization calls for freedom from the repression of Chinese autocrats:

Let me respectfully remind these gentlemen: We want to be masters of our own destiny. We need no gods or emperors. We do not believe in the existence of any savior. We want to be masters of the world and not instruments used by autocrats to carry out their wild ambitions. We want a modern lifestyle and democracy for the people. Freedom and happiness are our sole objectives in accomplishing modernization. Without this fifth modernization all others are merely another promise.

Freethinkers and rebels of ages past fought against tyranny imposed on people from without. But many of those old dictatorships have fallen, and though some remain, the tide of history and technology is turning against them. I believe the battles of the future will be against a more subtle and pervasive foe: the ideologies that slip into people's minds and imprison them from within, turning them into willing participants in their own subjugation. This fight will be a more difficult one, but in the long run, victory may well be the last moral advance we need ever make. And in the end, it is always words that turn the tide. Let us hope we can kindle some worthy ones.