(CNN) — A federal judge on Thursday struck down the federal statute that established the National Day of Prayer, ruling that it violates the constitutional ban on government-backed religion.

“[I]ts sole purpose is to encourage all citizens to engage in prayer, an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function,” a Wisconsin judge wrote in the ruling, referring to the 1952 law that created the National Day of Prayer.

“In this instance, the government has taken sides on a matter that must be left to individual conscience,” wrote the judge, Barbara B. Crabb.

So, in the time it took for me to (almost) finish my taxes, the story changes from the silly email rumor that President Obama has canceled the National Day of Prayer to a federal court ruling that declares the 1952 National Day of Prayer statute unconstitutional!

Now, nothing is actually going to happen between now and May 6th since the statute will stand until all avenues of appeal are exhausted, and President Obama has already stated that he will be issuing the proclamation on scheduled, but this is going to drive the conservative Christians to apoplexy nonetheless.

Should be fun.

For the record, while I agree with the judge’s ruling (prayer is an inherently religious exercise and the federal government should stay out of it) I fully expect it to be overturned on appeal, with the appellant judges citing some sort of vague ceremonial tradition as the reason why the statute should stand—just as they did in various Ten Commandments monument-related cases.

In fact, given that this will give the religious right all the excuse they need to kick up an even bigger fuss about activist judges and the perceived persecution of Christians, I would have actually preferred it if the Freedom From Religion Foundation had not brought the suit. Ceremonial stuff like National Day of Prayer proclamations, religious mottoes on our money, and moldy old religious monuments stuffed away in the corner of a courthouse yard are the type of thing that people don’t pay much attention to anyway, secular or religious, and filing lawsuits against them does nothing but keep the religious fundamentalists fired up, engaged, and ready to fight.

I grew up in Britain during the time when Christianity went from being a dominant force in British life to being almost irrelevant.  That didn’t happen because atheists and non-believers fought tooth and nail to overthrow the established order. It happened though benign neglect. The shrinking religious minority found it very hard to get fired up about the gradual atrophy and decay of their religious institutions.

I would prefer the secularists and the separationists to keep their powder dry for things that really matter, like efforts to teach creationism in school, or attempts to proselytize students in public school, etc. But, what’s done is done, and no doubt Fox News pundits everywhere are lining up a gaggle of guests to express their righteous outrage at the court’s decision.

Perhaps if you’ve never studied high school geography you might have missed it, but Hovind’s questioning of how the Colorado River could have flowed uphill for millions of years to carve out the Grand Canyon demonstrates a profound (and wanton) ignorance of proven geological processes.

One of the first things you learn in high school about our home planet is that the Earth’s crust is always on the move.  The theory of plate tectonics—the notion that the Earth’s crust is made up of a number of individual plates that drift around and bump up against each other—was one of the triumphs of the geological sciences of the early 20th century.  Today, in this age of satellite monitoring, it is trivially easy to show that many parts of the world—most notably the Himalayas, the Alps, and the Andes—are rising as the tectonic plates they rest upon are being thrust upwards by the neighboring plates which are pushing underneath, like placing a lever below a large rock to lift it up.

This is almost certainly what happened to the Colorado Plateau before the formation of the Grand Canyon.  There is ample geological evidence to show that the Colorado River (or a predecessor) carved out the canyon as the landmass around it rose due to pressure being exerted from neighboring tectonic plates slipping below it.  Studies of canyon’s route across the plateau show that the river’s flow and direction was directly influenced by nature of the upthrust of the land going on around it.

Of course, it has taken many hundreds of person years of scientific research, and many thousands of published papers to build a good picture of how the Grand Canyon was formed, and even now some questions over the details remain.  But then Hovind comes along that dismisses all of that with a wave of the hand and cries “Inconceivable!” as he fobs people off with an argument from incredulity. 

If pressed, no doubt he will spout the usual unsupported and unresearched creationist claims about rapid deposition and erosion during the Great Flood, but that is no more than using a toothpick to attack the Himalaya-sized mountain range of scientific evidence arranged against him.  It’s worth remember that analogy when you next heard a creationist calling for an equal hearing in the science classroom.  The disparity in supporting scientific evidence between the two sides simply cannot be overstated.

But, as seems to happen with all too many authors, when they get a wee bit famous, they start injecting all kinds of personal views and prejudices into their stories.  I guess they feel that they have earned that right, and I suspect that editors tend to have less control over the content and tenor of their prized authors’ later novels.

I remember slogging my way through Terry Goodkind’s marathon Sword of Truth fantasy series a couple of years ago.  As with many such series, the first few books were entertaining and engaging, but then the pace of the action began to slow and I found myself skipping whole pages as the same plots and conversations were rehashed over and over again.  Then in book eight, Naked Empire, the hero of the story saves a bunch of pacifists from themselves, but not before he holds up the action and gives a chapter-long speech on the evils of pacifism.

Now, I’m not a pacifist.  If a nation is under attack from an aggressor, I believe they have the right to defend themselves.  But the last thing I need when reading a fantasy novel is a  twenty-odd page diatribe against pacifism just because the author has an axe to grind.  Nothing turns me off more.

Anyway, back to Orson Scott Card.  It was when reading the books in the Ender series when I noticed things starting to go downhill.  The sequel to Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, was okay, but Xenocide began to get a little preachy, and I found Children of the Mind unbearable and couldn’t finish it.

That was around the time I discovered that Card was a Mormon (no big deal) and a social conservative (a slightly bigger deal), but since I had already been turned off by the failing quality of his work, I had no further interest in reading anything more of his anyway.

Then I read Ender’s Game again, as part of a reading group, and it turned out to be an interesting exercise.  This time I was fully aware of Card’s politics, and was surprised how much of his personal beliefs can be found in the novel now that I knew what to look for.  Knowing that Card was, and still is, an enthusiastic backer of Bush’s misadventure in Iraq certainly shed new light on the militaristic nature of Ender’s training, not forgetting that he is a very young child at the time.  Now there is no reason why an author should not create such a setting for their novel and it may not be any reflection of the author’s personal views or prejudices, but I have little doubt that in Orson Scott Card’s case, it is.

Of course, now that Card has fully allied himself with the religious wingnuts in their ridiculous effort to “defend marriage from the gays,” I have absolutely no inclination to contribute further to the coffers of Mr. Card by buying any more of his books.

So sayeth the sharp-witted political wit, Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert.

It is probably the most famous quotation to come out of his brilliant show, The Colbert Report, and it has the merit not only of being funny, but of having a large ring of truth about (or should I say “truthiness”?) too, at least it does in America.

Why do I say that?  Well, as a British expat, I know that there is such a thing as a rational, secular conservative, in fact there are millions of them.  Right wingers in Britain may be a little more religious that their left-leaning fellow citizens, but they have nothing like the same religious fervor that swamps the conservative movement here in the USA.  British conservatives are quite capable of debating the merits of social policy without invoking the Bible or God at every opportunity, and even when I believe they’re on the wrong side of the argument, there is at least some comfort in knowing that I have a chance of changing their mind if I present them with a persuasive enough rational argument.

Contrast American conservatives.  Oh, I know there are plenty of secular and non-believing Republicans and conservatives around–I know a few personally–but they are in the unenviable position of belonging to a party that is dominated by the religious right and their allies.  Their voice is not heard.  Indeed, they are often treated with suspicion and even vilified if they speak up to defend their rational beliefs. 

It’s not all sweetness and light for non-believers on the left side of the political spectrum either, of course.  But at least we don’t have to battle the same amount of religious intensity when it comes to debating politics, moral issues and public policy.  Sure, there is still plenty of irrationality to go around, but it tends to be less organized, less focused, and can usually be overcome eventually.

Of course, in the end, there is only one true reality, and it’s neither left or right, it just is.  It’s just unfortunate that in America, one side (in general) is so much further away from the truth of that reality than the other.  It doesn’t always have to be so, and I am hopeful I will live to see the day when it is no longer that way.