The article in question was approved by Yahoo's editors, but some comments critical of their intolerance have disappeared. My response to the nonsense hosted here:
To declare oneself an "atheist" is to declare a belief regarding deity. So, to be consistent, the author must advocate that only agnostics be allowed in government. They're the only ones not asserting a position on god(s).
Besides the obvious self-disqualification of his "argument," this atheist would protect religious liberty by denying it to Christians and other theists, the overwhelming majority of humanity. Brilliant.
It was Christians who founded a "nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Who professed the self-evident truth that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
(What can you expect from someone who considers both the Skeptics Annotated Bible a reliable source of information and the slaughter of the most innocent and helpless among us something worth defending?)
Godless ideologies (Nazism, Communism) resulted in the extermination of tens of millions of innocents in the last century. On the other hand, it is the Bible's teachings that have resulted in the equality, liberty, and prosperity of Western Civilization.
The ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and codified in the Constitution are the direct result of the Christian worldview of their creators. Even those Founders who were not some sort of traditional Christian (nearly all were) were shaped in their thinking by the Christianity which permeated their civilization. Recall Thomas Jefferson, cited often in arguments against Christianity and religion in public life, who called Christ's teachings the most sublime in human history and most freeing for Science, Liberty, and the human mind.
As for violence in the Bible, (besides accounts of human evil) none was committed in service to religious intolerance. Capital punishment under the Mosaic Law was for the people of Israel only, a contract into which they entered voluntarily. Divine judgment against Egypt was carried out by God, not Man. Judgment against Canaan was for unspeakable evil (child sacrifice in devotion to Molech, for example; it is worth noting that Israel itself later suffered the same fate for the same sins). Nowhere do you find commands to war against unbelievers to make the world Hebrew.
Defaming Christ has to be the most vile and ridiculous element of this slander. The Son of God committed no sin, spoke only the truth, healed the sick, raised the dead, died for the sins of the whole world, and resurrected, commanding His people to love even their enemies and going so far as to not only pray for His murderers, but to die for the sins of all (even those who hate Him). Jesus taught a separation between the civil and the religious ("Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and give to God what is God's"), the equality of all ("Treat others as you want to be treated"), and the value of all ("What you do to the least of these, you do to Me.").
Perhaps it is the suicidal ignorance of the Christ-hating left who, in their zeal to destroy Christians and Christianity, will ally themselves with genocidal, totalitarian pedophiles, but there is one major "religion" which commands the enslavement and slaughter of all who refuse the "invitation" to convert. That's the only belief system which has -- for fourteen hundred years -- waged offensive warfare against "unbelievers." That's Islam.
No, Andrew Riggio's confused. His false moral equivalence between Christianity/Judaism and Islam is absurd and despicable. Don't throw Muhammad's dirty bath water on the Baby.