Eschewed Obfuscation

I know staunch Republicans who talk as though Bill Clinton was a known and obvious atheist. And I'm astonished at the extent to which "atheist" seems to mean "disagrees with me on social issues" to large swaths of the American population these days. If you point out open and blatant religious behavior on the part of Democratic politicians and political candidates in front of this subset of Republicans, they flat-out do not believe you. It is an article of faith (heh) that these Democrats all must be lying -- and that their Republican counterparts must not be. And yet you're right: one simply could not run for major office as an open atheist. In a lot of areas one could not run for dogcatcher as an open atheist. And that's wrong.

An historical note on "bless you": sneezes were once thought to make a person vulnerable to their soul flying out (into the handkerchief, apparently).

Also, adding "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance belatedly made it a two-edged sword, because Christ exhorted his followers to "let your yes be yes and your no be no," and not to swear oaths by or to any power on earth or in heaven. So now that "under God" has been added belatedly in, it's no longer applicable to atheists, agnostics, and people with non-monotheistic concepts of the divine -- but it was never applicable to Christians who were following what Christ said to do. Crazy.