Big snowstorm up here this weekend . . . although it wasn’t quite the harbinger of Ragnarok the local TV stations were predicting on Friday night, it disrupted plenty. It cancelled church services across most of southern Wisconsin today, which left the good people of this Christian state to fend for themselves without spiritual guidance. So many of them undoubtedly picked up the Sunday State Journal, where they were greeted by the headline “Atheists on the case.” It’s a feature about Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-presidents of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, headquartered in Madison. The foundation is suing the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, claiming it’s unconstitutional, and there’s a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court this week to determine if the foundation has standing to sue at all.

Barker’s a former minister whose book Losing Faith in Faith (excerpted, along with some of Barker’s other writings, at the Secular Web), was critically important in my own transformation from religious skeptic to full-on atheist. Gaylor, his wife, is the daughter of Anne Gaylor, who was Wisconsin’s most famous atheist for years, and who used to be spoken of up here with the same mixture of fear and loathing people once used to talk about Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

But here’s the thing—lameass reporter jokes about “a devilish grin” on Gaylor’s face notwithstanding, what’s most notable about Barker and Gaylor is how thoroughly Wisconsin-normal they are. If they walked past you at 3AM on the dark street of a strange neighborhood, they wouldn’t scare you. But perhaps that’s the scariest thing about them, to the religious: They look and sound completely normal, just like their neighbors, just like them—but they reject the entire idea that there’s someone or something in the sky that created us, watches us, expects certain behaviors from us (behaviors we are not always given to know), and will reward or punish us after we die based on those expectations. That’s a form of intellectual liberation that’s just too big a step for lots of people, who’d rather clutch Pascal’s Wager to their bosoms and not think about whether it makes any sense to do so.

It’s interesting that the Barker/Gaylor story would make the front page up here this morning. Just yesterday, I came across one of those stories that makes me glad I’m not under the sway of somebody’s religion. Would you really want to be like the people Ed Brayton wrote about at Dispatches from the Culture Wars yesterday?

The principal and several teachers from a school in Florida, apparently concerned that their kids weren’t prepared for a state assessment test, decided to go classroom to classroom saying a prayer for their students to do better. In the process, they “anointed” all of the desks with oil because, apparently, God is more likely to answer a prayer if it’s marinated in oil (presumably extra virgin oil, given His taste for virgins).

That’s grade-A snark, and Brayton’s further comments inspired a friend of mine to accuse him of being a bit bigoted. I don’t think she’d mind me quoting her:

While I believe the students’ rights were violated by the serial prayer that these folks did, I don’t think in general that prayer does no good. Does the author think that self-confidence and calmness play no role in doing one’s best on a test? If I said a prayer before a test, asking for calmness, focus, a clear mind, and a good memory, that’s not asking for God to give me answers I haven’t learned. It’s just a little centering ritual that could make a few points difference on the test if it helps me be better able to concentrate. One doesn’t even need to believe in a bearded old guy in the sky to pray a prayer like that. It’s not really any different than Luke Skywalker calling on the force.

That’s not what the teachers were doing, though—in fact, it’s almost the opposite. Instead of telling the kids to be calm, self-confident and focused, and to clear their minds so their memories will function in a way permitting them to do their work at their best for their benefit—a fine strategy for much in life, including standardized tests—the teachers asked instead for supernatural intervention, which, by its definition, bends the rules of time, space, and existence to make something happen that wouldn’t happen otherwise, and removes human agency altogether. Not exactly the message I’d want my students to receive—“We didn’t think you could do well on your own, so we greased up your desk because we thought it might help.” They might as well have sacrificed a goat.

Over at Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers (who’s often criticized Ed Brayton for being too accommodating of religion, once calling him “that sad panjandrum of the self-satisfied mean, medium, middle, moderate, and mediocre”), read the same story and went off gonzo-style:

Look, it’s very simple: if you believe that daubing objects with holy bacon drippings and chanting magic words will imbue them with special powers, if you think your imaginary Lord of the Universe will whisper answers to a test in a kid’s ears if his chair has a spot of grease on it, but won’t if it doesn’t, if your job is to teach children and you think one way to give them an understanding of algebra is to beg a ghost to do it for you, you are a disgrace, a confused and deluded kook, and you are screwing up. Get help. Your delusions are affecting your performance and your life.

I doubt my friend would care much for P.Z.’s tone, either.