Celebrating my blog's new tag line

Until a few moments ago, the tag line on my blog masthead was "A Journal of Dissent." As I told my friend Keith this morning:

"A Journal of Dissent" doesn't satisfy me, but I haven't figured out a better tag yet. You seemed to take "dissent" as political, but that's not what I had in mind. Not exclusively, anyway. My posts on Mitt Romney, for example, were of course political in that he's running for political office. But I intended my comments to be more on religion than on politics, on how in America people seem to assume that you have to be religious. Romney's rhetoric, for example, simply doesn't recognize non-religion (or nontheism, as the Freedom From Religion Foundation puts it) as being acceptable here; he even implies that people without faith in god aren't legitimate U.S. citizens. I'm particularly disgusted at the way he and others distort the views of the freethinkers among our founding fathers and co-opt them for partisan purposes.

I'm also unhappy with "dissent" because it is negative rather than affirmative....

Well, as usual, merely setting myself a problem (in words) quickly led to a solution (while I was outside clearing some drains). Hence the new tag line:

Celebrating our constitutional freedom from religion (while we still have it¹)

My text, of course, is the First Amendment of the United States Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Let's celebrate!
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1. Several hours later: Rather than "while we still have it," my original parenthetical was for a few hours "and other popular delusions." While I savored its ambiguity (is religion the delusion, or the assumption that we are constitutionally free from it?), two things bothered me. First, I don't think the First Amendment can be interpreted to guarantee freedom from delusions generally, however extraordinary they are or how mad they make crowds². Second, and more important, a lot of my friends and relatives are religious. I offend some of them enough already without implying in my masthead that religion is a delusion.
2. In 1841, Charles Mackay published a book titled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

At the suggestion of a friend, I have also changed my profile photo.