Get Donkey's Rob Humenik ponders whether or not outspoken atheist Michael Newdow is perhaps too extreme for the secular movement, citing a couple articles where Newdow lays out his real agenda: Getting God completely out of the public sphere. Up to and including getting the President to stop mentioning God.

I'm actually not that far from Rob on the subject. I thought that the Pledge was fair game, but a misplacement of priorities that was bound to create a bigger backlash than it had effect. Newdow takes it a few steps further and suggests that God ought to be removed from the debate entirely. It's not an uncommon view among many liberals (including many of my lefty friends) that religion ought to be a 'don't ask don't tell' issue. That is, of course, ludicrous. Religion strikes at the heart of who we are. Sure, sometimes it's used to cynically push unrelated causes, but using the arm of the law to squeeze it out of the public discourse is unrealistic and undesirable.

Rob clarifies a bit in the comments section and he's not quite as anti-anti-faith as I had originally hoped. One poster in the comments section suggested that one cannot be a "fundamentalist atheist" (a great term Rob derived) because atheism isn't a religion. It isn't a church, but it is a religion in that it requires certain beliefs about the world and it's creation. Agnosticism is the only true lack-of-religion. Several years back when I was agnostic I made the comment that Rob's ponderances reminded me of:

The only thing worse than a pushy Christian is a pushy atheist.