To the Editors,

I viewed with disgust your segment about atheism, and your horrible panel discussion afterwards. A discussion that seemed to be titled “Why Do Atheists Inspire Such Hatred?” Replace the word “atheists” with “Jews” or “Hispanics” and the insult would hopefully be readily apparant even to your panel members.

If it ever was apparent the discrimination and downright hostility atheists experience due to their mere beliefs, it was in this train-wreck of a segment.

I take extreme exception to Karen Hunter telling atheists to “Shut up.” But unlike her, I believe the proper response to bad speech is more speech, not less. How awful that CNN seems to have also apparantly decided that atheists need to shut up. Why else would they be denied a voice on the panel?

I understand that Richard Dawkins, the most inflamatory public atheist in the world today, has been invited to speak in defense of Americans like me. I think you have chosen him with the hope that he will provoke controversy. Just like you seem to have chosen two of the most strident theists to be on the original panel, you choose an equally polarizing figure on the atheist side now to provide “balance.” To quote John Stewart on Crossfire: “Please stop. You’re hurting America.”

When is the media going to wake up to the notion that Americans don’t want CNN telling us what we are and aren’t? I’m an American. I pay my taxes. I vote my opinions. I do charity work and I raise my family to be good, hardworking honest people, I hope. What I don’t need is a big huge media corporation shouting me down as an individual. Karen Hunter and Debbie Schlussel and Paula Zahn have a bigger megaphone than I’ll ever have.

They have CNN beaming their words worldwide, and they use their enormous power to tell relatively voiceless Americans like me to “shut up.”

Anyone who ever shut up because the media told them to has no right to call themselves American, in my opinion.

Also, the blond on the right made the remark about prayer in school, to the effect of, “well what difference does it make? A child isn’t going to understand…” That’s exactly the point, is it not? There was nothing in that statement of hers that shot down our reasoning for wanting prayer out of schools, it only made our point more clear in many ways.

I wrote a perfectly calm yet strongly worded comment to CNN’s site for Paula Zahn Now in regard to not having any atheist representative present and, as expected, didn’t get a personalized reply in any way. Instead I got a reply thanking me for my “i-reporting on the death of Steve Irwin.” wtf?

“Well-condensed rage” I like it.