Todd Beamer said, "God help me. Jesus help me. Are you ready? Let's roll." But the deified 1st century carpenter
and Galilean lay preacher apparently wasn't available for the call. Doubtless the radical Islamist with his hands on
the control yoke was simultaneously calling on Allah and Mohammed.

Todd Beamer,his fellow passengers, and the hijackers themselves died needlessly because of the ancient superstitions
that convinced a handful of deluded men to exchange their humanity for the falsehoods of religion. And in the aftermath, religionists are all seeing confirmation of their superstition as the one true faith.

In the case of the 9/11 attack, if you are a person that is looking to compare the power of the team of Jesus and
Jehovah, versus Mohammed and Allah, then judging by the results of the hijackings, the score goes to the Allah
team 4-Zip. Or, if you prefer to see Flight 93 as a victory for Jesus in that it simply went down in a field killing a
plane full of innocent people, instead of striking an evacuated White House and killing a plane full of innocent people,
you might credit Jesus with getting struck out in three at bats, then thrown out at first base on his fourth attempt.

Christians are crowing believing one of their own, Todd Beamer, has demonstrated the power of their God by
dying bravely. Radical Islamists are crowing believing 20 or so of their own died bravely. Whichever cult gets
the most credit, whichever version of god gets the best PR out of this travesty, everyone still died and humanity
is far from better for it.

Given a choice between hand-to-hand combat with a box-cutter wielding hijacker for a slim chance at life, and the
alternative choice of certain death crashing into a building, the choice seems a pragmatic one to me and obviously
was to some of the passengers. Those who are believed to have made this choice would doubtless have been
formidable opponents if they'd had room to fight in a level flying plane. There certainly could have been others,
but among those believed to have made the attempt at re-taking the plane were some genuine tough guys:

Mark Bingham
31, 6-foot-5, Bingham was a former rugby star at the University of California at Berkeley. He ran with the bulls
in Pamplona, Spain, just the summer before, and he had once wrestled a gun away from a mugger.

Todd Beamer
The Chritian's hero in this tragedy, was a basketball and baseball player in college and a take-charge guy,
who said he thought he and the others could "jump the terrorist with the bomb."

Jeremy Glick
An all-state wrestler from N.J., and a judo champion. His friend insisted to reporters
"Those attackers are pretty f----d, sorry, because they ran into the toughest son of a bitch I've ever known ..."

Tom Burnett:
Burnett told his wife, Deena, that he and two other passengers were "determined to do something" to take
Flight 93 back..."He came up through the football camps. His football coach said, "He started in the camps
in the third grade and never missed a summer. We had some great quarterbacks (at Jefferson) who were
highly talented. None were as self-made as Tom Burnett."

Lou Nacke:
42, a 5-foot-9, 200-pound executive who wore a "Superman" tattoo on his left shoulder,
believed to have been involved in the plan, according to Robert Weisberg, Nacke's father-in-law.

Donald F. Greene:
Trained pilot, 52, executive vice president of Connecticut-based Safe Flight Instrument Corp.

Todd Beamer's,"Let's roll" as he dropped his cell phone at the end of a last call to his wife, was the stuff of Hollywood,
and has just proved too good a phrase for the politicos to lay off, and the incidental fact that he was a Christian and
Wheaton College grad was just too good a tidbit for American Evangelicals not to use as a PR opportunity for Jesus:
thus an evangelical legend was born.

One evangelical spammer circulated the following which hit my mail box:

"The whole world knows how brave Beamer and his fellow passengers were on September 11th. But this week we learned more fully what buttressed that bravery: Faith in Jesus Christ. Todd died as he lived . a faithful evangelical believer."

Of course this particular piece of religious propaganda didn't mention Mark Bingham by name. As previously mentioned, Bingham, 31, 6-foot-5, was a former rugby star at the University of California at Berkeley, and had the cojones to run
with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, just that summer, and had once taken on and disarmed a gun-wielding mugger.
Mark Bingham certainly fits the hero role at least as well as any Bible college grad, but it's widely been reported
in newsgroups that Mark was gay - so, no stirring tributes to his bravery from the commander-in-chief and
one time absentee Air Guard pilot, Mr. Bush, and no mention of him in the evangelical e-spam I received.

Now imagine the Dorian Society or some gay affiliated group sending out e-spam avowing that Mark's bravery flowed
from his homosexuality, and from the courage he had developed navigating a world of homophobic evangelical Christians
that believed he should burn in hell for his sexual orientation. Indeed, as a gay American man, Mark would have likely had
more first hand experience coping with hate-driven religious radicals than any other American on the plane. Christians
of course visualize Todd Beamer leading the charge to the cockpit, and perhaps he did. I don't in any way discount his
bravery and courage. But I personally have never known a rugby player that wasn't first man in on a good donnybrook,
so I choose to believe Mark led the assault, and I hope he had the chance to open up a big can of rugger style
whoopass on at least one terrorist before the plane struck the dirt.

A Newsweek article revealed that Todd Beamer more than once, "cried out for his Savior." I think we can safely
assume the hijackers were howling a hearty "Allah Wakbar!" as they drove the jet into the ground. They all died
regardless, which always seems to me a good basis for assuming that, if there is a God, which I don't assume,
God's staying out of human affairs.

One Christian spammer wrote:

"As Christians, we know that God can bring good out of evil. In Todd Beamer, the world witnesses a faith
that held up in the extremity of fear. A faith that is even now comforting his widow and two young sons."

This kind of cliche response always makes me wonder why the Christian never asks why their God, who has power
enough to bring good out of evil, seems powerless to bring out good and prevent evil in the first place? My own
experience of theists is that their faith doesn't have to hold up in the face of impending doom. They are screaming
"Save me Jesus" because they don't want to die any more than a non-theist. This is an indication of panic and a
futile search for rescue, like Beamer's, that never seems to come. This is hardly a commendation of Christianity.

All this reminds of the new Mel Gibson movie, "Signs." The main character in the movie starts out an Episcopal priest
but decides there is no god when his wife is killed in a horrible car accident. Then space aleins invade the earth killing
and carrying off tens of thousands, but the fallen priest's son survives an alein's poison gas attack because his lungs
are closed from asthma, and the priest decides this is proof there is a God ater all, and re-dons his white collar,
never pondering that tens of thousands being carried off and killed around the globe also happened on God's watch.

The Christian spammer goes on to say:

"As Flight 93 hurtled towards destruction, Todd Beamer could not have known that his quiet prayers
would ultimately be heard by millions .."

Seems Jesus wasn't one of the millions listening.

My point in writing this is remind everyone that religion was at the root of this disaster that cost so many innocent lives.
Men who believed they had the inside scoop on the creator's will took their duty to their superstition and their god no
one has ever seen more seriously than their duty to show compassion to the human beings they can see. That any
religionist should aggrandize their delusions and use this horror to propagandize for their brand of religious foolishness
is nauseating to me. And it won't do to blame Islam. Not when we can look back through 2000 years of Christian
atrocities and crimes (largely against fellow Christians)that match and exceed this event. The problem here is that
when anyone thinks they have the approval and word of The Almighty then no one is safe. The solution isn't a
matter of picking the right blood-soaked deity. The solution is to throw them all into the dust bin of our barbaric
past where they belong.