US fundamentalist neocons say that their religion is a godsend, you can do whatever you want and god - they mean God, the capitalized long-haired, bearded white guy in the sky - will forgive you. You can't beat that with a neon Bible.
"We've really got it great, if you think about it," says one fundie insider. "Everyone automatically buys into the idea that we're chaste, scrupulous, god-loving individuals and all that, but in fact none of it matters, because whatever we do - and as imaginative prudes we come up with some doozies - God will forgive us. Jesus will embrace us as lost sheep, prodigal sons, what have you. It's a long list that we can use over and over again, as I've proven in my own life. My god has taken me back, my savior has taken me back, my wife has taken me back and my favorite pimps have taken me back. As God-fearing individuals we get a lot of chances to redeem our filthy, sinful selves and wash our souls clean until the next time, but that's what the holy scripture - praise the Lord - is all about!"
One still-sweaty example is Rep Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, an ultraconservative whose electoral campaigns have focused on Family Values. The seemingly chaste but actually randy senator now reverently admits - having been outed by his madame and having no choice - that he committed a "very serious sin" X number of times with X number of prostitutes, but the great thing is, he has quickly received forgiveness from a God no one else has heard from in this regard. Nor has the robed deity said anything to Vitter's wife about the matter, or to the media, at least on paper, so we have to take the senator at his devout word, as his wife has been doing all these years.
Other uncertified examples of extreme reverence and Christian humility upon being caught open-flied include the hooker-stalking Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, also promptly and privately forgiven by the Supreme Cloud Being and now restarting his holy efforts on behalf of hefty women everywhere; and the gay-bashing Reverend Ted "Bottom" Haggard, who was outed by his drug-providing gay hooker Top and later privately forgiven by the Big Guy, no questions asked. His whereabouts are currently unknown, but they're religious, to be sure. God hasn't said anything publicly about the matter though, or about anything else, ever. Except what his many secretaries wrote long ago in all those archaic languages, which is subject to broad interpretation yet miraculously true in every syllable, just like the spoken words of any of these devoutly worshipful men. Richard Dawkins is sooo wrong.
