Clear and present danger: Christians.

I am making this appeal to New York City, because this is the only place in America where such an appeal can still be made. I just saw Billy Graham's Qualcomm Stadium telecast on ABC, and I believe that there are legitimate grounds for the godless among us to demand equal time according to Section 315 of the 1934 Communications Act.

Non-believers in America are far too polite, which will prove to be their undoing. There is a reason why the life of a typical atheist family resembles the Marshall-Will-and-Holly model from Land of the Lost. They live in caves, only venturing out for food and water, conceding the entire plush territory to T-Rex and the idiotic Sleestack. A guilty conscience prevents them from taking positive steps to change the situation: We're only here by mistake, it was our own fault for rafting down those rapids, this is their world, not ours...

This is a mistake. Land of the Lost was an inaccurate representation of humanity. What would have really happened in that situation is propagation of the species by Marshall, Will and Holly?incest be damned. Within a generation or two, the Sleestack would be wearing striped pajamas and cultivating our fields, while our chief dinosaur problem would be how to get them to mate in captivity. To depict things any other way is to sell human intelligence short.

Which brings us to Billy and Franklin Graham. These fifth-rate shysters, both close personal friends of the president, have spent decades engaged on a relentless quest to turn the United States into the world's revenge on smart people. Not only are they succeeding?have succeeded?but no one is doing anything about it. When the Sleestack herd themselves into football stadiums to organize and engage in elaborate shows of public self-debasement, the rest of us sit around in our houses, chuckle to ourselves and say, "Man, that's scary"?and then go right back to fucking up the Times Thursday crossword.

What we ought to be doing is asserting our Darwinian prerogative: saturate their habitats with lizard repellent, then laugh all the way to the bank as they scatter in all directions, hissing and gasping and bumping brainlessly into walls and each other in a doomed search for safe ground.

In any fight, you must meet force with force. Evangelism is naturally expansive. Atheism is defensive. That is why they are growing, and we're sitting around like idiots watching as pious troglodytes occupy the White House and send us hurtling hundreds of years back in time, to the age of the Crusades.

Regarding the equal-time clause of the Communications Act: The argument could easily be made that Billy and Franklin Graham's telecasts have a definite political content, and that in an election year, the other side deserves an equal response. This goes beyond the fact that Billy Graham was in the White House with George Bush Sr. on the night we launched the first invasion of Iraq. More to the point, Franklin Graham?a key proponent of Bush's faith-based initiative, incidentally?is an honorary chairperson of an extraordinary organization called the Presidential Prayer Team.

This nondenominational Christian organization, which claims over a million members, is dedicated to a "singular purpose: to encourage specific nationwide prayer for the President."

What this means, practically, is that the group calls upon its members to pray not only for the health and well-being of George Bush, but also for his policies. On its amazing website (presidentialprayerteam.org, one of the great sources of unintentional comedy on the planet), the group issues daily prayer requests for its members to follow. Here is a sample from Dec. 11:

Pray for three significant developments in President Bush's efforts to strengthen and restore Iraq:

1. For Secretary of State Powell as he works to involve more NATO and United Nations members in the rebuilding of Iraq.

2. For the development of new businesses and free enterprise in Iraq. As Americans and others begin to invest in businesses there, pray for God's blessing and strength in the economic recovery of that nation.

3. For James Baker as he steps up to serve President Bush by helping restructure the debt in Iraq. Pray for wisdom and cooperation for all his initiatives.

That is some weird-ass Christianity, praying for God to assist James Baker's efforts to restructure Iraq's debt. One wonders how Christians in Russia, whose country is owed $8 billion by our new satellite, will pray on this matter. Additionally, the idea that God should be called upon to help Americans recover their investments in Iraq is a little strange, to say the least. I must have missed that section of the Bible.

The Presidential Prayer Team issues a disclaimer, saying that it is not affiliated with the government and that it would serve "future leaders." But I don't think that it takes a genius to see that it would cease to exist the day, say, Al Sharpton is elected president.

The time has come to put a stop to this sort of thing. And the way to do it is not to shrug off the evangelical lunacy and simply oppose them on the political front. We must attack the religion directly. They are trying to convert us. I think it is high time we start trying to convert them.

Christianity has opposed social and scientific progress virtually every step of the way for the last 2000 years, and I suppose a short portion of the one-hour equal-time broadcast could be devoted to a brief summary of this excellent legacy. Perhaps Industrial Light & Magic could be hired to recreate the fourth century burning of the Library of Alexandria by Christian zealots, with some space given to the doubtless very cinematic torture and execution of the mathematician and librarian Hypatia. The bonfire of original works by Plato and Eratosthenes would be a nice touch there as well. One could move on to scenes of the persecution of Copernicus and Galileo (the latter forced by the Inquisition to renounce his writings, gravity being a quack theory), the banning of surfing and hula by Christian missionaries in Hawaii, the nailing of African ears to poles by missionaries accompanying slave traders (they wouldn't listen otherwise), the reading aloud of the Bible at slave auctions, the widespread opposition of organized religion to women's suffrage?and so on. This section of the show could be given a title like, "There are only so many mulligans."

But that would just be the appetizer. The real show would be devoted to a merciless deconstruction of the Christian myth. I only have 150 words left in this column, so I can't get into that part of it here. But it can be done. It certainly can't be any harder than arguing with a straight face that human thought ended 2000 years ago when a supposedly omnipotent God, in a strategic masterstroke that for two millennia has had decidedly ambiguous results, elected to solve man's problems by sending his half-supernatural son to Earth to be crucified by petty bureaucrats who, if given a toothbrush, probably would have tried to comb their hair with it.

The threat that the Grahams of the world pose isn't merely that they are cynical hucksters who steal money and influence from the spiritually desperate. It's that they preach servility and unworthiness. People who buy into what they preach are unable, as Bertrand Russell put it, to "stare the world frankly in the face." Our country is as stupid as it is because so many of its citizens are afraid to look at it.

We ought to be teaching people to behave like men, not dogs, and I think that deserves equal time.