Vote early! Vote often!

The good, if Godless, folks over at New Humanist magazine have opened the polls in their annual Bad Faith Awards. This year's competition sees the following nominees:

• Chuck Norris: These days the martial arts legend seems to spend less time cracking skulls and more time lamenting the moral decline of Western civilisation. His weekly column on conservative Christian website WorldNetDaily is a goldmine of evangelical rantings, and his Bad Faith nomination comes by way of his declaration that if he was US President he would "tattoo an American flag with the words 'In God we trust' on the forehead of every atheist".
• The Bishop of Carlisle: This Cumbrian prelate shot to fame when he suggested this summer's floods were God's punishment for Britain's liberal attitude to homosexuality.
• Dr Joyce Pratt: Appropriately named doctor who recommended an exorcism to a woman complaining of stomach pains.
• Richard Dawkins: One heretic New Humanist reader even put forward rationalism's very own Dawkins, for turning "the 19th century's doubting of religious dogma into another kind of dogma". The cheek...
• Cardinal Keith O'Brien: Scottish cardinal who tastefully compared the abortion rate in Scotland to "two Dunblane massacres a day".
• Westboro Baptist Church: That delightful bunch who picket the funerals of US soldiers killed in Iraq, displaying such tactful signs as "God hates fags" and "God blew up the troops".
• Archbishop Francisco Chimoio: Head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique who claims some European-made condoms are deliberately infected with HIV in order to quickly finish off the African people.
• Dinesh D'Souza: Conservative author who said the following about the Virginia Tech massacre: "Notice something interesting about the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings? Atheists are nowhere to be found".
• General Sir Richard Dannatt: Chief of the General Staff, and self professed evangelical, who said: "In my business, asking people to risk their lives is part of the job, but doing so without giving them the chance to understand that there is a life after death is something of a betrayal".
• Pope Benedict XVI: Clearly the bookies' favourite. Perhaps he should be excluded to give the rest a chance?

The polls are open until 16 December. I shan't tell you who I voted for but it might help you guess if you knew that I really don't want the Stars and Stripes tattooed on my forehead!