RUSH: Here’s Brian in Tampa we head back to the phones. Great to have you, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Well, good afternoon, Mr. Limbaugh.

RUSH: (chuckling)

CALLER: I want to take you on or at least defend Ronald Prescott Reagan. But first I gotta tell you, I’ve been cruising down the Turnpike of Truth — your Turnpike of Truth — ever since September 1988. And that’s why it’s so exhilarating to make air on EIB Network —

RUSH: No, kidding? You’ve been on the Turnpike of Truth since 1988? That makes you a lifer. You’ve been here since the beginning.

CALLER: But I tell you, Rush, it wasn’t as moving as when I stood over your grandfather’s and your parents’ graves there in Cape Girardeau following the total eclipse of the sun. That was an experience.

RUSH: (laughing) Okay. (laughing) Okay.

CALLER: Although it was hard finding one of the cemeteries, but I worked on it. I got lost for a couple hours on a (crosstalk).

RUSH: Wait a minute says up here that you’re an atheist. What are you doing in cemeteries?

CALLER: Hey, I believe in eternity. And, by the way, one of my favorite things to say is, “God bless Rush Limbaugh, because even if the Almighty doesn’t exist, at least we know Limbaugh does.” So Ronald Prescott Reagan, often erroneously referred to as Ronald Reagan Jr., he was, as you know, up there been the middle of the debate sticking up for the — I believe it’s the — Freedom From Religion Foundation. I just want you to know that there’s all kinds of people like myself. I’m not an atheist like he is. I’m an agnostic. To me the difference between agnosticism and atheism, which some people lump together, is as different as Elijah Cummings — the late Elijah Cummings — and the very much alive Rush Limbaugh III. So I’m an agnostic, not an atheist. But I’m telling you (crosstalk).

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Hang on. So people can understand, what’s the difference to you between an atheist and an agnostic?

CALLER: Well, an atheist declares that he knows there’s no God. I don’t know that, and I don’t know that anybody does. Lots of people think they know, but they’re all guessing. (crosstalk)

RUSH: So —

CALLER: We’ll all find out, maybe, if there’s an afterlife, after we die — and if we die without an afterlife, we won’t even have the pleasure of finding out.

RUSH: Well, there is that. Yeah. So an agnostic, you just don’t believe but you can’t say for about. The atheist is committed that there is no God?

CALLER: No! No! No! That’s a misrepresenting about agnosticism at least as Robert Ingersoll, “The Great Agnostic” of the nineteenth century who’s hanging on my wall we’re, by the way, along with Rush Limbaugh and a lot of other broadcasters.

RUSH: (laughing)

CALLER: As Ingersoll described it, “An agnostic believes that the universe is structured in such away such that it is impossible to determine whether or not there’s a God.”

RUSH: I’m a believer, and I agree with that. That’s why there’s faith.

CALLER: All right.

RUSH: That’s why there’s faith. You don’t have any faith; I do.

CALLER: But faith is the opposite, in my book at least — and I bet in your book, too, Rush. Faith is the opposite of reason and reason is what built this civilization and reason (crosstalk).

RUSH: One doesn’t cancel the other out. Just because you have faith does not mean you are not able to reason at the same time. It doesn’t mean you’re abandoning reason just because you have faith.

CALLER: Well, I’ve been reading theology for about 65 years now. Well (crosstalk).

RUSH: You desperately want to believe, then?

CALLER: What’s that?

RUSH: You desperately want to believe?

CALLER: Well, of course we want to believe and we also don’t want to die. I think that’s what fuels the belief in God. That’s my hunch. But I can’t prove that, and that’s a shame. But I’m telling you, again, now, God bless Rush Limbaugh. By the way, if not for Rush Limbaugh I — Rush Hudson Limbaugh I — there would be no, obviously, Rush Limbaugh II or Rush Limbaugh III. Therefore, there would be no President Limbaugh inaugurated on the 20th of January 2029 —

RUSH: Right. (chuckle)

CALLER: — which is gonna be a Monday, by the way, just as August 1, 1988, was.

RUSH: Brian, thank you for the call. That’s classic, folks. That’s classic. His point was… He kind of raced over it, but his point is, “Hey, Rush, I’m an agnostic. I don’t believe in God. I didn’t find anything particularly wrong with Ron Reagan’s little commercial in the Democrat debate, but I listen to you. There’s a lot of people listen to you, Rush, that are agnostic. Some are atheists. You don’t know, Rush, but you got all kinds of people in your audience so you better be careful who you’re critical of.”

That was his friendly, friendly, friendly, point. I’m the first one to tell you that this audience has no boundaries. We have all ages. We have all races, we have all religions, we have all, well, 10 genders, three sexes. No boundaries whatsoever. But since he brought it up, I still think this is classic, folks. Regardless of your belief — and you know, we don’t proselytize here. I have said from the beginning that this is not church, and I do not do sermons, and I do not get into personal religious beliefs here because I don’t want to ever go down the road of criticizing somebody else’s precisely because it is faith.

And I frankly believe faith is a tremendously valuable thing, characteristic. I think faith creates so many positives in people — has the potential to. It’s much better than having none. But some people don’t. It’s their business. We do radio here, not church. That’s why I don’t delve into it and never have. But we do do politics here. I want to set the table again. For those of you who missed it, I can think of no better advertisement, product placement than I saw Wednesday night in the Democrat debate.

Now, who are the modern-day Democrats? Well, they really publicly despise evangelicals. They despise the so-called Religious Right. They despise people like Jerry Falwell, Jerry Falwell Jr., Pat Robertson. They despise the pro-life movement. They hated Phyllis Schlafly. They make no bones about the fact that they think people that believe in God are a bunch of hayseed hicks who have gun racks in the back of pickup trucks, and they show up in the church parking lot on Thursday night to get a good parking spot for the sermon on Sunday.

They think you’ve got no front teeth. You sit around chewing tobacco, playing the banjo on the front porch — even if it rains. They have the most condescending, arrogant view toward religious people. And they’re scared to death of religious people because American leftists and socialists do not like the competition that God provides. In their world, the state is where everyone must turn for everything.

Not church, not God-d, not the Bible. They go as far as they can to mock and impugn and laugh at those people. However, every four years they have to dial that back because they know that even though the number of people in recent polling data who admit to being Christian or religious is declining, there’s still a sizable number of them that they don’t want to offend. When you get near the election, the Democrats dial this stuff back, other than on abortion.

But when they talk about abortion near election time, they don’t talk about it in a religious vein. They talk about “a women’s right to choose.” They talk about, “It’s a health care issue. Pregnancy is an illness. Pregnancy can kill you.” Yes, if the Democrats are in charge of the baby. So given that we have now something called the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and they wanted to run an ad to raise money. So they’re asking themselves, “Where would be the best place to run our ad?”

And they obviously said, “Not on Fox News. We’d offend too many people there.” So they decided the best place to run their ad ripping and criticizing religion and Christianity would be in the middle of the Democrat presidential debate. So I want you to picture it. Here are… Oh. By the way, did you hear the ratings for this debate Wednesday night were in the tank? They dropped almost half their audience from the last Democrat debate.

When ABC did a debate, PMSNBC did a debate, they had 14-15 million people. CNN barely scraped together eight million people for three hours in prime time. It was a dud! In that regard, the product-placement specialists for the Freedom From Religion Foundation kind of made a mistake. But their thinking, you can’t blame ’em. “Okay. We hate religion. They don’t want to raise money from other people that do.

“Where are we likely to find people that hate religion?” And they said, “The Democrat debate!” And they were right. So here you are, you’re watching a Democrat debate and you’re watching these people with their inanities and their impeachment scenarios and all of this, and then Anderson Cooper says, “Well, we must take a brief break here — a brief time-out — to give the candidates a chance to catch up.

“We’ll come back in 30 seconds or a minute,” they go to split screen. On the right side of the screen is the upcoming commercial. On the left side of the screen are the candidates standing at their “podii,” all of them chatting amongst themselves. So point is they are on the screen as this airs on the right side of the screen.

RON P. REAGAN: Hi. I’m Ron Reagan, an unabashed atheist, and I’m alarmed by the intrusions of religion into our secular government. That’s why I’m asking you to support the Freedom From Religion foundation, the nation’s largest and most effective association of atheists and agnostics working to keep state and church separate, just like our Founding Fathers intended. Please support the Freedom From Religion foundation. Ron Reagan, lifelong atheist, not afraid of burning in hell.

RUSH: Ha-ha-ha-ha. Right smack-dab in the middle of the Democrat debate! Ah, it was flawless. It was perfect. It was the highlight of the whole debate for me. And I had to praise the Freedom From Religion Foundation for perfect, perfect product placement decision-making.