Bush's comments were "divisive," they say, and an insult to those who don't believe in religious creeds or a deity.
Am I to presume, then, that Atheists would prefer a President who thinks he is God, then?
I guess so!
Below is the Atheist God Stalin himself with his divisive comrades. So divisive they killed 40 million Orthodox Christian Russians.
A celebration of Joseph Stalin's 50th birthday in the Kremlin, December 21, 1929, with party members Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov, Kuibyshev, Stalin, Kalinin, Kaganovich, and Kirov, as a statue of Lenin looks on.
Atheists, Religion, Castro and Stalin
So by the same logic employed by the Patriarch, should Joseph Stalin, who during the later stages of his communist regime legalized the Moscow Patriarchate –
even though 80% of Russia's churches had been either utterly destroyed, converted to government and public buildings, or closed by the government, while 10's of millions of Orthodox Christians were martyred under the aegis of Comrade Stalin
– also have been a laureate for the "Order of the Knights of St. Andrew"? Or perhaps Bartholomew would even go a step further and argue that Stalin should have been canonized as a saint (after all, unlike Castro, Stalin opened more than a single church;
not to mention the fact that Stalin also trained to become an Orthodox monk in his pre-communist youth).