Hubbard High School and Why We Have a First Amendment

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
-Justice Robert Jackson, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette

The Vindy (h/t ABJ) reports today about an Ohio high school student who was disciplined for not standing and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance:

Roxanne Westover, 17, of Elmwood Drive, had been reprimanded by the school for refusing to stand during the pledge, which is recited each morning. She said it contradicts her beliefs and she elected not to participate.

“I’m an atheist, and I believe the pledge isn’t something toward our nation,” she said. “It’s more like a religious oath, and I believe that if I stand I’m still participating in it.”

Westover said she had been written up and sent to the principal’s office multiple times for her refusal over the course of the past few weeks. The ACLU sent a letter requesting the school to stop requiring students to say the pledge.

In fact the question of compelling students to recite the Pledge was resolved back in 1943 in the Barnette case cited up top. The school is listening to the ACLU and in fact have discovered that school policy says students aren't required to recite.

All of which points up why civil libertarians work so hard to hold a strict line on attempts to introduce anything religious into schools. The pro-school prayer folks wonder ingenuously what could possibly wrong with a voluntary teacher-led prayer. This is what could -- and almost certainly would -- go wrong. Here is a school violating not only a decades-old Supreme Court precedent, but their own school policy. But we are supposed to trust that teacher-lead school prayer would never coerce non- or different believers.

Conservative Christians who pen thumb suckers about being oppressed. In fact they are angry that they can't use the mechanisms of the state to evangelize. That's not oppression. The plaintiffs in the Barnette case were Jehovah's Witnesses. Their children were expelled from school and their homes picketed. In other communities Witnesses were assaulted for their beliefs. That's oppression.

What Roxanne Westover experienced is hardly comparable to some of the outrages Americans past have experienced, but she did suffer real consequences just for believing something different than the majority. Happily we have a First Amendment to protect Roxanne -- and the rest of us.

Rick Warren: His Purpose Is Not to Make Actual Sense

President-elect Barack Obama has ticked off the LGBT community and their friends and allies (yr. blogger included) by offering the symbolically-charged inaguration invocation spot to Pastor Rick Warren of the Saddleback evangelical megachurch. Warren opposes gay marriage and campaigned for Proposition 8, the gay marriage ban in California.

While I disagree with Rev. Warren's position on the issue, I can't be the only one to find the position doubly infuriating because it's so incoherent. In a recently published interview with BeliefNet and the Wall Street Journal Rev. Warren explained -- or tried to -- his views. Below is an excerpt regarding the marriage issue itself. This follows an attempt to discuss civil unions which becomes a big mess and results in Warren submitting a number of "clarifications" after the fact. I'll try to get to the civil unions bit in a later post, but first we need to suss out the initial position.

(plain text is Warren, bold is the questioner and my thoughts are in italics.)

The issue to me, I’m not opposed to that as much as I’m opposed to redefinition of a 5,000 year definition of marriage. I’m opposed to having a brother and sister being together and calling that marriage. I’m opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.


The polygamy bugaboo will be funny no matter how many times gay marriage opponents use it. People like Warren base their opposition on the Bible, then invoke polygamy, ignoring the fact that polygamy was foursquare within the 5000 year old definition of marriage up to and through the biblical era.


Do you think those are equivalent to gays getting married?

Oh , I do.


This hurts the worst. Later he talks about having gay friends and eating at their homes. The homes of people whose relationships he equates with incest and pedophilia, apparently.

For 5,000 years, marriage has been defined by every single culture and every single religion – this is not a Christian issue. Buddhist, Muslims, Jews – historically, marriage is a man and a woman.


Well, a man and as many women as he can afford.

Oh, another thing. Warren et al. rhetorically claim (or at least imply) that the definition of marriage has remained static for all those 5000 years. In addition to the above, marriage has at various times been defined as between people of the same race, as between a man and whoever his parents arranged for him, and between a man and the woman he was deemed to own. All of those definitions have been changed and the world failed to spin off its axis.

And the reason I supported Proposition 8, is really a free speech issue. Because first the court overrode the will of the people, but second there were all kinds of threats that if that did not pass then any pastor could be considered doing hate speech if he shared his views that he didn’t think homosexuality was the most natural way for relationships, and that would be hate speech. We should have freedom of speech, ok? And you should be able to have freedom of speech to make your position and I should be able to have freedom of speech to make my position,


At this point Warren is either being dishonest or obtuse. Nothing in the California Supreme Court's decision repealed the First Amendment. Put another way, the U.S. Supreme Court held that anti-miscegenation laws violate the Constitution. People can still legally speak out against interracial marriage. They aren't arrested for it, they just are considered douchebags.

This argument was a staple of the Prop 8 folks and made it difficult to respect their position as simply a difference of opinion. It was a lie then and remains a lie today.


and can’t we do this in a civil way.


The lying and comparing political adversaries to the worst people in the world way.

I Believe this License Plate is Unconstitutional

. . .though I don't believe the suit against it will ultimately be successful.

This blog has reported earlier about efforts in Florida to create a Christian-themed specialty license plate. South Carolina has begun production and, as of this week, been ordered to stop. Americans United, who brought the suit, has been crowing about a preliminary injunction handed down this week.

Just to be clear about this, a preliminary injunction does give an indication that the judge is leaning toward the party who secures it, but it isn't a complete win, even at the trial court level. It is what it say -- preliminary. Under the right circumstances a judge will make one party or the other stop what they are doing to preserve the status quo pending the ultimate decision. While one part of the calculus is a judgment that the moving party is likely to succeed on the merits, it's entirely possible to obtain a preliminary injunction, then ultimately lose.

To say nothing of the appeal. The Fourth Circuit runs shoulder to shoulder with DC in the race for the most conservative appellate panel. And at some point the Supremes will weigh in as well and the current Court is not friendly to Establishment Clause claims.

In the opinion granting the injunction, the trial court notes:

As the Supreme Court has further explained, "Government may not promote or affiliate itself with any religious doctrine or organization." [quoting County of Allegheny v. ACLU].

Allegheny County is a 1989 case regarding a government-sponsored Christmas and Chanuka display. Of the five member majority, only one -- Justice John Paul Stevens -- still sits on the Court. On the other hand, Justice Anthony Kennedy now the swing justice authored a dissenting opinion which offers his views at the time regarding government-sponsored religious speech. Kennedy rejects the argument that government religious endorsement is unconstitutional if it conveys the message to non-believers that the are not part of the political culture. Instead, he argues that Establishment Clause cases turn on whether the government conduct is in some way coercive to non-believers.

A lot has happened to Kennedy's jurisprudence since 1989s- he is the one conservative justice who has drifted toward the center. So it remains to be seen whether that is still his view and whether he will forego that view given that the majority decided differently. Personally I'm not confident that he will.

And so what's the harm, you ask? If the standard is actual coercion, shouldn't that offer enough protection to reprobates and heretics like yr humble blogger and his friends. Well, a couple of things. First off, make no mistake -- making nonbelievers feel as if they are outside the American community isn't a side effect of efforts like the SC license plate, it's a goal. And a constant drumbeat of messages that certain people are not "real" Americans pushes closer and closer to the level of coercion.

In other words, the line between government conveying the message that nonbelievers are truly part of the community and "coercion" is far more difficult to draw that Justice Kennedy seems to believe.

Preachers Pulpits and the Proper Separation

The hard right Christian exceptionalists at the Alliance Defense Fund are on one of their favorite crusades again -- challenging restrictions on political activity by churches. This time they are advising pastors to defy the restriction and preach political endorsements from the pulpit on September 28, and offering to defend anyone brought up on violation of IRS violations.

Not to be outdone in the Dubious Tactics category, an Ohio UCC minister has filed a complaint against the effort alleging that . . . um, they are trying get complaints filed against them. According to a WKSU story (which hopefully will be posted sometime) they are also planning a Sunday of celebrating separation of church and state.

I'm big on church/state separation, but that's not what this is about. Separating church isn't the same as separating religion and politics, which is probaly impossible. The IRS regulations are about separating partisan politics and charity. All nonprofit organizations -- not just churches -- are prohibited from engaging in electoral politics. In other words, the taxpayers don't underwrite political campaigning. What the Alliance wants is an exception for churches and churches only.

This sort of exceptionalism is the norm for groups like ADF, which is ironic. Their rap on opposing gay rights is that they are "special" or "exceptional" rights. The right to keep one's job irrespective of sexual orientation is exceptional. But the use of state resources to "celebrate" the country's Christian heritage (but no other) is simply curtailing discrimination against Christians.

It's so . . . special.

A Shooting in Tennessee

The shooting at a Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville, Tennessee has affected all of us -- myself to the point of groping for words. I've spent hours shifting from updates in the Knoxville papers to blog posts to my own blank posting screen.

It's too early to try to make sense of What All This Means. Right now we're grieving. We are grieving the loss of the two members who died in a twisted soul's feeble attempt at a blaze of glory.

And we grieve the loss of the illusion of safety. Jim Adkisson's actions don't make my church any less safe than it was two days ago. But there is a difference between appreciating intellectually that terrible things can happen without warning versus a visceral knowledge based on a real live terrible thing.

As UUs we believe ours is a chosen faith. That is, we attend church not because God commands us to but because we choose to seek out God. That choice takes on a special resonance with the knowledge that two of our fellow members lost their lives as a result of it.

Happily, others have found the words that elude me. A round-up. The Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations quickly built a site for expressions of support using the Blogger platform. Also, Sara at Orcinus wrote beautiful piece on the strength of liberal religion. Street Prophets has a good post up including thoughts based on other Orcinus posts about eliminationist rhetoric in conservative thought. Other UU bloggers weighing in include Philocrites who has been following the story piece by piece, ChaliceBlog and Yet Another UU.

Sermonizing

For real, yesterday. I led worship at church and delivered a sermon on church and state plus a bit on the state of our church. I posted it on the seldom-updated, rarely read church blog. It includes much of my take on church/state and may be something I refer to from time to time on the topic.

New Nanosite Takes on Dobson's Take on Obama

Yesterday Dr. James Dobson, one of the most influential evangelical opinion makers, dusted off a 2006 Obama speech about faith in the public sphere and trashed it. Today God-o-Meter notes that a nanosite (remember them?) is up: James Dobson Doesn't Speak for Me.

Named as an organizer is one Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, pastor of a Houston megachurch. While Rev. Kirbyjon has been on the O Train from early in the cycle, he is also a friend of W. Bush. So the Reverend is probably left of center politically, but not someone likely to be painted as another Jeremiah Wright.

The site features a good side-by-side of Dobson's remarks and what Obama actually said. As of now if a transcript of Dobson's rant is available it's hard to locate, meaning you have to listen to all 18 minutes of it which, no thanks. But based on the JDDSFM website, it looks like most of what Dobson objects to and calls undemocratic or inimical to his freedoms is a wild misreading of what Obama was saying. Check for yourself.

McCain Says "Hold the Parsley."

Yesterday McCain sought out the unendorsement of two fundamentalist clerics whose endorsement he had earlier sought: Pastor John Hagee of Texas and Ohio's own Rod Parsley.

ProgOhio notes that the statements from Parsley's church about his history of anti-Muslim statements were -- wait for it -- taken out of context, and that this is a big honkin' lie. Here's what World Harvest Church said:

The church also said Parsley's comments were "in response to militant Islamic leaders" and not intended to single out the "vast majority of peaceful Muslims."

Hmm. Let's review. Anastasia Pantios wrote up Parsley's anti-Muslim rants in his book and I posted based on one of his televised sermons. In other words, this is all stuff out in the public domain.

Parsley, for example, says that Mohammed received the Qu'ran not from Allah, but from a demon who deceived him. (Was that the Qu'ran that only militant Islamic leaders use as opposed to the apparently separate Qu'ran of the vast majority of peaceful Muslims?) He also says that because Islam is a works-based religion as opposed to a grace-based religion, it inexorably leads some followers to violence in the name of the faith. He ultimately exhorts Christians to convert Muslims to Christianity as the only way to win the war on terror. (Hmm. Converting Muslims. Has anyone tried that before?)

This is all par for Parsley's course. In the confines of his congregation he makes outrageous, intolerant statements that seam likely to lead down some horror-filled roads. When called to account, he cleans it up for public consumption and, despite the extensive public record, the press goes along for the ride.

Ohio as a Bellwether on Religion and Poitics?

A Blogging Faith post leads to this article in Religious Dispatches by one Robert Jones -- among other things a Center for Amercan Progress guy. Jones' piece heavily overclaims whatever shift in faith and voting may have happened in Ohio. The story starts contrasting the "fortunes" of We Believe Ohio on the left and Bruce Johnson on the right. From there the author notes the result of the 2006 gubernatorial election, then draws broader points about the supposed crack up of the religious right and ascendancy of religious progressives. Here's a sample:

In the meantime, Ohio Christians clearly voiced their preference for a candidate that shared all their values rather than a candidate running on a narrow divisive platform of opposing abortion and same-sex marriage. Blackwell was handily defeated by Ted Strickland, a Methodist minister who stumped as a “Golden Rule Democrat” and who, as a senator, insisted on paying for his own health coverage as long as his constituents were not covered. According to the 2006 NEP exit polls, Strickland gained fourteen points among voters who attended religious services once per week or more, compared to support these voters gave Senator John Kerry in 2004. And voters, including a majority (fifty-one percent) of weekly church attenders, overwhelmingly supported a long-overdue ballot measure to increase the minimum wage.

*sigh*

If this is our evidence that the tide has turned, I'm not moving down the beach just yet. Of course we can start with the elementary mistake -- Strickland was a Representative, not a Congressman.

More broadly, We Believe has a long way to go before it is anything more than liberal clergy talking to each other. They currently aren't a convenient bus ride from the stadium Rod Parsley et al play in.

And of course, one cycle does not a trend make. I'd love to believe that we just need to keep doing what we are doing and we never have to worry about intolerant ranters like Parsley again.
While not his intention, Jones in fact shows now much work we have to do.

The Mount Vernon Church-State Case Takes a Bizarre Turn

The controversy in Mount Vernon, Ohio over a public school teacher who refuses to remove a Bible from his desk is a close case.¹ This is not (from the Dispatch):

The Mount Vernon public-school science teacher who won't remove his personal Bible from the top of his desk also is accused of conducting a religious “healing session” during school and burning crosses onto students' arms.

* * *


An independent investigator will be hired to look into claims involving Freshwater, an eighth-grade teacher at Mount Vernon Middle School, the school board decided today. An administrator will monitor his classes until the probe ends.

The “healing” allegedly occurred when Freshwater was a chaperone for a Christian student-athlete group that met during school hours. A guest speaker visiting the group in January had an illness, and Freshwater called for his healing.

“He said out loud, ‘Satan be removed from this man,'” said Jessica Philemond, an attorney representing a Mount Vernon Middle School student who witnessed the event.

The same boy also was among several students branded during a science class in which Freshwater asked for volunteers who wanted to see how an electrical device in his classroom worked.

“He (the boy) didn't know it would be a cross and he didn't know it was going to hurt,” Philemond said.

Needless to say, these are just allegations and we are at the beginning of an investigation. If it pans out, hopefully the activists who screech about "persecution" of American Christians will move on to a more worthy martyr.

¹Which is to say that it's close in terms of what result we civil libertarians would arrive at in balancing the teacher's free speech rights against Establishment Clause concerns. It might even be a close case to Justice Kennedy who has declared that the key question is whether government religious speech is coercive or not. Given that Kennedy's standard leads to some troubling results, it wouldn't be a bad thing if this close case was not an opportunity for Kennedy to make his view the standard.

Expelled Update: More PZ Myers, More Sub Rosa Spin and a Promise

First off, thanks to the commenter who linked to my first Expelled post, and welcome FDLers. It's my intention to continue monitoring the story on the science blogs and offer a conduit between that blogosphere and the Ohio left.

The big development this week was a PZ Myers' questionable participation in a conference call presser the Expelled producers put on to let journos talk to Ben Stein. Because of course, the person journalists should speak to about evolutionary science is a finance expert with a droll speaking

The good part of the story is 1) we know the main thrust of both the movie and the PR campaign -- that Darwin is responsible for the Holocaust, and 2) that Myers offered the journos an opposing view and a source when odds are they would have simply stenographed the story.

The bad part of the story is Myers learning how to unmute his phone and interrupting the call.
The ethics of all this have been a hot topic on the Panda's Thumb thread. The ethical arguments are essentially in equipoise. Certainly what Dr. Myers did was not nice, but it doesn't somehow make up for the problem on the other side that they are pretty much making up the case that Darwin is responsible for Nazi horrors.

(There's a broader question about whether one can be an activist atheist without simultaneous being an obnoxious dick. It seems too often one goes with the other, though Village Green has partially restored my faith in the faithless. Still, it's not always easy finding oneself on the same side with the Myers/Dawkins/Hitchens axis.)

Back to Expelled and the Nazi argument. Much of the scientific argument against the film's premises is beyond the knowledge of this blogger. The arguments about the interaction of science and policy, that's social science, an area where your blogger finds himself on somewhat firmer ground. As noted in my previous post, the film draws battle lines. While it postures itself as an argument for intellectual freedom, it is in fact a broadside by religion against science. Consider for example this quote from auteur Stein, courtesy of Stranger Fruit:

I believe God created the heavens and the earth, and it doesn’t scare me when scientists say that can’t be proved. I couldn’t give a [profanity] whether a person calls himself a scientist. Science has covered itself with glory, morally, in my time. Scientists were the people in Germany telling Hitler that it was a good idea to kill all the Jews. Scientists told Stalin it was a good idea to wipe out the middle-class peasants. Scientists told Mao Tse-Tung it was fine to kill 50,000,000 people in order to further the revolution.

At times, the IDers behind and in front of this film will argue that they aren't against science, they are only for equal time. Imagine if they really believe the above. They certainly wouldn't be for equal time. They would be working feverishly to purge that evil science from the American landscape. And it appears they are.

In the meantime, I'll be working on the historical arguments against Stein & Co.'s thesis. Remember that the movie erupts into the mainstream on April 18. You can find out where on their theater locator page.

Rev. Tracy Lind Not Nominated to Be Bishop

The Rev. Tracy Lind, Dean of Cleveland's Trinity Cathedral, was in the running to be elected the second openly gay bishop in the American Episcopal Church. Today the Chicago diocese selected another of the eight candidates after two rounds of voting. Rev. Lind finished fourth on both of the ballots.

The Episcopal Church has been struggling to resolve the controversy between liberal and conservative factions over gay clergy. As a result, Rev. Lind's candidacy has received national media attention. Had she been voted in by the Chicago Diocese, she would have had to pass additional hurdles and her candidacy certainly would have heightened the controversies in the church.

The Evangelical Crack-up and It's Discontents.

Every day the Faith in Public Life newsletter carries at least one story about ideological strains within the Christian Right. So it seemed inevitable that 1) some organ of record would run a story declaring evangelical schism a fait accompli and 2) a spate of "Not so fast there" stories would appear. "The Evangelical Crackup" appeared in this Sunday's NYT Mag and now the push-back stories are going up.

Sarah Posner, who writes extensively on the Christian Right gives five reasons why liberals shouldn't be celebrating just yet. To be fair to David Kirkpatrick, author of the NYT piece, he sounds that note just at the end. As Posner notes (and I should mention we were casual friends in law school), the infrastructure of the Christian Right is extensive and its base is easily mobilized.

The larger question is how well the Christian Right is able to influence the mainstream. For instance, the latest Pew poll shows that "God gap" -- the tendency of more religious people to support Republican candidates -- is narrowing among evangelicals and disappearing among mainline Christians.

The bellwether for the evangelical right will be a Hillary Clinton candidacy. The received wisdom is that, thanks the Right caricaturing her as a dangerous ultra-liberal, the evangelical vote will mobilize against her, regardless of who the Republicans nominate. If that happens, the movement may or may not have staying power. If evangelicals cannot keep Hillary out of the White House, we can safely say the movement has waned.

Finally Posting on my Church Blog

Do you want to know what I think about my church's advertising campaign? Did you know my church even had an advertising campaign? I've been threatening to start writing on my church's blog and now I've finally gotten to it.

BTW, the ads are running in Time. As a result, I discovered it is damnably difficult to find a newsstand copy of Time in this town. I tried grocery stores, drug stores, nada. I finally had to go to Borders. I'd like to think it's all about people getting it on the web, but I fear it's more about a Britney crowd-out effect.

The Boring Made Dull Goes Global

I was just driving and listening to the BBC's World Have Your Say on WCPN. The subject was the recent suggestion by Bishop Martinus Muskens in The Netherlands that everyone start referring to God as "Allah." As the show is wont to do, they quoted blog reaction on the topic at hand. First up was from Akron's own The Boring Made Dull quoting the following passage of this post:

I wasn't aware that we got to name God; He names himself.

. . . the name of God carries a theological position. Allah isn’t the God worshipped by Christians or Jews. This is a distinction that every Muslim understands – Why can’t a Catholic Bishop get it?

When I read it last night I thought it was a nice turn of phrase. I also think it's incorrect -- the God of Islam is called Allah in Arabic and is the same God (or concept of God if you prefer to think in those terms.) The fundamental cleavage between Islam and everyone else isn't "There is no God but Allah," it's in ". . .and Mohammed is His prophet." Therein lies the rub with the good Bishop's kumbayaa by branding plan. So Boring and I take equally dim views of the idea, but from somewhat different angles.

But I digress. I thought it was a nice turn of phrase and distilled the conservative Christian viewpoint down to a compact couple of sentences. The thing Boring excels at and that frankly keeps the blog from living down to its name. Hearing the words of a local blogger and friendly adversary quoted on an international news program underscores the "Worldwide" in Worldwide Web.

By the way, World Have Your Say maintains a program blog and Boring's words appear on the post regarding today's show, but with no link. Bad form in any language. I exhort Ohio bloggers of all stripes to dish the link love liberally.

Krauss and Dawkins Discuss Science and Religion

The July issue of Scientific American runs a dialog between Oxford biologist and uber-Atheist Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss from Cleveland's Case Western about how science should respond to religion. The online edition has an extended version of the conversation. Given the two scientists' contrasting temperaments, the conversation is surprisingly low-key.

On the other hand, it is unsurprisingly frustrating. Dawkin's response to the question -- how science should respond to religion -- is to call religion "bad science" and argue against it at every turn as he would any other bad science. Dawkins' method of persuasion consiste of reminding people he is smarter than they are and calling those who disagree with him ignorant. While his argument is popular among fellow nonbelievers, he has unsurprisingly failed to inspire mass exodus from houses of worship.

Krauss's approach is better, though it would hard to get much worse. Krauss is more an evangelist for science than against religion. He will argue against religious beliefs that conflict with scientific evidence but not against faith itself. And when he does argue against such beliefs he tries to do so in a less-dickish way than Dawkins.

While I liked Krauss's passages much better than Dawkins's I have two quarrels. First, Krauss unfortunately describes his method of persuasion as "seduction," which he should stop doing pretty much now unless it is his ambition to be quoted in every Answers in Genesis fundraising letter for the next ten years.

More fundamentally, Krauss's approach at best might get people interested in studying science. What he does not offer is an effective strategy for persuading people to find constructive means of resolving disagreements between religion and science.

Just as the press "doesn't get religion," neither do an awful lot of scientists. However much contemporary theologians put a rational gloss on faith or however much outfits like the Discovery Institute try to put build an empirical case for God, fact is religion is a non-rational enterprise. I don't try to justify my faith with much more than the belief at the core of my being that God exists. Whatever people do to rationalize spiritual beliefs, I suspect most if not all start in a similarly nonrational place.

Krauss acknowledges this:

As long as the tenets of faith go beyond reason, i.e. go beyond issues that can be settled by evidence or lack of evidence, faith lies in the realm of human activity that has little to do with reason. Going back to my earlier point, if this realm was restricted to religion alone one might have a good argument for trying to squelch religion. But, like it or not, it is a central facet of much of what it means to be a human. All of us share some characteristics with Lewis Carroll’s Queen, who believed six impossible things before breakfast each day. For most people religion is one way of making sense of an irrational world, a world that is not fair, in which human justice is an afterthought.

Which is fine as far as it goes, but Krauss doesn't come to grips with the implications for his project. If believers in scientific method want to win converts, they need to begin by acknowledging that people of faith need their faith. To evangelize or seduce or, hell, persuade people to respect scientific rationalism, they need to work help people reconcile that rationalism with their faith rather than force them into a choice between the two.

As for Dawkins, he will have no truck with the non-rational side of human nature. At first blush, one might ascribe this to the hyper-rational Vulcan like personality Dawkins tries to cultivate. But in fact, when he moves from arguing for scientifc fact to arguing that religion is evil, Dawkins begins to sound as emotional and post-rational as Rod Parsley.

Personally, I've journeyed from Christian to atheist to theistic Unitarian and at every step of the way, I've had a strong emotional reaction to people with different beliefs. I don't know why this is so, but suspect that it drives much of the vitriol the current crop of atheist writers have toward religion. In any event, with over ninety percent of Americans professing a belief in God, Dawkins is unlikely to make much headway simply by telling such an overwhelming bulk of the population that they are deluded.