http://www.townhall.com/columnists/column.aspx?UrlTitle=religion,_madness_and_secular_paranoia&ns=MichaelMedved&dt=10/04/2006&page=2

Religion, madness and secular paranoia
By Michael Medved
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
nts

Why would a major corporation invest big money in a gratuitous insult
of millions of potential customers who, according to the company's
own figures, represent a clear majority of the American public?

That's the obvious question raised by a splashy full-page ad in the
Sunday New York Times that appeared on September 24th under the
attention-grabbing headline:

"RELIGION=MADNESS?"

Along with a vaguely familiar but unmistakably menacing image of a
looming, slightly askew church steeple, the layout asked: "Ready to
challenge religious dogma? Read LETTER TO A CHRISTIAN NATION by Sam
Harris...The courageous new book that arms all rational Americans with
powerful arguments against their opponents on the Christian right."

At the bottom of the page, the ad features a series of statistics
clearly meant to alert the reader to a growing peril and to force all
"rational Americans" to protect themselves by buying the new book.
"DID YOU KNOW," the text explains, "44% of Americans think Christ
will return in the next 50 years....73% of Americans believe in the
existence of Hell * More than 50% of Americans have a "negative" or
"highly negative" view of people who don't believe in God * 70%
think it important for presidential candidates to be 'strongly
religious.'"

This hugely expensive book promotion (such a prominently placed full
page in the New York Times often costs more than $100,000) goes out of
its way to assault and insult people of faith, drawing a clear dividing
line between the "rational Americans" it hopes to reach and the
benighted masses who believe in God, the importance of religious
belief, or even the existence of hell. You might expect this sort of
partisan, opinionated declaration of non-faith from some activist group
like "Move On.org" or "People for the American Way" or even the
American Civil Liberties Union. But the ad came from Alfred A. Knopf,
one of the world's most distinguished publishing imprints and a
prominent segment of the mighty Random House empire, which also
releases the work of prominent conservatives including (through its
Crown Forum division) Ann Coulter, Fred Barnes and me.

Of course, one could explain their full page ad equating religion with
madness as a smart, hard-headed business decision, cunningly designed
to connect a new book with its atheistically-inclined audience and
"Letter to a Christian Nation" is, indeed, riding high on national
bestseller lists. Nevertheless, the uncompromising language employed in
the text expresses such obvious contempt for religious believers as to
suggest a deep-seated distaste and resentment that go well beyond
commercial calculation. For instance, in advertising the explosive Ann
Coulter bestseller "Godless," Random House never placed an ad
describing: "The courageous new book that arms all decent, patriotic,
God-fearing Americans with powerful arguments against their opponents
on the Satanic, atheist left."

Moreover, the fanfare for the Sam Harris book (including a spirited
debate on the Michael Medved show) followed similar backing by the
publishing industry and major media for a seemingly unending parade of
similarly themed books, including, "The Left Hand of God: Taking Back
Our Country from the Religious Right," "Thy Kingdom Come: How the
Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America," "Jesus
is Not a Republican: The Religious Right's War on America," "With
God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America," "With
God on Their Side: How Christian Fundamentalists Trampled Science,
Policy and Democracy in George W. Bush's White House," "The
Baptizing of America: The Religious Right's Plans for the Rest of
Us," "Why the Christian Right is Wrong," "Liars for Jesus: The
Religious Right's Alternative Version of American History," "An
Outline of the Bible: Why the Religious Right Can't Call Itself
Christian," "The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege,"
"American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil
and Borrowed Money," "Hijacking of the Christian Church: Voices of
the Religious Right," and many, many more.

Think of all the innocent and beautiful trees cleared from the
landscape and pulped into paper to feed this raging epidemic of major
book releases meant to indict and expose Christian conservatives! On
the Keith Olbermann "Countdown" show on MSNBC, the shrill leftist
Chris Hedges announced his own forthcoming project: "American
Fascist: The Coming of a Theocratic Dictatorship in the United
States."

In order to cash in and surf to shore on this trendy publishing tidal
wave, it may be time to write: "Christian Killers and Cannibals: How
the Religious Right Plans to Burn Your Homes, Rape Your Women and Eat
Your Babies." This attention-getting title counts as only slightly
more ridiculous and more extreme than many others proudly published by
major corporations. Sam Harris, for instance, suggests that
"eradicating" religion represents an urgent priority that should
engage the efforts of all good people-a moral necessity comparable to
the abolition of slavery. "I would be the first to admit that the
prospects for eradicating religion in our time do not seem good," he
writes on page 87 or "Letter to a Christian Nation." "Still, the
same could have been said about efforts to abolish slavery at the end
of the eighteenth century....The truth is, some of your most cherished
beliefs are as embarrassing as those that sent the last slave ship
sailing to America as late as 1859 (the same year that Darwin published
The Origin of Species)."

Meanwhile, the ecstatically positive reviews that greeted the alarmist
documentary film "Jesus Camp" (which explicitly compares an
enthusiastic Christian summer program for kids to a terrorist training
ground) show the genuine horror of religious revival that pervades much
of the secular establishment. In reviewing the film for the New York
Times, a horrified Stephen Holden unambiguously equated young
Evangelical believers to Communist mass murderers. "It wasn't so
long ago that another puritanical youth army, Mao Zedong's Red
Guards, turned the world's most populous country inside out," he
wrote. "Nowadays, the possibility of a right-wing Christian American
version of what happened in China no longer seems entirely
far-fetched."

The most surprising aspect of the current vogue for Christian-bashing
hysteria involves the timing: after many years of growth and progress,
religious conservatives have suffered recent reverses. The once mighty
"Moral Majority," "Christian Coalition" and other influential
organizations are either disbanded or irrelevant. Conservative
Christians failed spectacularly in their attempts to spare the life of
the stricken Terri Schiavo, fell far short of achieving the needed
Congressional majorities for a Marriage Protection Amendment, have lost
a series of high profile court cases on Intelligent Design, and face
daunting odds in efforts to block governmental funding of Embryonic
Stem Cell Research. None of the GOP frontrunners for 2008 has been
embraced by the Evangelical community and most of them (McCain,
Giuliani, and Romney because of his Mormon faith) are anathema to many
Christian conservatives. When it comes to incidents of violence or
intimidation by conservative Christians (who are regularly, shamefully
compared to the Taliban or Al Qaeda), the perpetrators of such
universally denounced, long-ago attacks against abortion providers are
currently rotting in jail (where they belong). When secularists try to
insist that all religions, not just Islam, display a dangerous violent
streak, it's deeply revealing that they indict Christianity by
reaching back five hundred years (to the Spanish Inquisition) or a
thousand years (to the Crusades). It's no exaggeration to say that
Muslim extremists around the world committed many, many more violent
attacks in the last week than have Christian conservatives in the last
ten years.

Why, then, the blatant loathing of Christian believers in so many books
and columns and manifestos from non-believers on the left? None of the
volumes decrying Christian influence suggest that religious families
engage in violence more frequently than atheists, or unravel the fabric
of society through criminality, selfishness or greed. When I've
interviewed the authors on my radio show, they freely admit that
they'd be pleased to live next door to an Evangelical, or even a
Fundamentalist household, because such people are likely to be
law-abiding, hard-working, neighborly, stable and considerate. This
contradiction demonstrates the irrational essence of the hatred and
fear of a group of citizens who do more than their share at feeing the
hungry, housing the homeless, keeping families together, educating
their children, serving in the military, giving to charity, maintaining
their homes, nursing the sick, promoting adoption and building vibrant
communities. What, exactly, do conservative Christians do that in any
way harms or damages their non-Christian neighbors?

In answering that question, critics of the "Religious Right" always
come back to issues of political influence and their groundless fears
of some future, Orwellian, dictatorial, theocracy. These alarmists
consistently ignore the actual agenda of even the most ambitious
Christian conservatives who express no desire to install a new,
religiously inflexible form of government, but merely wish to return to
the more hospitable attitude to public expressions of faith that
flourished in this nation until the 1960's. Yes, religious activists
want to roll back some of the controversial secularist "advances"
of the last fifty years - denying abortion on demand and giving
states greater leeway in regulating termination of pregnancy, clearly
limiting marriage to one man and one woman, allowing non-sectarian
prayer in schools, and permitting public displays of crosses, the ten
commandments, and nativity scenes. These do not constitute radical
alterations of America's Constitutional separation of
church-and-state: as recently as 1955, the nation clearly exemplified
all the accommodations to faith desired by religious conservatives for
the future. Did the recital of a non-sectarian prayer after the pledge
of allegiance in public school classrooms some fifty years ago
constitute the essence of theocratic tyranny? Did minority religions
find themselves relentlessly persecuted because local service clubs
installed nativity scenes in public parks?

Those who believe that religious conservatives want to impose a
nightmare of intolerance and oppression on those who disagree with them
must classify the nation's heroic past, from its founding through the
landmark school-prayer cases of 1961, as representative of a similar
nightmare. It's secularists and leftists who seek to alter the
long-term essence of this deeply religious, majority Christian country
(as Sam Harris, for one, freely acknowledges), rather than believing
fanatics who want to remake the nation as an alien, unrecognizable
theocracy.

Why, then, the current paranoia over the often exaggerated prominence
and power of religious conservatives? In "Letter to a Christian
Nation," Sam Harris unwittingly provides the answer. Addressing his
believing fellow citizens, he dramatically declaims: "If the basic
tenets of Christianity are true, then there are some very grim
surprises in store for nonbelievers like myself. You understand this.
At least half of the American population understands this. So let us be
honest with ourselves: in the fullness of time, one side is really
going to win this argument, and the other side is really going to
lose."

Mr. Harris, in other words, seems to worry that people assume he's
bound for damnation and an eternity of regret because in one tiny
corner of his mind, at least, he fears they may be right. In the
argument he describes, it's not possible that Christian believers are
"really going to lose." If Mr. Harris is right about humanity and
materialism, then there will be no sense of regret or despair if
religious people fail to reach heaven after death. If we are, indeed,
just spiritless chemicals and soulless matter, then we won't be
around in any sense to feel remorse over a life wasted in prayer,
religious fellowship, love of family and good deeds. When he suggests
that one side is "really going to lose" he can only have his own
side in mind.

It's the contemporary version of the famous "bargain" of Blaise
Pascal, the French scientist and Catholic religious philosopher who
died in 1662. When asked how he would react if he discovered at the end
of life that his firm belief in God proved unjustified, he suggested
that he would still have gained the enormous benefit of having lived as
if God existed - and would feel no regret at all. If, on the other
hand, non-believers like Sam Harris ultimately discover that the
Almighty lives, and has been judging them all along, then, in the words
of the great theologian Ricky Riccardo, "they got a whole lot of
es-plainin' to do."

That's why even the most benign, loving Biblically based religious
ideas seem so threatening to non-believers. The more that people of
faith develop confidence, sophistication and intellectual influence,
the more that those on the other side nurse the dark, clammy, cold,
intolerable fear that these theists just may be right about God and
eternity. When polemics and newspaper ads seek to "arm" so-called
"rational Americans with powerful arguments," it's not that they
need defense against rampaging Christians with pitchforks and torches.
They ultimately seek protection against creeping, subversive doubts
about their own unbelief.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/column.aspx?UrlTitle=religion,_madness_and_secular_paranoia&ns=MichaelMedved&dt=10/04/2006&page=2

Religion, madness and secular paranoia
By Michael Medved
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
nts

Why would a major corporation invest big money in a gratuitous insult
of millions of potential customers who, according to the company's
own figures, represent a clear majority of the American public?

That's the obvious question raised by a splashy full-page ad in the
Sunday New York Times that appeared on September 24th under the
attention-grabbing headline: