White People

Righty: White people created Western Civilization and all its wonders. We built everything of note from the Parthenon to the personal computer. We explored the world from top to bottom, delivered most of it from ignorance and savagery, spread the Gospel, advanced the frontiers of science, discovered cures for dreaded diseases, and founded numerous great nations, including, of course, the United States. White people were designed by nature to rule. Why shouldn’t we band together and resist the steady erosion of our culture by foreign elements? Why is it OK for black people to celebrate black power when we’re not allowed to promote white power? We detect a double standard here, and we’d better do something about it before white societies are completely overrun by hostile dark-skinned immigrants who breed like mosquitoes. White people are already an endangered species, and the world won’t realize it until it’s too late. Self-hating white liberals like Lefty are probably our worst enemy. Two hundred years from now, Lefty, your coffee-colored great-great grandchildren will probably have to visit Iceland or Iowa to see actual specimens of white people.

Lefty: White racism has given us slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, Nazism and the Holocaust. Quite a legacy there! White supremacists are almost without exception moronic, malevolent, impotent psychopaths. (How could anyone believe in the notion of white superiority after watching these clowns in action?) What do white people have to celebrate other than a heritage of greed, exploitation, war, materialism and bad dancing (Fred Astaire and a few others excepted)? African Americans and other minorities are entitled to celebrate their cultures because they’ve been the victims of systematic white oppression. They must be given a chance to undo centuries of forced hypnosis that essentially told them "White is right." There has never been a white pride movement capable of divorcing itself from racism. It is a poisonous issue that must be banished from every forum of civilized discourse.

The New Moderate:

The New Moderate must acknowledge Righty’s gripe about a double standard that allows dark-skinned minorities, but not white people, to celebrate their race-based cultures. I must also support Lefty’s contention that every "white pride" movement that has ever existed seems to have been tainted with obnoxious strains of racism. Why can’t white people simply look after their interests without bashing their darker brethren? Until they can, anyone who espouses white power or even white rights will be condemned (and justifiably so) as racist. (It might be that all ethnic "pride" celebrations are essentially racist or chauvinistic, regardless of who is doing the celebrating.)

Why would The New Moderate suggest that white people might want to "look after their interests"? Aren’t we slowly sinking into the bottomless bog of racism here? Stay with me for a moment. If current demographic trends continue unchecked, whites of European ancestry will account for less than half the population in both North America and Western Europe within half a century. In other words, white people will officially be a minority group. This revolutionary shift in population will forever alter the nature of Western societies and their cultures. (Forever is a LONG time, in case you’re not convinced.) It is not unreasonable to assume that the United States will eventually be speaking Spanish as its primary language, or that minarets will be sprouting alongside the abandoned cathedrals of France and England. And there is nothing wrong -- repeat, NOTHING WRONG -- with expressing dismay at this development. In fact, it might be desirable and even heroic to prevent it from happening. We’ve become so sensitized to leftist accusations of racism, and so bankrupt as a civilization, that we’re willing to just roll over and let the forces of history have their way with us.

There is nothing racist about simple self-preservation. I’m not even of European stock (my ancestors were Armenian Christians from the Ottoman Empire), and yet I’d mourn the disappearance of blond hair, blue eyes and freckles from our midst. I’d hate to see fine old languages like Dutch and Danish frittered into extinction. As much as I love Middle Eastern food, I’d never want it to replace the meaty succulence of German cooking or the epicurean delights of French. The New Moderate loves all nationalities in their infinite variety and would be loath to see any of them go the way of the dodo. I’d be just as unhappy if Americans settled en masse in the Middle East, reproduced out of control and festooned the stark landscape with golf courses and endless rows of McMansions.

How can white people "look after their interests"? Definitely not by mobilizing into fascist brigades, spouting racist diatribes or rounding up everyone who doesn’t fit the desired mold. No, if the white residents of North America and Western Europe don’t want to see their societies changed beyond recognition, they should simply do everything in their power to reverse the internal rot that has put them in this melancholy predicament. That means encouraging their own people to work at jobs they’ve been content to assign to immigrants. It means restricting immigration and downsizing the cushy welfare systems that attract foreigners who choose not to work. It means creating a vigorous culture that shuns cheap values and empty materialism. It means daring to sacrifice a little comfort for the scary proposition of having children. You can’t expect a race to survive when it lacks the resolve to reproduce.

The gods have always favored the hardy over the refined, in nations as well as individuals. The nations of the West (and especially Western Europe) are looking dangerously anemic right now. It might be that today’s white-dominated societies won’t survive in any form unless they receive an infusion of vitality from darker-hued populations. If those populations absorb Western values along the way, the darkening of Europe and America might actually be something to celebrate. But if those alien populations continue to multiply while remaining hostile to their host societies, the entire West can look forward to joining the Hittites, Babylonians, Phoenicians and Carthaginians in history’s dustbin.

Summary: White people of European stock have a right to look after their interests, especially in light of current demographic trends in the U.S. and Western Europe. Unfortunately, virtually every "white rights" movement has been laden with racism. What to do? Western societies need to shun decadence, depend less on foreign labor, and resolve to reproduce!

Terrorists

Righty: These bloodthirsty fanatics represent the gravest threat to Western Civilization since the Turks advanced to the gates of Vienna in 1683. (Remember what religion those Turks believed in?) We’ve done nothing to deserve their hatred; they’re simply jealous because we’re living in comparative luxury while they’re still shacking up with camels. We need to do everything in our power to prevent further terrorist attacks, even if it means temporarily surrendering a little of the freedom that we take for granted. I don’t mind being searched at the airport, because I have nothing to hide. I don’t mind having my phone tapped, because I’m not talking to overseas terrorists. We need to find the people who ARE talking to them. Muslim terrorists are the most vile criminals on the planet. They kill for the sheer joy of seeing innocent people blown to bits, based on the dictates of a brutal desert religion that exhorts the faithful to shed the blood of infidels. Lefty and his crew profess shock that we humiliate captured terrorists, that we don’t grant them the full rights accorded to prisoners of war. Believe me, ordering these scumbags to form naked pyramids is a laughably mild punishment compared to what they deserve. Why should we grant them a shred of mercy when they’re utterly merciless toward their victims? I say we boil them all in oil -- Arab oil.

Lefty: Of course terrorists are a threat to innocent people; nobody disputes that much. But we need to do some serious soul-searching to uncover the reasons they hate us -- and do something about it. We’re so mind-numbingly self-righteous as a nation; we can’t even see that we bring terrorism on ourselves through our imperialistic foreign policy, our unquestioning support of Israel and our sickening materialism. I’m not justifying terrorism, of course; I’m simply explaining it. As for the treatment of captured terrorists, we can’t allow ourselves to stoop to their level. The torture of suspected terrorists (emphasis on "suspected," since we don’t allow them to be tried) flagrantly defies the Geneva Conventions. On a more human level, it should grate against every honorable instinct of a decent nation. And the suspension of our civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorists is nothing but a bogus excuse for an evil administration to steer us toward fascism. A government that curtails our freedoms in the name of freedom is perverted. It’s a scenario right out of Orwell’s 1984. We’re in desperate need of a regime change before more of our rights are eroded by this stupidly fanatical administration. By comparison, the terrorists have only the slimmest chance of affecting our lives.

The New Moderate:

You’re right, Lefty: it wouldn’t hurt us to understand why the terrorists hate us, and to use that knowledge to make them hate us less. President Bush II explained that terrorists hate us because of our freedom. (By tampering with our civil liberties, he did his best to make sure they’d resent us a little less on that score.) But come on -- let’s peel this onion and uncover the real reasons for their hatred.

Do they hate us for our excessive wealth? Sure, but not enough to kill us because of it. Do they hate us for our lewdness and lasciviousness, our liquored lifestyles and seminude womenfolk? Undoubtedly, though probably not enough to launch a jihad in our direction. Young people throughout the Islamic realm seem to regard American pop culture as a guilty pleasure.

Now let’s peel some more. Do the terrorists hate us for meddling in their corner of the world... for regarding their nations as mere spigots for the flow of fuel... for supporting Israel as a de facto fifty-first state? Now the oil is beginning to boil.

And what about their radicalized religion, which exhorts the faithful to spread Islam over the face of the world by sword and bloodshed -- and promises an eternity of orgasmic bliss to those who die in the name of Allah? Well, duh! Should we be shocked that they’re coming after us?

We can’t do anything about our freedom and wealth, despite Bush’s efforts to curtail the former and redistribute the latter to a small tribe of hereditary tycoons. We can’t do much about our increasingly degenerate culture, though we probably should for our own sakes. But we can definitely check our national impulse to bounce uninvited onto every piece of turf that represents a potential U.S. interest. We have too many interests.

Should we be Israel’s ally even at the risk of Islamic animosity? Absolutely. Should we be granting it (as we do now) over 200 times as much foreign aid per capita as we grant Africans and Latin Americans? Absolutely not. Israel is over fifty years old now; it has to learn to walk on its own sooner or later. We just need to make sure that its neighbors respect its right to walk there.

As for the fierce desert religion that has fueled terrorism on an unprecedented scale, our options are few and potentially futile. We could shut down all the madrasses that teach jihadism to new generations of the faithful within our borders. But the schools would simply regroup somewhere else and fill those young minds with more vehement fanaticism. The real solution is for Islam to reform itself from within, ASAP. If it doesn’t, the West will have to reform it by force, and that could take centuries. I have a sickening suspicion that if Islam and the West come to blows in an all-out war, we’ll eventually see crescents atop the churches of Europe and America. We might have technology on our side, but the Muslims have fanaticism. Fanatics generally get what they want.

Back to the terrorists and how we treat them. Terrorists aren’t soldiers, even though Bush II seems to be fond of describing them as "enemy combatants." Terrorists fight on behalf of no state or government; they’re simply mass murderers on self-appointed missions. I don’t believe they’re entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions or, for that matter, to the customary respect we grant legitimate military personnel. Should we subject terrorists to physical torture? No. We’re better than that. But I think we’re entitled to wear them down in captivity, interrogate them under blazing lights and even stack them in naked pyramids while silly female soldiers pose for pictures in front of them. All terrorists, simply by being terrorists, forfeit their right to civilized treatment.

One bone of contention (and it’s a major bone): for God’s sake, let’s determine whether the suspected terrorists we round up and lock away are, in fact, actual terrorists. Yes, terrorists deserve to be treated like vermin, but not while the adjective suspected is still attached to them.
Our leaders need to address this nasty issue right now. They can start by revoking the portion of the so-called Patriot Act that conveniently allows us to toss all suspected terrorists into our scattered gulags, where we leave them to rot without recourse to representation. Imagine if the Almighty were to condemn all suspected sinners to hell. That’s essentially what we’re doing under the Patriot Act. It’s unworthy of us. Let’s separate the wheat from the chaff before we condemn anyone.

Summary: Obviously we’re right to hate terrorists, but we should try to make them hate us less by modifying our meddlesome foreign policy. The ultimate solution is a major reform movement in Islam, but we can’t wait that long. In the meantime, we have a right to imprison terrorists and even torment them (within reason) -- once we’ve proven that they are in fact terrorists. All suspected terrorists have a right to legal representation.

Afrocentrism

Righty: The glorification of African culture is just a transparent attempt by disaffected black intellectuals to further discredit our European heritage and weave a web of self-aggrandizing myths and lies around their primitive culture. Let’s get real: how can you compare tribal masks to the Sistine Chapel ceiling? Afrocentrists even have the audacity to claim the ancient Egyptians as ancestors of today’s African Americans, when everyone knows the Egyptians weren’t black. Afrocentrists are clearly desperate to find some evidence of distinction in their past, but their efforts are either self-deluding or plainly dishonest. To make matters worse, they’re actually teaching this drivel in schools today. What about teaching black kids how to read and write so they don’t end up as angry, drug-dealing street thugs or unwed teenage mothers?

Lefty: Africa was the birthplace of humankind and home to the most ancient civilization on the planet. Africans built the pyramids and the Sphinx; they created brilliant works of art while Europeans huddled over peat fires to warm their sorry backsides. Systematically excluded from our racist school curricula until now, Africa has re-emerged as the cultural focal point in restoring pride and dignity to millions of African-American students -- the descendants of enslaved Africans who had been blatantly deprived of their cultural birthright for centuries.

The New Moderate:

African history and culture are worth studying, but so is everyone’s heritage. All world history courses (and world history must become a requirement in all public schools) should include a segment on Africa -- as well as on Europe, the Middle East, India, China, Latin America (you get the picture).

The Afrocentrists’ emphasis on the glories of their African heritage might boost the self-esteem of underachieving black kids, and that’s a worthy goal. But at what price? Dismissal of (and hostility toward) European history as little more than a chronicle of systematic imperialist exploitation? Further self-ghettoization of the already ghettoized African American community? The creation of a narcissistic cultural identity that clouds reality with wishful half-truths? (Yes, the ancient Egyptians were African; no, they weren’t black.)

The cultivation of a mythic Afrocentric world-view, like the invented holiday Kwanzaa, springs from noble intentions but will only dig a deeper gulf between the black community and the rest of American society. Include African history and folk traditions in every social studies curriculum, definitely -- but teach it accurately, and don’t make it the focal point of a black child’s education. With slavery and Jim Crow dead and buried, black separatism should join them in the cultural graveyard.

Should American blacks take pride in their African heritage? Absolutely. With a passion. Do they need to connect with Africa in order to feel good about themselves and their achievements? Absolutely not. What a sad idea. African Americans need no validation from another continent. A four-century history of suffering and redemption on these shores is validation enough. African Americans are, above all else, quintessentially American, and they have an abundance of American heroes to admire. In a New Moderate’s utopia, some of those heroes might even be white.

Summary: Afrocentrism is a well-intentioned but divisive influence. Include African history in social studies courses, but keep it free of dogma and don’t make it the core of a black child’s education.

Evolution

Righty: The theory of evolution (emphasis on theory) is incompatible with the account of creation handed down to us via God’s own Word in the book of Genesis. The Bible clearly states that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. That hardly leaves time for the vast parade of prehistoric creatures that supposedly romped around the Earth a hundred million years ago, according to the mythology of evolutionists and nonbelievers. Those fossils may have been deposited at the time of the Flood, or they might have been fudged by overambitious paleontologists. (Amazing, the way they can recreate an entire creature from a single neck bone!) We don’t necessarily believe that the Earth is only 6000 years old (the Bible doesn’t provide us with specific dates, after all), and it could be that a "day" at the dawn of time was considerably longer than a day is today. But we do believe in the Bible, and the Bible makes it clear that God created the fishes, the beasts, the "fowls of the air," and "every thing that creepeth upon the earth." Finally, He created man. How could anything so mindbogglingly complex as man -- or even a housefly -- be the result of mere accident? Evolutionists are asking us to take an awful lot on faith.

Lefty: Mythology has no place in science. In fact, it has been the mission of science since its ancient beginnings to lift the veil of the supernatural from the inner workings of life and matter. As hard as this may be for Righty to accept, the Book of Genesis is just one of the many creation myths fabricated by primitive tribes to explain the mysteries of the universe. The evidence for evolution is so overwhelming that only the most ignorant Bible thumpers continue to reject it. (Unfortunately, those Bible thumpers continue to hold sway in the vast hinterland between the East and West coasts... Jesusland, as one inspired cartoonist dubbed it.) How can these imbecilic rubes continue to deny what paleontologists have uncovered in layers of rock dating back hundreds of millions of years? How can they fail to notice the striking similarities between man and chimp? Righty and his obstinate brethren are in serious denial. If they still can’t admit that we’re descended from apes, the rest of the world can clearly see that they are -- and that they haven’t evolved very far from their simian origins.

The New Moderate:

Nobody with any sense still believes that the great parade of creation marched from nothingness to Adam and Eve in six days. We can give the Bible some latitude here and there; we can interpret the "days" as epochs that correspond roughly to the geological ages, or we can wonder if the Genesis account of creation was meant to be viewed as a myth all along. But the evidence for evolution is impressive. We can look at a fossilized archaeopteryx and immediately see the missing link between dinosaurs and birds. With a little imagination, we can understand how the modern horse developed from a cat-sized critter known as eohippus.

So how did primitive life diversify into the millions of astonishing forms we see around us today, all without divine assistance? Darwin’s theory of natural selection offers a brilliant (and brilliantly simple) explanation: mutations that popped up in our genes conferred advantages that enabled the lucky mutants to attract desirable mates, prosper in their native habitats, or exploit new niches that no comparable creature had exploited before. A small dinosaur born with membranes that enabled it to glide through the air might be able to evade predators (and find prey) more easily than its earthbound cousins. It would live longer and presumably raise more offspring, several of whom would share its ability to glide. Those gliding offspring would prosper, and so on down the line. Eventually some of them would produce descendants that could flap their wings and stay aloft for hours at a time. That’s progress. That’s evolution.

Natural selection is essentially free-market capitalism as practiced by plants and animals. Individuals, species and businesses that develop useful new widgets will be more likely to perpetuate themselves through time. Those that fail to adapt are destined for the compost heap. Like business, natural selection is totally amoral: it favors the opportunists.

It all makes sense, but I’ve noticed a few loose ends. How do you account for the development of new traits that don’t seem to confer any evolutionary advantages? (Wouldn’t we have survived and reproduced just as readily without eyebrows, for example?) And how do you explain the evolution of something as complex as a circulatory system? A partial circulatory system would be of no use at all; blood vessels have to reach every living cell, or clumps of tissue would start sloughing off in a disgusting and probably fatal manner. How could any creature have developed even a primitive circulatory system as the result of a single mutation? Correct me if I’m wrong, but evolution alone seems powerless to explain it.

I’m not proposing that God or even some nameless Intelligent Designer engineered the first circulatory system, though I refuse to shut the door on those possibilities. It’s just that the visible world doesn’t always fit neatly into prepackaged theories -- even one as beautiful and widely accepted as the theory of evolution. Religious skeptics probably shouldn’t take so much of their science on faith.

Summary: The theory of evolution explains most (but not all) developments in the history of life. We should be willing and able to question science as readily as we question religion.

Affirmative Action

Righty: We’re looking at reverse discrimination, plain and simple. Why should today’s white males be victimized because of so-called bias against blacks and women in the past? ("So-called" because most blacks were unqualified for professional jobs and most women left the workforce after a few years to raise kids. How was it discriminatory not to hire them?) We’re all poorer when key professional positions are filled by marginally competent individuals who got hired because they had the right skin color or gender. And who is suffering most? Just your average working-class white boys, who never enjoyed special privileges in the past and will never be given a break now that all the opportunities go to minorities and women. How could this country have sanctioned a policy that singles out white males for ill-treatment, as if they were a kind of legally designated pincushion for the grievances of irate special-interest groups? How does it help society to penalize several generations of talented individuals simply because they were born as white guys? Affirmative Action MUST be scrapped once and for all.

Lefty: Affirmative Action finally created the level playing field we needed to give minorities and women a chance to share in the American Dream. How can any decent person begrudge them the opportunities that were denied them for so long simply because they weren’t white males? Affirmative Action was instrumental in the growth of the black middle class, and it continues to rescue talented, underprivileged young people from lives of chronic poverty and frustration. Affirmative Action helped women break through the age-old prejudicial barriers that kept them out of contention for high-level jobs in business and the professions. As for the complaints of reverse discrimination, there is still so much natural bias in favor of white males that they hardly suffer under Affirmative Action. They have no idea how privileged they are simply as a result of being born with light skin and male genitals.

The New Moderate:

Discrimination seems to be as American as Velveeta, whether it’s directed at minorities, women or "overprivileged" white males. Yes, women and blacks were encumbered in the past by prejudices that kept them conveniently subservient. So naturally the U.S. corrected the old injustice by instituting a new one in its place.

The name of the program is a dead giveaway: they couldn’t call it "Reverse Discrimination," because that would have been too honest and unpalatable; it never would have played in Peoria. So they had to do what ideologues always do to push a potentially unpopular agenda: they disguised it with a candy coating of euphemism. Affirmative Action. Sounds upbeat, progressive and vague enough to whiz right by the majority of Americans without ruffling too many feathers. They didn’t even capitalize it, probably in the hope that we wouldn’t notice it. (I capitalize it here.) Were we ever allowed to vote on whether we wanted Affirmative Action? Nope, it was simply foisted on us from above by high-minded social liberals (including President Johnson) whose feel-good impulses apparently exceeded their capacity for objective fairness.

Did black Americans really need an extra boost after they finally won their full civil rights back in the 1960s? Absolutely. There was a small, aristocratic black middle class at the time, but the vast majority of African Americans had no tradition of literacy or professionalism to draw upon as they began to compete for admission to better schools and jobs. Shouldn’t we have discriminated in their favor, then? No. We should have stopped discriminating against them. We should have trained them, coached them and inspired them to compete. It would have meant creating a New Deal-style federal program to help minorities make the transition, and it wouldn’t have been cheap. But it would have been cheaper than the disastrous welfare system that inadvertently spawned a permanent black underclass in the U.S. More important, it would have been the honorable thing to do.

Instead, it was easier simply to favor blacks and other minorities, with minimal regard for their qualifications. So we admitted them to the Ivies with substandard test scores when they would have done better at good old State. Their dropout rate was alarming, and those who went on to graduate would forever be branded by many whites, consciously or subconsciously, as Affirmative Action babies: the undeserving beneficiaries of a blatantly preferential policy. Even worse, we gave preference to wealthy and middle-class blacks over working-class whites, while the poorest students of either race were simply bypassed. (If we need an Affirmative Action program at all, we should use it to benefit poor people regardless of race or gender.)

Affirmative Action has devalued the real accomplishments of blacks and other minorities who have made it by virtue of their own talents. (If I had been black and brilliant, I’d bristle at the suggestion that I succeeded only because of reverse discrimination.) Even more damaging, Affirmative Action has cast a pall of public doubt over the idea that blacks can succeed on their own. Guess what: if you treat people as if they’re handicapped, everyone -- including the beneficiaries of your largesse -- will start to assume that they are handicapped. This is not the image the black community needs or wants. In fact, many African American leaders oppose Affirmative Action for this reason.

If, after 40 years of equal rights, blacks still require Affirmative Action to compete with whites, something is seriously wrong somewhere. Lefty would blame racism while secretly harboring doubts about blacks’ abilities; Righty would probably harbor those same doubts, but not as secretly. I suspect that what’s holding blacks back isn’t primarily racism or lack of ability, but a miasma of social problems afflicting the African American community (and especially the young male African American community, which is a culture unto itself) like some virulent and endemic disease. No surprise here. We have to start attacking these problems at the elementary school level or even earlier -- not at the point of admission to college or the business world.

As for the upscale white women who have benefited from Affirmative Action at the expense of men, I’ll try to take the high road on this one. Let’s just say that if I were female and white today, I’d be mortified by the assumption that I required special consideration to compete equally with men. Yes, back in 1970 women needed to be taken seriously in the working world, and fast. It was still an era when older businessmen referred to their wives as "the little lady" and expected female employees to type, fetch coffee and occasionally "put out" for harried male executives like themselves. But those days are long gone, at least in the civilized world. So is the infamous "glass ceiling" that kept women from rising above middle-management positions. Yes, bastions of stubborn male supremacy still exist at scattered corporate and institutional outposts, but so do bastions of female supremacy (the publishing industry, corporate marketing departments, and the nonprofit sector are shining exemplars of feminine prowess).

The male establishment has transferred significant power to women in the space of a single generation. Given that we’re looking at a major realignment of the historic gender roles of our species, the pace of change has been amazingly swift. Now that women populate corporate boardrooms and significantly outnumber men at American colleges and graduate schools, no amount of feminist eloquence will persuade me that they still require a free pass. Affirmative Action for women in the job marketplace seemed fair enough back in the seventies, but it’s needlessly discriminatory today.

What about the lingering pay gap between men and women, you ask? If a disproportionate number of women still congregate in traditional "pink collar" jobs like secretarial or clerical work, discrimination isn’t the culprit. Most men abandoned those low-paying fields long ago for the chance to earn grown-up salaries (can you blame them?), and women filled the vacuum. The continuing social pressure on men to be high earners drives them to steer clear of ill-paid clerical jobs, while women are free to take them as a source of additional family income. Nobody snickers at a woman who earns only $20K for a year’s work. Men simply don’t enjoy that luxury, so they generally follow the money.

Summary: Affirmative Action may have been a necessary evil back in the 1970s, but it’s simply evil today. It’s unfair to blacks as well as whites, and women no longer need it. We could use coaching programs, not preference programs.

Separation of Church and State

Righty: America was settled by Christians, its Founding Fathers were Christians, and the vast majority of Americans today are Christians. So why should we cater to a tiny minority of vicious heathens who would trample our rights and force us to remove all signs of our faith from schools and public spaces? We must protect our religion against all those who would take it from us. You have to agree that something is seriously wrong when public schools teach our kids about homosexuality while banishing any reference to God and the Bible. You know the world has gone mad when we can’t even mention the word "Christmas" in public without incurring somebody’s wrath. ("Holiday tree," indeed! You can have your holiday tree, Lefty, but don’t you dare touch my CHRISTMAS tree! That’s CHRISTmas! Merry CHRISTmas, you goddamn atheist!) The Founding Fathers would be spinning in their graves if they knew how successfully the anti-Christian forces in America have used the Bill of Rights to justify their crusade against God. We must turn the tide and take back this nation for Christ.

Lefty: The Bill of Rights guarantees the separation of church and state. The fact that Christians constitute a majority does not entitle them to impose their beliefs on the rest of the nation. That’s the beauty of the First Amendment. We must prohibit the expression of religious beliefs in all public institutions and venues. That means no Christmas carols, no menorahs, no Ten Commandments plaques on court houses, no prayers at presidential inaugurations. "In God We Trust" should come off U.S. coins out of respect for those of us who don’t trust in God, and likewise we must delete the phrase "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance -- everyone knows it was inserted there during the McCarthy hysteria. The majority of America’s Founding Fathers were Deists, not Christians; they spoke of God only in the abstract sense of "Providence" and certainly didn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus or the inerrancy of the Bible. We must honor their wise decision to keep religion out of the public arena. Nyah, nyah, Righty!

The New Moderate:

I've looked in vain for any phrase resembling "separation of church and state" in the U.S. Bill of Rights. With regard to religion, the First Amendment actually states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." That’s it. Surprised? The wording might be a little vague, but the Founding Fathers were simply saying that when it comes to religion, Congress won’t meddle. No official state religion... no prohibition of religion. Have it your way, those noble Dead White Males were telling us. Worship Yahweh or Quetzalcoatl or nobody at all. Congress won’t tell you what to believe.

How this wise and benign concept morphed into the secularist catchphrase "separation of church and state" is a matter for serious scholars of American history to ponder. The New Moderate isn’t quite serious or scholarly enough to attempt it here. All I have going for me is a documented 99th percentile aptitude for verbal reasoning (don’t ask about my mechanical reasoning score). Based on that aptitude, I can assert with relative confidence that the public dismantling of religion is not what the Founding Fathers had in mind (remember, they refused to prohibit "the free exercise thereof").

For example, the First Amendment appears to be powerless to ban God from public schools, since those schools are run by local governments, not by Congress. Neither can it ban nativity scenes or Ten Commandments plaques from public squares, because those squares, like the schools, fall under the dominion of local governments, not Congress.

Like the Founding Fathers, The New Moderate adamantly opposes any form of theocracy. I don’t want the Holy Bible to be the law of the land (for starters, we’d have to execute people who work on the Sabbath). But I have to conclude that the left has been distorting the First Amendment to promote a secularist agenda, that the Supreme Court has been a willing accomplice, and that the rest of the country has been seriously snookered.

But that’s not the end of our argument: in a New Moderate utopia, nobody would impose religious (or irreligious) beliefs on anyone else. This is a simple matter of civility, not legality. The right-leaning Christian majority in this utopia would be considerate enough to acknowledge that not everyone submits to their creed (or needs to). They’d never force nonbelievers to participate in a Christmas pageant or expect them to intone the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. But non-Christians would be open-minded enough to participate in that Christmas pageant out of sheer good will. They’d still be non-Christians after all is said and done.

A personal note: Back in grade school, many decades ago, I stepped in for an absent Jewish friend during the Hanukkah segment of our holiday pageant. I recited a story about the Maccabees and the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days. Reciting those words didn’t make me Jewish, but for some reason it made me feel good to the core.

Summary: The Bill of Rights made no provision for "separation of church and state;" on the contrary, it defended the "free exercise" of religious beliefs. Secularists cannot point to the First Amendment to justify their anti-religious campaigns. The New Moderate supports the free expression of religion in a civil and non-coercive manner, but theocracy has no place in American life.

Racial Profiling

Righty: The function of law enforcement isn’t simply to round up criminals but to prevent them from acting. If statistics tell us that 55% of violent crime is committed by black males, for example, why shouldn’t police monitor that segment of the population more carefully than it does Asian females? If the black males who are stopped by police have nothing to hide, they won’t be arrested. They’re free to go. No harm done, no blots on their record. Simple as that. Profiling is even more urgent when it comes to stopping future terrorist attacks on the U.S. If young Muslim males are responsible for 95% of violent terrorist acts, why should the authorities waste their time (and ours) routinely strip-searching 70-year-old Irish-American nuns? It defies common sense. When we’re at war with Muslim terrorists, we can’t afford to let namby-pamby political correctness undermine our defenses. Which is more important: the lives of our people or the ruffled egos of a few indignant detainees?

Lefty: "Namby-pamby" political correctness? It’s so easy (isn’t it, Righty?) to dismiss the rights and feelings of an entire race or religion in a single flippant phrase. The freedom that so many right-wingers would die to defend evidently doesn’t include freedom from harassment on the basis of one’s creed or color. Here’s an example to sober you up. To date, all presidential assassins (and even failed assassins) have been white. Should the authorities make a point of screening all white people before allowing them to attend a personal appearance by the president? Our society must never cave in to the kind of quasi-fascist hysteria that places security above human rights. Our society must never condone the isolation of an entire group as the common enemy. We failed brutally in our relations with the original inhabitants of North America (and we dared call them savages!). We turned a blind eye as the Southern states trampled the rights of African Americans for an entire century after the Civil War. Even as recently as World War II, we allowed our hysteria to get the better of us as we interned loyal Japanese Americans in concentration camps. We simply can’t allow such malignant bigotry to prevail again if we are to consider ourselves a free and virtuous nation.

The New Moderate:

Both Righty and Lefty make valid and heartfelt points, but of course the solution lies in the middle. We can’t ignore the demographics of crime for the sake of political correctness: if poor urban blacks commit more street crime than whites, it makes sense for police to be more alert in poor urban black communities. Not middle class white communities. Not middle class black communities, either. In other words, police shouldn’t focus entirely on race as the identifying factor, and they should never stop drivers or pedestrians simply because they happen to be black.

The same holds true for the screening of potential terrorists. The vast majority of suicide bombers and other murderous fanatics are young Muslim men. That means you screen young Muslim men, not elderly Muslim grandmothers. It means you don’t screen Christian Arabs, either. Ethnic background shouldn’t be a primary focus at all, because fanatical Muslims can be black, white or Asian.

In short, you could say The New Moderate favors profiling, but not racial profiling. In treacherous times, we can’t afford to blind ourselves to the demographics of the people most likely to cause harm. But it should be clear that those demographics involve more than race or ethnicity, and that the individuals selected for profiling should never be treated as criminals or even as suspects until the police find incriminating evidence.

Frankly, I don’t mind when I’m pulled aside at airport security checkpoints. I look resolutely Middle Eastern, though I’m not Muslim or (alas) young. I’ve never been detained for more than half a minute; after a quick scan, I’m good to go. As long as I’m not taken into custody, I feel assured that the profiling system is working to keep us as safe as possible.

Summary: Racial profiling may be unjust, but demographic profiling is justified where certain identifiable groups commit a preponderance of the crime.

McCarthyism

Righty: Senator Joseph McCarthy was a hero for helping his country unmask all those filthy Communists lurking in the federal government. His methods were harsh but necessary, comparable to cutting out a tumor. He performed his invaluable service during a critical phase of the Cold War, after the Soviet Union had spread its tentacles over all of Eastern Europe, toppling one legitimate government after another in the years following World War II. The leftist [read "Jewish"] press brought him down and indirectly caused his premature death. The fact that this patriotic martyr is still widely reviled today shows us how completely our culture is dominated by left-wing propagandists. They’re still sore that McCarthy exposed their precious friends and foiled the Communist plot to destroy our Christian way of life.

Lefty: McCarthy was a monster and a fascist demagogue whose nefarious witch-hunt tore the United States in half during the early 1950s. A vicious philistine and a drunken slob, McCarthy ruined the careers of countless men and women whose talents were immeasurably superior to his. He went after Communists, suspected Communists, friends of Communists, and suspected friends of suspected Communists with equally demonic fervor. His methods were reprehensible, even evil. He was a brutal master of intimidation (even President Eisenhower was afraid to stand up to him), terrorizing his victims into betraying their own friends. He had no authority to force any of these people to avow their loyalties in public; doing so was a blatant violation of their civil rights. McCarthy was without doubt a greater threat to our liberty than any of the so-called Communists he persecuted. We must never allow his like [read "right-wing Christians"] to threaten our way of life again.

The New Moderate:

Dare I say it? McCarthy’s goals were laudable: to weed out Communists from the federal government and other centers of influence during a highly volatile phase of the Cold War. The aggressive Soviet Communist expansionism in Europe and Asia, coupled with the presence of a robust Communist movement in the U.S. at the time, lend credence to my belief that McCarthy and his fellow right-wingers were justified in their paranoia.

The operative word, though, IS paranoia: Nobody of civilized instincts can justify McCarthy’s vicious scattershot approach to rounding up the usual suspects. He struck terror into the souls of innocent people who merely dined with Communists or attended the meetings of collegiate leftist organizations. Sympathy for left-wing causes should never be equated with treason.

McCarthy’s undoing was his wild-eyed assault on the U.S. Army, of all institutions. He had previously impugned the loyalties of as great a man as Gen. George C. Marshall. Then he ran up against Army Attorney General Joseph Welch, who famously retorted, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" That was the beginning of the end. CBS News icon Edward R. Murrow hastened McCarthy’s slide with a memorable televised editorial, and the U.S. Senate finally sealed his doom by censuring him. Virtually nobody listened to the disgraced senator during the three years left to him.

A few popular misconceptions about McCarthy need to be cleared up. He doesn’t appear to have been a homosexual, closeted or otherwise. He was never associated with the House Committee on Un-American Activities (known as HUAC). It was HUAC that went after suspected Communists in Hollywood and the entertainment industry. In fact, McCarthy never blacklisted anyone. The Hollywood studios and other vessels of commercial culture, terrified that their revenues would suffer if they used politically tainted talent, did McCarthy’s dirty work for him. McCarthy helped create the climate of terror and suspicion, but it was the studios that ultimately wrecked the careers of all those suspected pinkos. When you think about it, what difference did it make if actors and screenwriters were Communist, Nazi or Mormon? They had no power to bring down our government. Power to influence our culture, yes -- but since when is cultural influence a crime?

The New Moderate blames McCarthy for firing the opening salvo in the destructive culture war that persists to this day in the form of "red state/blue state" polarization. What if a more moderate and civil spokesman (President Eisenhower, for example) had led a rational assault on Communist infiltration? Would we still be as polarized as we are today? Probably not. McCarthy’s wanton attacks inflamed the left with a raging self-righteousness that propelled it through the 1960s and beyond, into the age of special-interest politics with its smorgasbord of ideological follies. The leftist surge eventually helped spawn an even greater political backlash: today’s rumbling right-wing juggernaut of fundamentalist Christians, radio talk-show hosts and war-whooping neocons. In other words, McCarthy inadvertently made our New Moderate movement necessary. I suppose I should thank him, but I’d really rather be birdwatching.

Summary: McCarthy was right to track down Communists in the federal government and seriously wrong to inaugurate a reign of terror. His witch hunt provoked the right-left culture war that persists to this day in the U.S.

Jews and Anti-Semitism

Note: The far right/far left scale doesn’t strictly apply here, since many right-wingers today are ardent supporters of Israel, while most leftists seem to be critical of that nation. But the identification of Jews with liberal causes persists, and anti-Semites still tend to reflect traditional right-wing biases. So here goes...

Righty: I’m not endorsing anti-Semitism (some of my best friends are... well, you know). But to some extent the Jews bring it on themselves. Let’s start with their religion, which treats non-Jews as "unclean" creatures to be regarded with contempt. (Why is it that we never hear the term anti-Gentilism?) The Jews crucified Christ, of course... then they spread through Europe and became notorious money-lenders. Jews and money: everywhere they move, they seem to take over and pile it up. They’re opportunistic, abrasive and ruthless in their pursuit of success. They’re hypersensitive, too. You can’t criticize Israel without being tagged as an anti-Semite. In fact, you really can’t say anything about God’s chosen people, bad or good, without being smeared for it. That’s because they own the media and totally dominate our culture. Look at how they tried to stop Mel Gibson from releasing The Passion of the Christ. (Big surprise that he was later caught ranting about the Jews! I would have ranted, too, if they had put me through the wringer like that.) Let’s face it: Jews are malcontents and agitators by nature. They’ve been at the forefront of nearly every movement that set out to subvert traditional values: Communism, socialism, psychiatry, modernism, commercial pop culture, the radical student rebellion of the 1960s, the women’s movement. Their agitation toppled the Protestant old guard from power and left us with the moral chaos we see around us today. Now that the Jews are in control, it’s interesting that many of these former left-wing radicals have been drifting toward the right. (You didn’t hear a lot of Jews criticizing the war in Iraq.) And still, with all the power they’ve accumulated, they never get tired of shoving the Holocaust in our collective face -- as if today’s super-affluent Jews were still victims, and as if the rest of us were to blame. Is it any wonder that the Jews are so widely disliked? Not that I dislike them, mind you. I think they’re smart and funny. That Adam Sandler really cracks me up.

Lefty: After having been forced out of their ancestral homeland, the Jewish people spent the next nineteen centuries struggling to preserve their religion (and themselves) in alien lands, amid savage and relentless persecutions. If they became money-lenders, guess what: it might have had something to do with the fact that they were routinely barred from all other professions! From the tortures, massacres and expulsions of medieval Europe to the horror of the Holocaust, so-called Christians have gone out of their way to make life miserable for Jews. Why? What have the Jews done to merit their eternal status as scapegoats and victims? Simply for preserving their heritage in the midst of ignorance and hatred? Jews have been among the best and most patriotic citizens everywhere they’ve settled: consistently productive, enterprising, educated, progressive and humane. And they’ve been rewarded with pogroms and death camps. Never again! Jews must mobilize and trust no one. They must gain control over what others say about them. Anyone who dares criticize the Jewish community or Jewish interests is an anti-Semite and must be brought down. And watch out for anti-Semites in sheep’s clothing: those who praise the Jews or seem overly knowledgeable about Jewish history and affairs should be monitored as closely as outspoken anti-Semites. Any Gentile who singles out the Jews for any reason generally has an ulterior motive. As for those crazy Muslims, don’t ask!

The New Moderate:

I’m probably heading into swampy ground here, but we desperately need an outspoken moderate perspective on this perennial hot-button issue. I’ll attempt to demystify both the Jews and anti-Semitism in a handful of paragraphs -- no small challenge -- and I hope my Jewish friends will indulge me if they spot some overripe generalizations.

Where to begin? Christians have accused the Jews of everything from killing Christ (Did it ever occur to those Christians that Jesus, all twelve disciples and even the Virgin Mary were also Jewish? This was Judea, folks!) to using the blood of Christian babies in their rituals. But the persistence of anti-Semitism goes beyond religious animosity. For centuries the Jews kept themselves apart (not entirely by their own choice, of course) within the countries they settled. They were a small but visible community of people who were different. More literate. Generally a bit more astute. Less inclined to work with their hands. More inclined to succeed despite the prevailing prejudice against them.

You might say that Jews have been saddled with the mostly thankless role of smartest kid in the class. This issue is supercharged with such unseemly implications that it has achieved the status of a taboo. (Of course, I believe in exposing all taboo subjects to the fresh air of examination.) We know that Jewish parents tend to encourage learning and achievement. But are Jews actually more intelligent than the rest of us? Here’s another question: do women live longer than men? In both cases, the answer is yes and no. Yes, women outlive men on average, but plenty of men live longer than plenty of women. You can extend the analogy to Jewish intelligence. The median I.Q. for Jews of European origin has been measured at approximately 12 to 15 points above the median for the general population. Part of that difference is undoubtedly due to nurture. And the two bell curves overlap significantly: there are numerous Jewish dullards and Gentile geniuses. In short, you simply can’t justify a blanket statement like "Jews are smarter." On average, yes. But Jewishness doesn’t automatically confer intelligence. Individuals will always be individuals.

How to account for the extremely visible success of the Jewish community? (Here’s another taboo subject: let’s open another window!) It isn’t simply a matter of lavish I.Q.s or Harvard diplomas. Jewish achievers typically embody a rare combination of abstract intelligence and practical intelligence, creative passion and precision, openness to learning and opportunities, networking smarts, indefatigable drive and assertiveness (Righty nods smugly here while Lefty shakes his head), solid family values, and relative freedom from sloppy goyish vices like drinking, drugs, daydreaming and debauchery. Anyone who competes with a Jewish achiever is essentially running up against a perfect storm of success traits.

Naturally, many Jews succeed beyond the wildest dreams of their Gentile brethren. At least as many don’t, but it’s the successful ones who grab our attention and incite so many of us to envy. The Jews routinely beat us on our own turf, we moan, so there must be a secret to their success. (If anyone had the chutzpah to publish a book called Jewish Success Secrets, you can bet it would be a runaway bestseller.) We say, "Look at their dominance in Hollywood, the media, the arts, finance, medicine, the academic world! The Jews have it all sewn up!"

You don’t have to be an anti-Semite to see why some people feel threatened by the Jews. Not only have their Hebrew ancestors bequeathed them the awesome sobriquet "God’s chosen people" (scary enough in its own right)... not only do they appear to be unreasonably smart and successful... but many of them also (as Righty observed, in less than civil terms) seem to enjoy making waves as agents of social and cultural change. You can see how paranoid visions of Jewish cabals might swirl in the minds of thwarted Gentiles. Surely those clever Jews must collaborate, collude and even conspire among themselves to beat the goyim. Afraid not, Righty. Their accomplishments appear to be perfectly legitimate.

Jews account for less than 3% of the U.S. population but approximately 60% of its public intellectuals. Righty would look at this statistic and rant about "disproportionate" Jewish cultural influence. But we’re actually looking at an extraordinary collection of individual accomplishments. The truth is that there’s no such sociopolitical entity as "the Jews." They’re not some monolithic cultural force with a unified agenda; Jews are individuals with a profusion of individual goals and beliefs. Some of the most ardent capitalists, communists, socialists, liberals, conservatives and libertarians have been Jewish, so how can "they" possibly be collaborating on plans for a world takeover? How could any group so diverse decide on an agenda (other than sheer self-preservation) without resorting to fisticuffs?

Why have Jews traditionally been so active in radical political and cultural movements? Just look at their history as perennial outsiders, noses pressed against the window of a posh club that repeatedly turned them away at the door. They had to fight their way past prejudice and persecution to secure a table in that club, and along the way they acquired a pervasive sympathy for all who shared their plight. You can’t blame them for having wanted to shake up the system. (We New Moderates want to shake it up, too, in our own way.)

What can Jews do to disarm their anti-Semitic neighbors? First, be open to freer discussions of Jewish topics, without suspicion or rancor. You can’t afford to let anti-Jewish sentiments fester in secrecy until they ripen and burst. Resist the temptation to extract blubbering public apologies from every cranky Gentile celebrity who has something to say about you; to do so only reinforces the damaging stereotype of excessive Jewish power. (Humorous retorts are more effective, anyway; Time’s Joel Stein wrote a gem of a response to Mel Gibson’s infamous drunken rant.) Use the career-destroying term "anti-Semite" more judiciously (Are you listening, Abe Foxman?): reserve it for active Jew-haters, not for fair-minded people who knock Israeli policies or observe the simple realities of Jewish cultural prominence. Keep in mind that those who label you as brainy and successful aren’t necessarily anti-Semites; they might actually be paying you a sincere (if hackneyed) compliment.

Future historians will probably regard our era as a Jewish renaissance; we can’t be expected to whistle and look the other way while we’re living through it. Jews should be proud of their achievers, not disguise them as the children of "Polish" or "Russian" or "Lithuanian" immigrants. (That unofficial but widely observed rule, seen so often in biographical profiles, has always baffled me.) In a New Moderate utopia, Gentiles would be able to note the Jewishness of those achievers without being accused of anti-Semitism -- or succumbing to it.

As for the 24-karat anti-Semites out there, how about calling a permanent moratorium on blaming the Jews for your frustrations? You’re disgracing the rest of us. The Jewish community abounds with both greatness and goodness as well as ordinary human foibles. Remember that Jesus was Jewish (at least on his mother’s side). Don't hold rank-and-file Jews accountable for the often sanctimonious utterances of Jewish leaders; the latter don't always speak for the former. Get your own house in order, and try to imagine what it feels like to have been the world’s favorite scapegoat for 2000 years. "Those Jews" don’t have it nearly as easy as you think.

The New Moderate hopes that the rise of Asians in American society will divert some of the attention from the Jews, if only to show us that no group holds a monopoly on brains or achievement. (Of course, I’d like to see blacks, Hispanics, Poles, Ukrainians and rednecks succeed, too.) Then, finally, the Jewish community might be able to breathe a well-deserved sigh of relief... at least in the United States.

Summary: Let’s break a taboo: yes, Jews are, on average, smarter and more successful than non-Jews; no, they’re not some monolithic bloc intent on taking over the world. They’re individuals. We’ve behaved abominably toward Jews in the past. Today, Jews and Gentiles both need to exercise a little more tolerance.

Political Parties

Righty: The Republican Party is far from perfect, but who else will defend our nation against Islamic terrorists, atheists, Communists, abortionists, antiwar traitors, militant minorities, gays and Hillary Clinton?

Lefty: The Democratic Party is far from perfect, but who else will defend our nation against greedy capitalists, warmongers, gun nuts, pro-lifers, despoilers of the environment, fundamentalist Christian fanatics and George W. Bush?

The New Moderate:

You might be surprised to learn (or maybe not) that our Constitution made no provision for political parties. George Washington was elected president twice without opposition -- not necessarily a good thing, though in his case The New Moderate will make an exception. The two-party system arose only when Alexander Hamilton's Federalist faction (favoring strong central government and urban middle-class interests) decided to duke it out with Jefferson's anti-Federalist faction (favoring the rights of the individual states and agrarian interests). The music went 'round and 'round, and it came out here: with two deeply entrenched, staunchly opposed factions that have pretty much forgotten what they disagree about. They just know that disagreement is essential to their existence, comparable to the eternal dispute over whether toilet paper should be installed so you pull it over or under the roll. Sometimes it seems that our two parties exist primarily to create legislative logjams in the halls of Congress.

Their roles, like just about everything in the past, used to be more clear-cut. Republicans were the party of the elite, representing private enterprise and minimal government; Democrats used to protect the rights of labor and the common man. Today your typical Democrat is a well-heeled, well-educated atheist snob from San Francisco, while the representative Republican is a corn-fed lower-middle class Christian who hails from the Bible Belt. Yet Democrats still embrace impoverished people of color, while bank presidents still vote Republican. Go figure.

Does anyone have a clear notion of what our two parties stand for these days? Righty and Lefty have given you some idea. But both parties are timid, mealy-mouthed, and beholden to the lobbyists who grab their ears and ply them with the promise of favors. Both parties still covet the vast, voiceless moderate vote that would propel them to power. Yet neither party represents the middle.

The New Moderate used to wonder if we'd be better off without political parties at all, since they've devolved into petty, disputatious factions without any underpinnings of real principle. Why not just vote for the best candidate and shun party politics altogether? But I've concluded that parties are a necessary evil: they offer rising political stars the financial and organizational support they need to conduct their campaigns, and they contribute to the ideological tug of war that keeps our political debates lively. Unity is nice when you can get it, but universal assent would be deadening. Even The New Moderate confesses that we need to hear extremist dogma from both sides, if only so we can sift through it, reject the rubbish and formulate our own beautifully reasoned centrist opinions. I just wish the debate were more intelligent and less informed by the expediencies of electoral politics. Oh, and one more thing...

This country is overdue for a new and powerful centrist alternative to dueling Democrats and Republicans. The United States desperately needs a moderate party to represent the vast and sensible middle, whose vote everyone covets but whose interests few have been willing to represent. The new party would operate without favoritism toward the rich or poor, without special-interest agendas, without connections to lobbying groups.

This moderate party (do we call ourselves the Purples?) would erode the Republican base by luring middle-class voters with traditional middle-of-the-road social and economic views... establishment voters who have grown disgusted with obscenely overpaid CEOs and their cronies secretly collaborating with the ruling class on our next national misadventure. It would eat into the Democratic base by grabbing moderate-liberal voters who can't identify with the sniffish sensibilities and shrill rhetoric of the typical Left Coast liberal. It would be a populist party without rabid demagogues... a middle-of-the-road party without complacency... and above all a party that strives to tell the truth, without euphemisms or political spin, because it has nothing to hide from its potential voter base. It would actually improve the Republican and Democratic parties by forcing them to be true to their roots rather than compromise their principles to win moderate votes. The new party would be winning those votes, of course. I think its success would be as desirable as a happy marriage, as essential as breathing and almost as inevitable as a white Christmas in Lapland. The red and the blue have dominated our politics long enough. It's time to march for Purple Power! Any volunteers?

Summary: Political parties are a necessary evil. We desperately need a new moderate party in the U.S. to combat the corruption and polarizing influence of the Republicans and Democrats.

Gays

Righty: Homosexuality is an abomination unto God; the Bible tells us so, and the Bible is the ultimate authority. Gay people commit beastly sins of the flesh, and for the most part they look and act like freaks. Real men don’t worship Liza Minnelli, talk with their wrists or gush about exquisite drapes. Real women don’t look like truckers. Gays lead an unnatural, abhorrent way of life, but we still love them and would accept them if they changed their wicked ways. All they need is Jesus and a little forced deprogramming. But until then, let’s keep them away from our children and in the closet where they belong.

Lefty: They’re here, they’re queer... get used to it! Gay people were born that way; they have no choice in deciding their sexual orientation. Discriminating against them in any form is no different from racism. Homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality: you see gay dogs, birds and sheep. Gays have a right to marry each other and raise children; in fact, they generally make more enlightened parents than the average obtuse breeder couple. Gay people have shaped our theater, music, art and aesthetics; without them our cities would be dull, dull, dull! We should celebrate their lifestyle, welcome their gay pride parades and organizations, and encourage our own children to explore their sexuality. How about ballet lessons for your son, Righty?

The New Moderate:

Gay people deserve to be treated as the first-class citizens they clearly are, without derision or prejudice. It must have been intolerable, in a less sensitive age, for gays to put up with all the withering innuendoes cast in their direction. How did they listen to the snide aspersions, the pansy and fairy jokes, without going psycho?

Still, The New Moderate must dispute a few of their claims. Is homosexuality natural? Sure, but so is color-blindness. So is malaria. The "naturalness" of gay sex doesn’t necessarily make it normal or praiseworthy any more than its minority status makes it sinful or perverted. It just is what it is: a departure from mainstream sexual behavior.

The claim that gay people are born gay is a half-truth. Studies of identical twins have shown that if one of the pair is gay, the other twin has roughly a 50% chance of playing for the same team -- well above the 5% estimate for the general population, but still open to non-genetic factors (including parental influence and personal choice). Probably Kinsey’s sexual continuum theory remains the most valid: those of us born at one end or the other of the spectrum are essentially captives of innate sexual desires, while those who fall somewhere between the two camps can teeter in either direction (or both).

Yes, homosexual acts have been a fact of life for ages (just ask Socrates), but the notion of gay lifestyles is a relative novelty. The New Moderate has never understood what liking musicals has to do with liking men. Do men who hunt for antiques need to come clean about their sexuality? I might be a little dense, but I just don’t see how a lust for vintage furniture equates to a lust for studly males. For example, I’m a fan of old movies and Art Deco architecture. (You got a problem wid dat?) Does The New Moderate harbor a lavender gene that makes him easy prey for the charms of Una Merkel or the Empire State Building? Nobody can be 100% sure, including me, but my experiences and desires tell me no. In fact, I’d like to see an end to such cultural stereotyping before all the arts become the province, by default, of gay men.

I suspect that because of such stereotyping, most "regular guys" studiously avoid genteel pursuits that used to be enjoyed by heterosexual gentlemen in the past. The trend is comparable to white flight from urban centers, and it’s just as hazardous to our cultural health. Why shouldn’t heterosexual men be able to study art history or confess an affection for operetta without raising eyebrows both gay and straight?

Gays should probably get used to the idea that they will always be a rather exotic minority, at least outside of liberal urban neighborhoods. Extreme gay and lesbian styles and mannerisms still look outlandish to a lot of straight people and even many gays. The "in your face" approach doesn’t win friends. In fact, gays don’t help their cause by referring to themselves as a "community," unless they aspire to live in separate gay ghettos. Our culture is already ghettoized enough.

The marriage issue is a thorny one: yes, gays are entitled to sanctified unions and the attendant benefits, but do we dare call them marriages? I don’t see how gay marriage can threaten heterosexual marriage; the decline of religion, the empowering of women, and the white middle-class aversion to procreating have been much more effective in that department. It’s just that marriage between two men or two women still strikes some of us as a little bizarre, a wry parody of traditional domestic life. (Do gays, who for decades have embraced a uniquely stylized bohemian existence, really aspire to life as Ozzie and Harriet?) We’ve only recently come to accept gayness in our midst; it might take a bit longer before most of us get used to the idea of attending a wedding shower for our friend Brad... and referring to Brad’s mate as his "husband" -- or worse yet, his "wife."

Is gay marriage just another example of the decadent silliness of our culture... another depressing milestone for a soft society headed into oblivion? Or is it a legitimate idea that would strengthen the institution of marriage as the ideal estate for all entwined couples? Something tells me that it’s both at once. My instincts oppose gay marriage; my sense of fairness obliges me to support it.

At least gay marriage might eliminate the objectionable use of the word "partner," which always poses the uncomfortable question of whether the person is a professional or sexual affiliate. For that matter, The New Moderate would like to see the word "gay" restored to its former innocence as a synonym for all that is lighthearted, festive and conducive to joy. What was wrong with "homosexual"?

Summary: Gays deserve acceptance and equal rights, but they can’t expect everyone to embrace their lifestyles or the idea of gay marriage.

Euphemisms

Righty: Euphemisms? They’re not for me. Like all hardworking, God-fearing, pro-life Christians who support family values and the Patriot Act, I favor unvarnished language that tells it straight.

Lefty: Euphemisms? A truly diverse, gender-neutral, pro-choice, humanist society (like the kind we advocate) has no need to hide its progressive values behind deceptive terminology.

The New Moderate:

Euphemisms are elaborate verbal disguises for ideas that your opponents might find unpalatable. They conceal your political agenda behind soft-focus phrases and hazy idealism. Who among us could be opposed to "family values," "diversity" or "affirmative action"? Would anyone other than a suicide bomber object to a "pro-life" philosophy? Or "pro-choice," for that matter?

By using euphemisms instead of hot-potato terminology, ideologues like to think they can sneak their controversial ideas past their opponents’ radar. Why talk about reverse discrimination when you can say "affirmative action"? Why use ugly terms like "pro-abortion" and "anti-abortion" when "pro-choice" and "pro-life" sound so much sweeter? Nearly everyone hates atheists, but who would deny the renaissance appeal of "humanists"?

The problem with euphemisms is, of course, their fundamental dishonesty. No enlightened moderate should tolerate such wanton abuse of the language in the service of extremist agendas (or even moderate agendas). Before you know it, the government will start referring to unprovoked wars as exercises in "spreading freedom." They could even pass a bill to curtail our civil liberties and call it "the Patriot Act" or some such nonsense. Keep your eyes open for clever euphemisms and treat them as a deadly menace.

Summary: Euphemisms are calculated to conceal potentially unpopular extremist political agendas. They’re fundamentally dishonest and should be sniffed out by all thinking moderates.

Death Penalty

Righty: An eye for an eye, a life for a life. Anyone who deliberately takes a life deserves to have his own life taken. Anything less would stink of injustice. If someone murdered your own child (and everyone is somebody's child), you can bet you'd want to see the murderer die. Not only die, but die miserably. As it is, our executions are swift and humane. And it's not as if we recommend the death penalty for stealing a loaf of bread. It's odd that Lefty and his friends think nothing of killing an innocent fetus, but they'll rise up to defend an abominable sociopath who rapes and murders children. (What have they got against children, anyway?) We have to use the worst criminals as public examples -- both as a deterrent to similar crimes and as an assertive statement that such behavior will never be tolerated.

Lefty: The state has no right to take a life, even the life of a serial murderer. Think about the illogic of it: we're killing people to show that killing people is wrong. Think about the deeper human issues: people can't help becoming what they become. People are driven to kill by forces that are often beyond our comprehension. (The fact that people still murder is the best evidence that the death penalty is not a deterrent.) And think of all the prisoners on death row who have been found innocent when the real murderer finally confesses. More disturbingly, think of all the innocent prisoners who have gone to their executions because the real murderer was never found. Death is too serious a matter to be decided by a jury. The United States is the only industrialized Western nation that hasn't abolished capital punishment. This is an international disgrace. Even Turkey, Angola and Cambodia have discarded the death penalty. Why is it that people like Righty get bent out of shape over the abortion of undeveloped, unconscious embryos, but they'll cry for the blood of a suspected murderer who may not even have done the deed?

The New Moderate:

Righty and Lefty both make compelling arguments here. So where does The New Moderate stand on capital punishment? Let's keep it as the ultimate penalty for only the most egregious crimes: for wanton murderers who laugh in the faces of the victims' families, and for traitors whose defection directly causes the deaths of their countrymen. Such people don't deserve to live, even in confinement and misery. (Convicted Muslim terrorists do deserve to live in confinement and misery, if only because they're desperate to die as glorious martyrs.)

Nobody should ever be executed on the basis of testimony from witnesses. Even confessions are often invalid -- either because of the way they're extracted under sweltering overhead lights or because of the loopy mental condition of the suspect. The evidence must be as incontrovertible as a smoking gun or at least a smoking videotape.

But how can The New Moderate justify the death penalty at all? How can someone who refuses to eat veal condone the execution of a fellow human? Because veal calves are young and innocent. On the other hand, some criminals are so perfidious and their deeds so foul that only their executions can cleanse the air. Life behind bars would simply be a long and tedious anticlimax, like a bad play that rambles on for 37 acts. Has society really been served by keeping Charles Manson alive and healthy since 1969? Aren't you tired of his incessant smirking and gloating, his outrageous self-assurance, his damnable confidence that he remains an underground cult figure and evil philosopher who could still lure worshipful groupies to his side? Doesn't it irk you that he's more famous than you or I... that he merits a lengthy, scrupulously annotated article in Wikipedia? It should.

Would I take pleasure in seeing someone like Charles Manson transformed into an instant corpse? No, not at all. I hate to see any healthy living organism cut down before its time. It's a tragedy that Manson didn't feel the same way.

Summary: Keep the death penalty, but reserve it for only the most heinous crimes that can be proven independently of eyewitness testimony.

Iraq

Righty: The U.S. was completely justified in its invasion of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a monstrous dictator who massacred his own people and threatened the stability of the Middle East. We had solid evidence that he possessed weapons of mass destruction, and the only reason we didn't find them was because he hid or destroyed them. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, we had to do whatever we could to stop Islamic aggression against the West. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was the most powerful force in the Middle East, capable of knocking out Israel and destabilizing the entire region. We know that Saddam funded terrorist activities and communicated with al-Qaeda. We simply couldn't risk letting him furnish the terrorists with weapons. On top of that, Iraq continually violated the terms of the peace agreement following its defeat in the 1991 Gulf War. We would have been justified in invading Iraq for that reason alone. But when you add Saddam's transgressions and the need to stabilize the Middle East following 9/11, the justification for the war becomes indisputable. And after all, we won the actual war inside of a few months; you can't blame Bush if those fanatical insurgents refuse to surrender. You have to agree that we're safer today than before the war. Those jihadists haven't been able to pull off an attack on American soil since 9/11, thanks to our vigilant president and his administration.

Lefty: Don't get me started. The invasion of Iraq has been the single greatest foreign policy disaster in U.S. history: more insanely wrongheaded than Vietnam, and ultimately more costly in terms of what we've lost. And what have we lost? Not just billions of dollars and thousands of lives. We've squandered the good will of the allies who flocked to our side in the aftermath of 9/11; we've lost our reputation as a force for justice in the world. Iraq wasn't responsible for 9/11; can you understand that much? Bush pulled a classic bait-and-switch: "We misunderestimated that slippery rascal Osama bin Laden and couldn't ketch him, so how 'bout goin' after ol' Saddam Hussein, who had it in for my Daddy?" He and his neocon ventriloquists lied to drum up support for a totally unprovoked war in which the U.S. played the disgraceful role of wanton aggressor. And the astounding thing is that the nation fell for it -- including Democratic senators and representatives who must forever be held accountable. The war in Iraq has not only failed to bring stability to the region... it has actually fueled the Islamic jihad movement with new recruits and intensified animosity toward the West (and especially us). Within Iraq, our invasion has propelled dueling religious factions toward bloody civil war. What profound evil we've unleashed on the world! What a nightmare of a conflict, with no end in sight! We must withdraw from Iraq immediately. I'd move to Canada except for the fact that my dissenting voice is sorely needed to rouse this nation of sheep.

The New Moderate:

There's nothing immoderate about denouncing this sorry excuse for a war. Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks. In fact, it was one of the more secular and stable Islamic states in the region. We had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was planning to equip terrorists with his elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Did the Bush administration think we'd quash worldwide terrorism simply by toppling an ornery dictator in Iraq? Or that our invasion would make the Islamic world safe for democracy, which would then spread virally from Morocco to Indonesia? Whatever the real motive for the invading Iraq (oil? Israeli security? Bush family vendetta?), wiping out Islamic terrorism doesn't seem to have ranked especially high on the list. The sad irony is that terrorists never gravitated to Iraq until we invaded it. Now, of course, the country is Terrorist Central.

You can't defeat terrorists by conventional military tactics. (When will our leaders awaken to this obvious fact?) Terrorists have no territory, no capital to occupy, no infrastructure to destroy. We're at war with scattered fanatics who live in places like Germany and England as well as Syria and Afghanistan, and we'd have to kill them all to win. Even if we did accomplish that impossible feat, two new terrorists would rise up for every one we've snuffed out.

The only way to beat terrorists, aside from foiling their attempts to attack us, is to make them hate us less. You don't soften their hatred by bombing the bejeesus out of their kinsmen. In the Iraq War we essentially took a baseball bat to a hornet's nest and expected the hornets to like it. We'll be feeling those stings for a long time to come.

So what happens now? Do we pull out overnight and let Iraq disintegrate into full-scale civil war? Do we stay and force our military personnel to fend off suicide bombers for the next fifty years, while our overextended empire slowly bleeds to death amid the ruins of Ur and Babylon? The one glimmer of hope that emerged during this war -- the one moment that caused me to reconsider the ghastliness of Bush's Folly -- was the sight of Iraqis risking their lives to vote in their first free election. We could let those voters decide if they want us to stay. (If the Iraqis give us the thumbs down, we'd be able to vamoose without guilt.)

One widely suggested (but less-than-ideal) solution would be to partition the country and let each faction have its own territory. The world has been reverting to tribalism since the end of the Cold War, and all tribes need a patch of land to call their own. But the balkanization of Iraq would simply open another bloody floodgate. (Remember Yugoslavia?)

The ultimate solution -- the one we New Moderates dare to dream of -- is for a reformist Islamic faction to emerge and put an end to the insanity within their religious ranks. But we can't wait that long, and neither can Iraq. If Iraq is truly to belong to the Iraqis, I say we let the people decide who fights the remaining fight.

Summary: The war in Iraq was (and will remain) a colossal blunder, but now that the damage is done we should let the Iraqis decide if we stay or go.

Lobbying

Righty: In a society dominated by left-wing media, we need the influence of lobbies in Congress to protect the interests of Christians, gun-owners, Israel, oil companies, unborn children and other groups whose rights would otherwise be trampled by the opposition.

Lefty: In a society dominated by the religious right, we need the influence of lobbies in Congress to protect the interests of women, gays, minorities, secularists, environmentalists, the Pro-Choice movement and other groups whose rights would otherwise be trampled by the opposition.

The New Moderate:

Lobbyists are little more than educated pimps working on behalf of special interest groups. I don’t know how they ever insinuated their way into the halls of Congress, but The New Moderate would like to show them the way out. If our elected representatives need to be educated in matters of policy, let them read Policy Review. Better yet, let them talk to their constituents.

Lobbies use money, promises, pressure and privilege to exert undue influence in the House and Senate. They essentially own most of our Congressional representatives, courtesy of thinly veiled bribes that fund re-election campaigns and pet projects. And they’re a self-perpetuating phenomenon, because each group makes its opposition group necessary. The reason we need an environmental lobby is, at least in part, because of the powerful oil lobby. If we eliminated the latter, we might not need the former.

The legislative branch of our government is supposed to be run by representatives of the people. Lobbies push the agendas of special interests, frequently at the expense of the public good. They’re a divisive, unsavory, illegitimate influence and should be banned. All of them. Period.

Summary: How did these professional influencers ingratiate themselves with our elected representatives? Toss them all out!

Feminism

Righty: Women are designed by nature to bear children and nurture them. You can't fight anatomy, but the feminists like to think they know better than God. (Did it ever occur to them that most women are happy staying at home to raise their kids?) The women's movement has been a disaster for Western societies: upsetting the natural division of labor that existed for thousands of years, creating a glut of qualified talent in the job marketplace, unleashing an endless wave of anger and contempt upon innocent men, and -- worst of all -- transforming women from charming, eager-to-please helpmates into bitchy, belligerent, foul-mouthed adversaries. The shrillness is deafening. No wonder so many American men are looking for Russian mail-order brides.

Lefty: We should all bow down and thank the farsighted sisters who had the cojones to stand up for women's rights. For thousands of years women had been the slaves and playthings of male brutes: routinely forced into submission as domestics, denied basic human rights, kept barefoot and pregnant throughout their prime years, and cruelly deprived of meaningful careers. Women are able and entitled to perform any work that men can do, and they should sue if denied the opportunity. Women must take control of the educational process so that they can be steered into science, engineering and other traditionally male-dominated fields. We must radically reshape our patriarchal, phallocentric system so that women can prevail over the male power elite and its rapist mentality. The fight is not yet finished.

The New Moderate:

Feminism, like most other isms, is a good idea gone berserk. Who could deny, forty years ago, that women deserved to be taken seriously? That they needed to be liberated, at least a good part of the time, from mandatory domestic drudgery? That they were entitled to pursue distinguished and remunerative careers without having to choose between work and family?

So far, so good. Any man of civilized instincts would have been receptive to such a movement. Most of us hadn't realized how systematically we had been taking women for granted as personal assistants and bedtime snuggle-bunnies. We simply needed to have our eyes opened.

The feminist leadership opened our eyes, all right -- and then proceeded to gouge them out. As with most "progressive" movements, the extremists commandeered the vessel. What a shrill, venomous and repellent lot they were! What bilious, over-the-top hatred they spewed at the hapless male of the species! Men were oppressors, exploiters and rapists -- from the cradle, of course. Gender differences were merely a patriarchal social construct imposed upon society by insecure males. (Of course, men were evil and oppressive -- but other than that the sexes were identical.)

What did these man-eaters think they would gain by savaging the very people they needed to persuade? If they hoped to alienate an entire generation of men, they probably succeeded. The vituperative rhetoric droned on for upward of thirty years -- enough to turn a reasonable moderate like me into a cranky adversary. I grew weary of the incessant man-bashing, the automatic denigration of everything male. I resented having to feel guilty about crimes I never committed.

The real revolution had already taken place during the late 1960s and early 1970s, as women enrolled at formerly male colleges, graduated from law and medical schools in vastly increased numbers, and routinely entered the workforce as well-compensated professionals. So why did we require another thirty years of divisive rhetoric? Why, even as we entered the new millennium, were overheated feminists still calling for the elimination of "sexist" words like history?

My theory is that some people thrive on anger, as long as it's focused on an object outside themselves. The radical feminists essentially used men as lightning rods for their hostility; we absorbed their destructive energy and rendered it harmless. Harmless to the feminists, anyway. I have to wonder, as should most men, if serving as the recipient of all that negative energy has been hazardous to my health.

But men weren't the only victims of the feministas. Women who chose to stay home and indulge their maternal instincts were derided as ninnies and counter-revolutionaries. (Amazing how a movement of, by, and for women habitually rained contempt on feminine traits and values.) And many of the women who manned the barricades to enter the workforce began to wonder if their brilliant careers were worth the price: ridiculous hours, grinding stress, estrangement from the home front, sacrifice of personal pleasures... in short, an empty emotional bank account. Women were beginning to hate their jobs as much as men always did.

It should always trouble a moderate soul when a good idea goes berserk. (Think of the French Revolution and its bloody excesses, or the abuses of Commie-hunters during the McCarthy era.) In the future, we New Moderates have to guard against the perversion of fundamentally sound principles by rabid ideologues. When the extremists take command of an otherwise worthy movement, we should make every effort to dump them overboard. We're more important than we realize.

Summary: The women's movement was a worthy cause dominated by strident ideologues, who led it astray and used it as an excuse for relentless man-bashing.

God

Righty: God is our creator, our shepherd and our only salvation. We are all sinners, and those who reject God are doomed to everlasting punishment. Therefore we must bring all of humanity into His fold. The Holy Scriptures are the literal word of God, and they contain everything we need to know about life and human conduct. Heaven and hell are actual places; God sees all our sins and will damn our wretched souls unless we bend to His will. Yet He is a loving father who answers our prayers and delivers us from evil. We live in wicked times, and we must stand steadfast against the godless commercialism and decadence that have polluted our culture. We must do whatever is necessary to create a government founded on scriptural principles, so that everyone (and that includes you, Lefty) would be compelled to live by God’s law.

Lefty: The pathetic fools who believe their holy scriptures to the letter are not simply ignorant and deluded; they’re belligerent fanatics who would kill us to save our souls. Save us from what? From the eternal torments promised in their scriptures to all unbelievers. If the scriptures are full of human errors and embellishments, as they obviously are, then nothing in them is believable and the entire faith must collapse like a house of cards. If the scriptures are false, then God is a myth. Surely we’ve progressed far enough over the past few thousand years to abandon those patriarchal Middle Eastern faiths that have existed primarily to perpetuate fairy tales, subjugate their believers and keep them in a state of abject guilt simply for being human. Let’s get real: God is a human fabrication and his devout followers (like Righty) are a menace. Belief in God and the supernatural has no place in an enlightened society, and it must be eradicated before it destroys us.

The New Moderate:

Let’s get this much straight: nobody knows the true nature or will of God. All scriptures mix history, myth, tradition, revelation, dogma, wisdom, fantasy and eloquent guesswork to the extent that it becomes impossible to know the truth. Any of us could write a book and claim that it was divinely inspired.

Because we have no proof of God’s existence, we’re left with faith. We can believe the scriptures if we like, or we can choose not to believe them. We can believe in some parts and reject other parts. But keep this in mind: our beliefs have absolutely no bearing on whether God exists, what form he might take, whether he cares about us as individuals -- or whether he is a she. If God exists, he is who he is regardless of what we think he is (or even if we think he isn’t). If God doesn’t exist, no amount of preaching and genuflecting will bring him into being. We humans still believe we have the power to create God in our image or banish him from the universe if he no longer suits our purpose. What colossal arrogance!

Those who live by the literal dictates of holy scripture have equipped themselves with a sturdy moral compass that guides them through the tangled wilderness of earthly existence. Yet they’re also turning their backs on numerous pleasures of this too-transient life, not the least of which is the simple guiltless joy of being human. More seriously, they risk falling into the deadly grip of fanaticism, obsession and even madness. (The New Moderate shudders to think about the number of people who have died in agony at the hands of true believers.) Religious fanatics have done more than anyone else to turn the educated world against religion.

Those who automatically reject God because they reject the scriptures are making a fatal error in logic: they’ve neglected to consider that God might exist independently of the scriptures, in some form unknown to us, the way a novelist is unknown to the characters he has imagined. Forget about the image of God as a bearded Middle Eastern patriarch; he might be an indwelling life force, the source of energy and creativity, the voice of your soul, the inventor of atoms, the invisible moving hand behind the unfolding universe. Or not. But those who succumb to materialism and its enticements are exiling themselves from the infinitely rich life of the spirit. One of the beauties of religion is its aura of unapproachable mystery, the glimmer of light behind a veil of clouds.

If we require a less mysterious God, why not deduce his true nature by observing the universe he created? (I’m surprised that none of the major religions ever considered this approach.) For example, we can see that God must love rats, termites, cockroaches, viruses and people, because he made them so adaptable (and therefore so plentiful). He heaps misery on loners and rewards those who create strong social bonds, so he’s probably something of an extrovert. God has to be fairly enthusiastic about sex, or he wouldn’t have granted it such a prominent place in our life-cycles. He causes the strong to prey on the weak, which would imply that he’s less than kind. But he also makes sure that the weak outbreed their predators, so at least he’s fair and balanced.

All right -- these are just whimsical speculations, but they make more sense than many of the outlandish tales we’ve come to accept as holy writ. Why would anyone go to war over rigidly held interpretations of an unknowable divinity? Our continuing attachment to ancient dogmas seems as mysterious as God himself.

Still, we seem to have been implanted with a hunger for divine assistance. God might not answer our prayers like some celestial Santa Claus, but faith in a higher power -- even without certainty -- can make us feel less alone and miserable during our ride here on Planet Earth. It can boost our immune systems and our longevity, as studies have shown. In the end, how do you lose by giving the supreme deity the benefit of the doubt? Just don’t tell us that he caused your Google stock to triple so you could remodel your kitchen.

Summary: God is who he is (or isn’t) regardless of what we believe about him. All scriptures are factually suspect; we can come to God only by faith.