With the Economy Slumping, Values Voters Are Caring Less About Values

Steve - Just heard you on NPR and while I liked your points about the movie Religulous I am disapointed that you let your interviewer turn the piece into a negative commentary about Sarah Palin. You helped it along by saying (again) that there were "many" questions you would like Sarah Palin to answer about her faith...I thought you were there to provide an alternative view to Mr. Maher.

Why is this so important for you? It is not enough to know that she is a church-going scripture-based Christian woman who prays about things in her life and others pray with her and for her? What evil truth do you think you will uncover? Are you afraid she believes the end times will come during her lifetime, thereby buying into the Bill Maher theory that this is somehow dangerous?

Your intense interest in the nuts and bolts of her beliefs makes me think you do not support her anyway and are trying to find a theological reason to support your view.

Some words on Bill Maher and his "film." As you heard on the Fresh Air piece, these two obtained much of the content in the movie -- interviews of people and their faith -- in a somewhat deceitful way -- by not informing interviewees their voices would be used to make fun of religion. This is a perfect commentary on Maher -- he has no belief in God therefore no higher moral code guides his behavior, which is why he laughed when describing how the interviews were obtained. We should all be so enlightened as he.

But more importantly, Maher confuses religion with faith in God. He cites the pain and suffering and death, strange behavior, weird customs, and all manner of abnormal and irrational actions as proof that religion is silly and dangerous. He's right -- religion is a creation of man, not God, therefore extremely flawed. To secularists religion and faith in God are the same, but they are not. Religion is a human byproduct of an expression of faith in God -- man's attempt to create rules of worship. God did not establish Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopaleans, Buddhists, Muslims, Mormons, Methodists or Baptists, and certainly didn't intend to inspire the wars, hate and death that may have accompanied conflicts among these groups.

He DID set apart his people Israel, instructed their behavior with the Law, and told them to expect a Messiah. In the New Testament the Lord sent his son Jesus, who among other things swept aside the Law that Israel's Pharisees had turned into an instrument of power over its citizens. So in fact rather than establishing a "religion," Jesus turned upside down the prevailing "religion" of the day, because it was the Jewish Law taken to unintended extremes.

The fact that we as humans have ruined pure faith in God by morphing our faith into rules of observance, liturgical standards, nuances of what we believe in ("cardinal" sins or "ordinal" sins), whether you eat meat on Fridays, whether women can serve in the clergy, etc etc etc, is NO REASON to attack the basis of faith in God. What might be ridiculous to Mr. Maher is HOW people express their faith in God, and if that is true, even as a scripture-believing Christian, I agree with him.

What Mr. Maher seeks to do is further his religion - secular humanism.

Moral values are a luxury that people worry about when they can afford to, when they have nothing more important to worry about, like the economy.

It is no accident that the first thing to go overboard in the Depression was Prohibition.

Just wanted to point out that these "12 tribes" categories don't contain everyone - where do the theologically conservative (read: orthodox), socially aware (consistent pro-life: anti-abortion, anti-war; anti-poverty; pro-universal healthcare; pro-immigration) folks go? Hmmmm.....Not everyone fits in your boxes.