It is the inevitable effect of religion on public policy that makes it a matter of public concern. Advocates of religiosity extol the virtues or moral habits that religion is supposed to instill in us. But we should be equally concerned with the intellectual habits it discourages.

What might once have been called whining is now exalted as a process of asserting selfhood; self-absorption is regarded as a form of self-expression.

For the most part, executions happen in obscurity. If people did hear about executions, if they were publicized, even televised, I fear more would enjoy them than be repelled by them.

Interactivity has the virtue of democracy, conferring upon everyone with access to a computer the right and opportunity to be heard, but it's also saddled with democracy's vice - a tendency to assume that everyone who has a right to be heard has something to say that's worth hearing.

In this climate - with belief in guardian angels and creationism becoming commonplace - making fun of religion is as risky as burning a flag in an American Legion hall.

The scarcest resource these days is reason. What's certainly striking about American culture today is the great hostility toward science and the decline of respect for rational scientific thinking. People seem to think that we are ruled by the scientific method and that we overvalue reason. If there was ever a period when we overvalued reason, I think that it was probably extremely brief. What I see now is a great deal of superstition, as much superstition as there has ever been. There are probably more people who believe in guardian angels than who understand the law of gravity.

Like heterosexuality, faith in immaterial realities is popularly considered essential to individual morality.