hatecrimesreligion

There's nothing really new here. Religion haters, often pretending to be smarter and more sophisticated than their backward neighbors, have been around a long time. The village atheist was a role featured in many small towns of the early 20th century. Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis, author of Main Street (and a neighbor of my grandmother in Saulk Centre, MN, the real Gopher Prairie at which "Red" Lewis sneered, and left behind a lot of angry former friends) penned Elmer Gantry, his second most—famous boThe article is well worth reading, because outright hatred of religion seems to be quite on the rise in the United States. You hear it in comparisons of evangelical Christianity with Wahhabism, quite a commonplace on the left. I sometimes even sense a bit of it in ostensible clergy of a leftist bent who affirm that religion is about "believeing something" without going any further in specifying what exactly they have in mind. There's nothing the cloak of protective coloration by denaturing religion into a pious call for a belief in something, no matter what that is. Not exactly atheism, but not exactly belief in God either. ok, on the subject. (Only after he was dead, and so were the people identifiable as characters in Main Street, did Saulk Centre forgive Red, and errect the Sinclair Lewis Museum, right by the interchange on Interstate 94.) Although the Post article by David Segal does attempt to be fair, there is a faint aroma of condescension wafting through asides like this