Of course, there's no surprise, really. Norris, a columnist these days for WorldNetDaily, loves conservative evangelical candidates -- see Huckabee, Mike. And Moore loves bearded guys who have power over life and death and can move the Earth -- see God, Almighty.

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Here in America, for all of our democratic ideals, we're more than happy to treat our leader like royalty, so long as he has the stature and dignity to deserve our adoration. Because, just as a bumbling frat boy who stumbles on his words and blithely drops bombs on nonbelievers can make the entire world look like a hardened, messy, incomprehensible hell, a graceful, eloquent man seems to magically transform our planet into a shiny, hopeful place populated by humble, pure-hearted people who have the courage to believe that they'll make it through the darkness. Even the atheists among us relish the sense that some eternal, celestial force has finally descended, to cure our blindness and set us free.

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So far, only 3,000 names have been signed to the "True Women" manifesto. (Hmm, "True Woman." Is that anything like "Real American"?) But they're hoping to get 100,000 women to pledge their faith to a life of "biblical femininity."

According to the manifesto, a True Woman is called to "affirm and encourage men as they seek to express godly masculinity" and responds "humbly to male leadership" demonstrating "noble submission to authority." Still hesitant to sign your name? How about the belief that "Selfish insistence on personal rights is contrary to the spirit of Christ." If that sounds like a page out of pre-feminist history, that's the point.

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If that sounds too extreme and aggressive to describe the smiling Huck -- who introduced himself to the country as "a conservative, but I'm not angry about it" -- then consider how he explained his urge to revamp the nation's founding document. At a public forum on the eve of the Michigan primary, while mocking Republican opponents who don't want to append a "marriage amendment" or a "life amendment" to the Constitution, he said: "I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards."

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The simplest response is to say that science and religion have nothing to do with each other -- to claim, as Stephen Jay Gould famously did, that they are "non-overlapping magisteria." But perhaps that response seems too easy, a politically expedient ploy to pacify both scientists and mainstream Christians. Maybe evolutionary theory, along with modern physics, does pose a serious challenge to religious belief. To put it another way, how can an intellectually responsible person of faith justify that faith -- and even belief in a personal God -- after Darwin and Einstein?

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The most egregious offender against basic American civics today is Huckabee, who told a group of students at Liberty University, the center of higher learning founded by the late Jerry Falwell, that his sudden rise in the Iowa polls is an act of God. He compared the improvement in his political fortunes to the New Testament miracle of the loaves and fishes. He wasn't joking, as both his demeanor and his words demonstrated.

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Those of us brought up on the Bible remember the parable of the rich man in hell and the beggar Lazarus in paradise, and yet we still do enjoy fine restaurants and four-star hotels -- though we see flames licking at the windows -- because it takes a hardscrabble upbringing to truly appreciate the home beautiful, the exquisite salad, the bison rib-eye in mushroom sauce, the braised tomatoes. As Emily Dickinson said, "To comprehend a nectar requires sorest need."

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By now, pretty much anyone who cares (and just about everyone who has a small child, judging by the boffo box office numbers this past weekend) knows that global warming is the driving plot device of the animated movice "Ice Age 2." As allegories for our current climate-change times, it's about as obvious as a melting glacier in Greenland. Our lovable motley crew of neolithic beasts live in a valley precariously protected from towering masses of water by a huge ice dam. Temperatures are rising; doom threatens. And that's about it for a story line, aside from whether or not two neurotic mammoths are ever going to get it on.

But really, what more does one need for a passable narrative than the threat of an all-consuming apocalypse? Despite its plot weaknesses, "Ice Age 2" is amusing, especially if you are an 8-year-old boy.

However, if you are a 43-year-old secular humanist, you might be perplexed. Early on in the movie, an evil vulture cruelly informs the animals of the valley that, yes, a great flood is coming. But if the animals can get to the other side of the valley, there is a boat waiting that will save them.

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But Trible has sought out the exceptions, or at least the reinterpretations, starting with Eve, who she argues is an active participant in the story of the downfall of Eden. (Hmm, yeah, definitely active. But not so much in a good way.) Trible points out that at least Eve was the perceptive partner when it came to her observations about that tempting apple tree. Adam "just eats  He doesn't speak out," Trible says.

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Rarely has the contrast between the rhetoric of the religious right and the behavior of its leaders been so starkly exposed as in the Abramoff scandal. The most obvious example was the manipulation of Christian activists in Louisiana and Texas by Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition, who said he was helping them fight gambling when he was actually using them to promote Indian casinos (and to make a few million bucks for himself).

That episode alone should have alerted honest Christians to the moral rot within the Republican leadership that professed to represent their interests. But there is of course much more evidence of the religious cynicism of Abramoff and his cronies.

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-- Book of Me, Chapter 2, Verse 23

When I hopped on the No. 7 train to Shea Stadium to join several thousand people to hear what was ostensibly the 86-year-old Billy Graham's last series of sermons, I was expecting an old-time Christian revival, but that wasn't what I got. I was also expecting the fiery orator I grew up with as a Southern Baptist evangelical in small-town Alabama, but I didn't exactly get that, either.

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