Larry, Welcome to the Lake.

Ian, Thank you for Hosting today’s Book Salon.

Hello, Ian,
good to not see you

Hi Mr. beinhart and Ian
thanks for coming to the Lake.

I loved it – and emerged a born again atheist, with a revived lack of faith in the supernatural – and a renewed faith in the integrity of ordinary people.

that’s a good starting point, tell us more.

i didn’t mean that in a rude way, i meant good to communicate w/you although there is no visual reference

Bless you Saint Larry.. This book is set up almost as a theological thought experiment on ethics and religion. Did you construct it that way, or was there some event in the (Sur)real world out there that inspired you?

Ian and Larry, welcome to FDL.

Larry, I am a lifelong fan of mystery/detective fiction and have to say, Salvation Boulevard did just what that type should do, it grabbed me from the opening chapter.

Was there any specific action or person that inspired this?

Larry’s book is demonstrating, in fictional form, that while religion does not preclude ethical behavior, it is certainly not a prerequisite for it. And it is adventurous to have the disbelieving protagonist dead before the book begins, and have a born again Christian carry the burden of the tale.

Hi Elliot
Salvation Boulevard proceeds on two levels.
One is a mystery thriller. The narrator/protagaonist is a detective, a born again Christian
He’s hired by a defense attorney, at PI’s always are
He thinks his job is to find out if the client did it, and then, if not, who might have.
that’s the detective novel.
There are two other characters, the corpse, the dead atheist, but he’s left a book behind and if there;s anything we know from the bible, it’s that dead people have a lot of power if they leave books behind.
the other is a powerful mega church pastor.
they’re in a war for souls
which boils down, ilke the story of Job, to one soul,
that of the detective.
in his journey he is stripped of practically everything, faith, family, finances, and has to come to terms – for himself – with what is right and where the meaning of life comes from.
wow! heavy, man!

Hi, Dakine;
actually this is the most made-up of all my books.
of anything i’ve written. it’s actual fiction. usually i drag a friend, a wife, a girlfriend, my mother in, and then mix and match them with some stranger and come up with a half fiction. but this was from whole cloth.

And he has a whale of time… sorry couldn’t resist the Jonah reference. James Morrow did a play based on Jonah with some of the same burden of argument. God comes out pretty petty and bossy in the actual book!

from saint larry,
actually i was called a new prophet by tony campolo, who is a serious evangelical of a liberal sort

Since the book that inspired Wag The Dog became a movie (and became a cultural touchstone for politics), do you have any casting recommendations for the movie version of Salvation Boulevard?

but i don’t let it go to my head, just to my publicist as i scream, do something with this!
remarkably the book seems to touch a chord with believes quite as much or more than with non believers.

I hope as much profit as prophets. In most traditions, prophets come to a sticky end

the book is optioned. the producer is cathy schulman of crash, the director/screenwriter is George Ratliff of Hellhouse and Joshua.
it’s very much theirs now. i’m being very carefully to tread lightly because i respect that.
and they’re very smart talented people

Well Sarah Palin may be available as the PI’s wife after November.. it would be method acting to the max!

Fascinating. Can’t wait to read it!
It’s a treat to be able to hear from the author himself.

Wonderful, and scary, book. I don’t think I’ve lately felt more in-the-mind of a character than with Carl Vanderveer. His creepy beliefs, his wacky marriage, and his odd relationship with his work were all fascinating to me. I don’t know how true he’d read to someone who actually knows people like him — perhaps very.

I also must say, Mr Beinhart, that for character names, the Reverend’s takes the prize.

Thanks for this book. Highly recommended to folks, like me, who are far away from communities like the one depicted. Know our adversary!

Larry,
What writers inspire you when you write something such as Salvation Boulevard

(Note: It is sometimes difficult to ask questions about a mystery as like all good mysteries, this book has some interesting hooks and curves sprinkled throughout that I don’t want to give away.)

i also have a series of essays – called the god series – on my website – larrybeinhart.com – which, when they’re all done will be the equivilent of a non-fiction book on the subject of god, faith, religion, religion and politics, morality – the basics of philo 101 course – oh yes, and what is truth, reality, aesthetics – and a few others as well. the first four are up and more to come

Hi, Teddy
I didn’t think his beliefs were wacky. When I was inside him, as it were, they seemed to make perfect sense.
i really wanted it to feel like, yes, i can see how people live that way, want to live that way, and like it.
just to trash belief systems doesn’t work.
religion is fascinating because the truth claims are easy to tear down, but the effectiveness and power of them does not disappear. so that tells us that they are two different things and have to be understood as such

Hi Larry — I’m reading it now, love the book.

BTW, you’re the author of one of my favorite movie lines ever.

Larry, I was a latecomer to detective fiction, and so it a pleasant surprise to see how the PI, in Chandler, Hammet, Paretsky is always a rebel looking at society from outside. Vandeveer is clearly a temperamental rebel, ultimately marching to the sound of his own drum, but when it begins he is functionally conforming. Did you consciously choose the genre to make your points, or did the questions point to the genre?

there’s a question of what writers inspire me over all and what writers inspire me in a given book or in the moment.
this harkens back to shaw and brecht, that fiction or drama, should be about social issues, even more that people’s live are determined by social forces, ideologies, politics, economics, religions, tribal affiliations.
then stylistically there are other choices. i did one book in eric ambler mode, another e.l. doctorow, another sort of hammett, but more verbal, this one pulled in different moods and modes

which line

the great thing about mysteries is that if you kill someone on page one, then promise the reader you’ll tell them whodunnit on page last, they’ll take the whole trip with you.

there are mysteries about horseracing.
ian, you should do one about rum,
they’re about ancient rome, spies behind the iron curtain, in the white house, wherever
and readers – or viewers – go along.

Yes,
I’ve been working my through them. Sometimes the Roman and Ancient Egypt ones are upsetting. One had tomatoes being served to the Pharoah some three millenia before Columbus. So one of the issues is meticulous research – like Cruz Smith wrote Gorky Park without getting to Moscow but made it completely credible. Did you haunt any of the megachurches for background?

We’re all trying to figure out what jane’s favorite line ever is. probably i don’t want to because it’ll turn out to be by the screenwriter, not me.

Larry: Your book American Hero, which was clearly a shot at Bush the Elder’s and Dick Cheney’s first go-round in Iraq, was turned into a film that was widely viewed as a shot at Bill Clinton — ironically enough, as he was moving against Al-Qaeda. (It makes me think of how 1950’s Hollywood took Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and utterly and deliberately sabotaged it.) Do you hold out any hope that any movie made from your latest novel will not have its message subverted?

ah, but as they say in the credits, “based upon an idea by”

Don’t know if you’ve ever read much by Lawrence Block or John D. MacDonald but I did sense echoes of each.

And of course, Hammett and Chandler as well, but then, it’s difficult to write detective based fiction without echoing Hammett and chandler

I wrote Salvation Boulevard because it seemed to me that religion – why people believe – why they’ll kill and die for it – why it they’ll allow it, demand that it, overwhelm they’re other ways of thinking – should be our number one area of study.
the subject of a vast public, social and scientific dialogue.
Because it has returned as the number one cause of war and violence, because one of the major parties in the US is co-existent with one kind of religion, joined like a Siamese twin.
But it has not been.
Instead, we’ve gone the other way, we have the spectacle of all the presidential candidates going on tv to be cross-examined about how deep and true and real their faith is. how they rely on it and how it will guide them in office.
it is my hope, in my small way, to make this a public dialogue

I have to say, Gwen Vanderveer’s reactions at the end seemed to be as true to the set-up as Carl’s were.

Down to the denial of her own lyin’ eyes.

read some block. read tons of mcdonald when i was younger. neither a great stylist.
but hammett is my ideal. hammett was genuinely great writer.
i also was influenced by ambler.

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…” Oh, wait, that’s not it.

Hi, Phoenix Woman
by the time the film was made, we had a different president, a different political situation, a different way of going to war.
so the film had to morph to ride the wave of the present.
i’m dealing with the same thing now, adapting The Librarian, from my novel to a screenplay.
one part of the narrative stays the same, but the political narrative has to be changed, to one that i am guessing will be correct ca. 2010 or so. interesting problem indeed.

Yes, I really liked that. That two different people can live through the same events, see two different things, come to two diametrically different conclusions.
anybody who’s been married should know that reality

It is one of the great mysteries about America for those brought up outside. IN Europe, and other English speaking countries, it’s perfectly possible for a non-believer to win public office, and it would be considered rude to bring it up. Indeed, Blair’s religiosity probably lost him more votes than it gained.
So anything that helps explains this is welcome. Not to mention the cartel of religions, where Catholics, protestants, Mormons and Jews can present a united front, when each dogma is in violent opposition to the others. Still, few prepared to give Islam a pass… and they usually just ignore Hinduism.

Hi Phoenix Woman. How timely. I watched Casablanca again last night, and thought at the end,how “round up the usual suspects” has gone beyond a joke -as Larry’s plot shows.

i went to a few megachurches. though not the really great ones, as i’m in the northeast. i kept thinking i should go. but kept writing the book.
besides they’re all on tv and on the net, so it’s not hard to see them.
most of the ones i went to … a couple of megas and a couple of mediums … were disappointing, especially the music.
the best was the smallest, an african american mostly place in kingston new york, with a pastor who spoke in tongues and layed on hands to heal people and music never, ever stopped.

Once upon a time, long ago, non believers held office in the United States: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington.
George was not the outspoken type. You have to read his silences, frequently, to understand what he was saying by not saying.

Vanderveer is a wonderful character, you occupied him fully for your readers. Even for someone like me with diametrically opposed views, who sees his community as damaging to the Enlightenment and bad for America, you made Carl very sympathetic and human.

Carl’s family’s acceptance of the reasons for the school assembly — “It was to tell us not to be afraid” — when the clear reason for the level of detail is to scare people, was an excellent way to encapsulate the current Terror Regime, I thought.

And you are correct, trashing belief systems doesn’t work. I prefer to scoff.

What’s the name of the church in Kingston?

Lincoln appears to also have been a deist. That is to not have believed in a God that actually watched, judged, took sides, interfered. To have believed in the push button God, the one who pushed the Go button then left to take care of his own business.
Though this is thoroughly masked by his use of biblical language.

btw, more Larry Beinhart and Salvation Blvd from GRITtv http://lauraflanders.firedogla…..boulevard/

I don’t remember the name of the Kingston Church. Little place in a wood frame building. Nice people. Accepted us though I, at least, was clearly a tourist.
Scoffing is good – on one level of the public dialogue. Ridicule inhibits people.
But it also leaves them resentful. The driving force behind the rise of the religious right seems to be – or at least a large part of it – to be resentment at being mocked and belittled.
That’s why they rage against “elites,” cause they think the elites are mocking them (they often are). While embracing the elites who exploit them but offer respect and pander to their views. their is a distinction between truths and effectiveness.

Sects can be secular as well as religious. The key is ability, like Gwen, to disbelieve the evidence of your own lying eyes. I’ve done lots of investigation on cults and political sects. Most followers of modern creeds do not need the supernatural.. Nazism, the various forms of Leninism, and indeed recent Republicanism, have all shown an ability to ignore reality in order to cling to their connections. And like Rubashov in Darkness at Noon, the inner compulsions, like Carl had, are in many ways more compelling than any external coercion.

Music at the megachurches in my area is like Muzak on Qualudes.

What do you think of the idea that Jimmy Carter is responsible for the reintroduction of religion into contemporary American political life?

Yes, and “praise music” is the worst.
I guess it’s like anything else, the bulk of the art form is dreadful, with a few standout.
Bob Dylan’s religious music is fabulous. Aretha’s gospel music is fabulous. The music I heard at the Kingston Church was amazing. My wife is working on doc about a guy bringing pianos to new orleans, to give away, and two of the people who he gave them two were two black preachers, who are amazing! music just rolls out of them, i’ve never seen the like.
the name of the film is nine pianos. it’s not up or out anywhere yet, but i assume it will go at least to you tube

In fact, you just have to think of the black churches, around whom the civil rights and much of what is progressive in the Democratic Party revolve. Indeed, I interviewed theEvangelical Lobbyist two years ago, and he has almost caused a schism by breaking with Reaganism and calling for action against Global Warming.

And in Britain of course the Labour Party was an amalgam of Marxists, Methodists and Unions…
The issue is the point where followers stop thinking at all and let someone else do it for them. Most catholics happily practice birth control regardless of the Pope.

Ah, but think of those churches in Blues Brothers…

“Praise music”–you took the words out of my mouth.
I have a cousin who’s a steady church-goer and is a Bush voter, and I’m not, but we agree on praise music. It has led him to change churches, to try to find one that doesn’t have it.
I love Kirk Franklin and black gospel music.

Religion did not re-enter american politics by accident. especially not right wing politics. it was deliberate
Three Catholics and a Jew (the jew had converted, become an evangelical christian) got together. They were all conservative activists. Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie (direct mail king), the closeted homosexual who ran NCPAC and died of AIDS, forgot his name, also of the fourth guy, were looking for wedge issues and wedge constituencies.
The issues were abortion, gay rights, and thinly disguised racism, mostly. Those issues were important to religious conservatives.
So they got some money from right wing backers, went out, found a preacher, Jerry Falwell, founded the Moral Majority, to bring evangelicals into politics as conservatives and split the Democratic coalition.
A movement began and transformed the Republican Party, America, and the world.

It was the otherwise reasonable Eisenhower who put “under God” in the oath and “in god we trust” on the currency wasn’t it? There’s a lot to be said for the ruling class being Episcopalians, since like the Church of England it filled gap that kept the more severe forms out.

actually, the church in kingston was exactly like that (blues brothers) minus the trampolines.

have you ever actually listened to muzak on quaaludes? can you still get quaaludes?

probably best to reply to that Q about qaaludes off list!

I’ve been to churches like that here in my town, and they are great!

yeah, funny that the Evangelicals organized the Moral Majority, and used it to elect Reagan over the good Baptist Jimy Carter….am I getting the narrative/timeline correct?
(/sigh)

In re: listening to Muzak on ‘ludes – there wouldn’t be a whole lot of listening going on there as sleep would quickly overtake you.

Yes, Jimmy Carter was an avowed Southern Baptist Sunday School teacher who was hated by the Moral Majority who loved the divorced, non-church going Ronald Reagan.

clearly, when critics of religion say that religion is the worst cause of war, or imply that without religion there would be no war, they’re wrong.
there have been plenty of non-religious war and non-religion abominations.
if we are to understand these things we have to understand what religion, communism, nazism, nationalism, and tribalism have in common.
what it seems to be is that they all define the outer-edge of identity. the final ring of how we define who we are and therefore the final standard of how we are to live our lives.
simultaneously we have to understand that no human society (except for some brief experiments) has a prohibition against killing. only against murder (the unauthorized killing of a member of the group).
all human societies ascribe to authorized killing and especially authorized killing of outsiders.
so the outer edge definition of the group, meets an outside group, and killing is relative acceptable, with a perceived threat, recommended.

some evangelicals liked carter. many did not. i think it would be worthwhile to do group forensic personality profiles on both.

Terry Dolan’s the NCPAC founder and the closeted gay AIDS victim. (He also gets a mention in a Dead Kennedys tune.)

It is interesting how this bunch of Protestant bigots managed to coopt the Catholic Church or at least many Catholics. The word from Rome is about the Right to Life and it makes some sense since the Church opposes the death penalty as well. But that is something that you rarely here the US Catholic Heirarchy making a point about. Even Obama has supported the death penalty which puts him alongside the Chinese Communist Party, Saudi Sheiks and Iranian Ayatollahs – but gives the GOP one less thing to throw at him.
The God of the Moral Majority is the one who was doing all that smiting in the OT, rather than the JC they claim to have accepted in their hearts.

thank you. i should remember terry. a great character. for a fiction or non-fiction writer

I’ll have to give the name of that film to the local cardiologist who used to play the piano for an A.M.E. church near me. He can play.

I’ve said this many times before, but to me, Carter tried to force Americans to live up to our professed ideals and got slammed for it while Reagan made people feel good about their hates and prejudices.

Overly simplified maybe but I don’t think by much.

And we still see it today with the “I like to visit on Pro-America” or “Real American” parts of America”

The conservative Christians have made common cause with conservative Catholics because the original impulse is not religious, it’s political.
Remember, founded by three Catholics and a Jew, for the purpose of splitting the liberal coalition and starting a new conservative one.
Not all, but some significant portion, of both groups regards the others as heretical.
Many years ago, my wife went to a Bible bookstore in New York to get me a copy of the Baltimore Catechism (sp?), as I was researching a character who would have been raised Catholic among Italian American Catholics.
She went in and asked where to find it.
The clerk looked at her, somewhat astonished, and said, “We wouldn’t have that. This is a Christian bookstore.”

The big irony of the people who were hollering “Wag the Dog!” at Clinton back then when he was trying to get Congress to freeze Bin Laden’s assets are the same ones who blamed him for 9/11 three years later.

There is very little of God that is left in the fundies religion. I don’t even recognize the concepts from when I was young. They have almost completely destroyed the Christian religion.

We should start a tour company. By bus, of course, that takes real Americans to visit places where there are other real Americans.

Him and Arthur Finkelstein, the Roy Cohn of the Religious Right.

I was once asked, seriously, by an Orangeman in Liverpool whether I was a Protestant Atheist or a Catholic Atheist.
I suppose since I prefer the King James Bible on literary grounds, I am the former!

I don’t even want to think about the lunacy that proclaims the King James bible as the inerrant word of doG, perfect in all respects.

Republicans are very good at attacking. (They think, or claim, that Liberals are. It’s hard to know, unless you’re one of them, looking at us, and vice versa).
Anyway, Republicans are very good at attacking. With Rove they’ve added the idea of attack the person’s strength. They mocked Kerry’s war record and adored the war dodger and the chicken hawks. They attacked Obama for being a community organizer and for being elite because he went to Harvard Law School and his suits fit him so well.
Ideology, theological thinking, requires and encourages a certain kind of hypocrisy.

I prefer to think of it as the polished accomplished of a committee of great writers. But it has so many contradictions, that it’s fun to joust with missionaries when they come wielding it.

There is, I presume, a distinct difference. Catholic atheists tend to be very angry about it. Jewish atheists tend to be very comfortable with it. Protestant atheists tend to be quite proper about it. I don’t know what Islamic atheists are like. I have a suspicion from the Iranian atheists I’ve met that it varies by ethnic group. Iranian atheists tend to be rather like Jewish atheists.

Joining in late and trying to catch up. Thanks for writing.. and visiting!

I was stunned when Catholic friends apologized about voting HAVING TO VOTE for Bush not Kerry in 2004 but the abortion issue was their deal breaker.

Then there’s reductionism and demonization …. “baby killer” … (though now a man’s middle name seems to be used as evidence of being a terrorist) … Really awed by the videos coming out of PA (Bethlehem, no less) of the racist mutterings of kool-aid drinking McCain/Palin contingency.

I have been reading about what the Taliban theocracy did to Afghanistan in the 1980s. Women went from careers and freedom to wearing jeans and runnings shoes to wearing burkhas and being treated like slaves, unable to leave home without a male escort. Chilling!

Arthur Finkelstein is a very, very interesting person. I shot a commercial for one of his clients once and met him. Had brief, but fascinating discussions with him. Had no idea he was gay, not a clue. Which I’d known more about him at the time so I could have talked to him even more.

I use logic, I ask if they can understand Shakespeare with out the cheat sheet notes in most of the copies we had in school. I then point out that Shakespeare was a contemporary of King James.

I then point out that we can’t fully understand Shakespeare even though it’s the same basic language, 400 years apart.

I then ask how can I be expected to believe that a bunch of folks sitting in England 1600 years after the fact, without access to original source documents that weren’t in their own native language, can get the information correct when we can’t understand the same language written 400 years earlier.

Then while the sputtering is still going on, I point out that King James was purportedly a pederast.

Hindu Atheists work overtime. So many deities to disbelieve! In fact there are some quite strong Atheist associations in India that I met when I was there.

Getting back to your points early about mocking and scorning.. I presume it is because Atheism in America has been so unpopular that they become their antithesis, dogmatic and militant. For me it’s like an American watching cricket, not at all sure what the fuss is about. But to return to the book, Carl does show what it is all about.. I have many bornagain Xian friends who are liberal, progressive, highly ethical (and I must add, mostly black).
And think of the Unitarians where the trinity has contracted into black hole about to go over the event horizon. They are so good that the Fundies want to shoot them!

Per Jane’s link: Maybe my favorite movie line ever: “If Kissinger can win the Peace Prize, I wouldn’t be surprised to wake up and find out I’d won the Preakness.” Hope this helps. :)

I want to say that when religion enters politics, reason leaves. Because it’s a cute line. It’s not entirely true of accurate.
We have multiple ways to think about things: reason, emotion, religion, moral, aesthetic, etc.
Each has it’s value and use in the same way that our sense each have their values and uses. We use them, also, to check on each other.
When we see an apparition – some of us do – we might toss a brick at it and if the brick goes through we know we’re seeing something that’s not there. If we hear a noise in the night, we turn on the lights to see if it’s a threat or the cat or something else.
When religion trumps all – reason, morality, feelings – then it is a great problem.
When religion declares things that are otherwise immoral to be moral, then there is a problem.
When religion declares things to be true that reason and science say are false, then there is a problem.

I should throw in, the Life of Brian is almost the definitive film about religion – beautifully true to life “Tell us how we may think for ourselves, Oh lord!”

The more public we can make this dialogue, the better it will get.
The idea, for one, that science cannot examine religion is ridiculous.
It’s a political position based on fear. It’s acceptable (in political sense) so long as religion is private.
When religion enters the public sphere, influences policy, is the cause of war, it needs to be discussed.
If a president of the US goes to war because God told him to, we need to be able to say that when someone in Seattle, as recently happened, goes out and shoots someone because God told him to, we call him a lunatic, so why shouldn’t we say the same about the president?
How can we fail to say it?

Terry Dolan founded NCPAC; lost his campaign to head the College Republicans to Karl Rove.

For me, the definitive line about religion is Dylan:
God told Abraham, kill me a son,
Abe said, God, you must be puttin’ me on.

Did you see this week state legislator failed to get court authority to sue God for an Act of God on the grounds that he could not deliver the papers to the deity. He indignantly pointed out that since God was omnipresent and omniscient he could be assumed to be aware of them, even before, in fact, they were prepared.

Also Marvin Liebman

But that was before Dyan’s born again Jewish and Christian phases, so perhaps its just as well that poets are not the unacknowledged legislators for mankind!

The Constitution says
“…no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”
Yet we have established, de fact, religious tests for being president.
No one said a word when we had faith quizzes of all the candidates. Nobody said, wait a minute, this is wrong, this is unconstitutional. Sure, we’re not doing it by law, but we’re doing it in fact.
Our mainstream dialogue, our commentators, pundits, even some politician somewhere shold have said, Why? Why is that OK? Why have we changed?
And then asked, Does faith make for a good leader? Can we please compare the leaders who were loaded with faith to the leaders who had little?
But it didn’t happen. Join me, my brothers and sisters! Let us cry out! Let us ask! Let us demand our questions be heard! And answered! Hallelujah!

which state legislator? where? citations please.

Bill Maher asks those questions. But he is a comedian, I guess.

In the film? Or on his TV show? Haven’t seen the film yet.

Comedy has been the only place for reality these last eight years.

Nebraska State Senator Sues God

Nebraska
16 October, CTV News which is Canadian Ctv.ca

Six more minutes to go. Questions? Comments? Anybody ready to tithe? Now is the time. Go for it!

Thank you for the citation. I will look for it.

I am really looking forward to reading your book. It sounds like a wonderful read. Thank you so much for being here with us.

As we come to the close of this lively Book Salon.

Larry, Thank you for stopping by the Lake and spending the afternoon discussing your book with us.

Ian, As always, Thank you for Hosting the Book Salon.

Everyone, if you haven’t bought a copy of this book yet, there is a link above.

Thanks all.

I’ve always maintained that all the funniest stories are true. And from Voltaire onwards, and even before, religion has always been the funniest thing. I would almost say, you can’t make this up. But they did!

Just reading Leviticus is like a Monty Python script

Thanks everyone. Fun and stimulating as ever. Buuy Larry’s book(s)

Mr. Beinhart, Have you read The God Delusion or The End Of Faith or the Hitchen’s book? If so, what say you about these tomes?

It’s hard to get a handle on which presidents actually believed. And how much.
The Cambridge Handbook of Atheism (not sure if that’s the exact title) points out that as soon as atheism was invented (by the greeks of course, when they were inventing everything else in the western tradition) it became a dangerous political accusation. So it’s hard to be elected as an atheist and to stay in office as one and as a result most political figures downplay and paper over disbelief.
But clearly that first group, Washington, Adams, Madison, Jefferson were very much non believers.
George Bush and Jimmy Carter were people of great faith. If anyone knows more or wants to contact me further
beinhart@earthlink.net

This is a great fun book, and everyone should buy it.

Thanks for the chat!

contact me direct. i believe i have to say goodbye now. And thank you, very much.
larry

A the New York Catholic Dinner Foundation, McCain made a joking reference to Zoroastrianism. I wonder if he knew what it was.

Good line was when Bill Maher heard that Sarah Palin believed she would see Christ again in her life time. “Don’t you think Jesus has suffered enough?”

Obama had some good Messiah jokes. Wonder if they will be shown out of context on Fox?