I remember a moment in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's novel *The Mote in God's Eye' when a Muslim, on board a starship many, many light years from Sol, asks for the proper coordinates for Earth so he could properly orient himself -- as accurately as possible in his quarters -- towards Mecca.
That seemed to me like a particularly realistic observation in a hard science fiction story with no time for God -- an acknowledgment that sophisticated gadgetry and subtle science notwithstanding, as long as we're recognizably human there's going to be religiosity.
...
I'm about as secular a guy as you're likely to meet. In this way, I'm quite different from my family which retains and cherishes (as Charles B. put it) a *centrist* African American style of religious expression which is, despite its conservatism, much more of a live and let live approach to life than what we see from the politically ambitious religious right.
They're implacably opposed to the Bush admin because they understand where their class interests lie and quite clearly see a difference between his Christian rhetoric and the incredible destruction that's been unleashed by his orders.
Now although there are quite a few Christians who can accurately be called all sorts of hard ass things (fascists, extremists, snake handlers, etc, etc) it's also true there are quite a few who, like my family, have no interest in ruling the globe or *taking the culture back for Jesus* or any of the other things the power grabbers go on about ad nauseam.
I suspect these are the people Chip Berlet (who probably tuned out a while ago) is trying to reach and build bridges to.
Since religion is here to stay (despite our dreams of a secular world) and likely to remain a force for the foreseeable future and beyond, it doesn't seem like such a mad plan to make common cause with reasonable people who happen to believe in the divinity of Jesus.
Not all of whom, by the way, have much time for the rapture and other apocalyptic preoccupations.
An important distinction.
And no, not a distinction without a difference.
.d.