Deity

In the rough and tumble world of cheap souvenirs, it's getting tougher and tougher to compete. Here in the Southwest, Native American artifacts reign supreme. In bygone days, visitors would purchase real arrowheads and authentic clay pots. Today, tourists drive off in station wagons strewn with plastic tomahawks and fake turquoise jewelry. Through it all, the Hopi kachina doll has seemed schlock-proof.

In a patch of forest clustered around the 28-mile marker of Angeles Crest Highway, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputies Randy Rousseau and Shane Maloney point to the dead chicken splayed out in the muddy grass. Alongside the chicken lies a doll fashioned out of burlap and purple ribbon. Up a little farther, red, black and white squares of cloth are scattered on the ground.

Since the creation of cinema, filmmakers have produced countless movies about Jesus Christ, Mary and Joseph, guardian angels, the saints and even Satan. But God is another matter. Film historian Jan-Christopher Horak says the main reason why God has rarely been depicted on celluloid is that, save for Christianity, several religions -- including Judaism and Islam -- forbid portrayals of God.

In a mountain hamlet, where the T-shirts proclaimed that it was hosting ''The nation's largest small town Independence Day celebration,'' President Bush imbued the Fourth of July with the aura of a religious holiday. To a throng of West Virginians gathered before a county courthouse, the president delivered a message of American unity in the face of attack, vowed the use of massive military might around the world and steeped it all in the cadences of a country preacher. The Sept.

Whenever a debate on evolutionary biology arises, the popular rejoinder is almost inevitable: "It's the old story of science versus religion." Not really true. Countless religious people are intellectually at home with evolution, and there are leading scientists, including Nobel laureates, who believe in a personal deity.

The fragment of prayer to the greatest of Roman gods was small: "Jupiter the great, most powerful and beautiful . . ." But the carving on a stone tablet was a monumental discovery for Ukrainian archeologists last month when they excavated it at construction site in this small town on the tip of the Crimean peninsula. When they uncovered sacrificial tables and altars to Hercules and Vulcan, the god of fire, it became clear that they had found the first ancient Roman temple north of the Black Sea.

The God Problem started nagging at Gregory and Sandra Weber some time after 1 a.m. on June 12, 1990. Until then, religion had really not been an issue. The couple lived and worked in Davis--a Northern California town that he describes as "the antithesis of the Bible Belt." But early that morning, Alissa Weber came into the world. And her parents, who don't believe in a deity, unexpectedly found themselves in a spiritual dilemma.

When M. T. Winter, a professor at Hartford Seminary, lectures on the female representations of God in the Bible; when she mentions the biblical images of God as a nurturing mother or as a mother bear; when she explains that "Shaddai," a recurring term in the Old Testament, relates to God's feminine side, she sometimes sees the women in the audience shed tears of gratitude.

Edward Said's 1978 book, "Orientalism," accusing Western scholars of filtering their "discoveries" through a grid of prejudice in order to bolster an imperialist worldview, whipped the academic discipline known as post-colonial studies into a lather. Since then, the term "Orientalism" has been uttered almost solely in contempt and Orientalists as a class have been reductively vilified as little else but tools of imperial oppression.

Warring gods, black snow and deities represented by mountains are central features of native folklore focusing on volcanoes in the Cascade Range. To the Yakama, Klickitat, Cowlitz, Multnomah, Puyallup, Nisqually and other Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest, peaks like Mt. St. Helens embodied supernatural and spiritual forces.