God

By citing Mikhail Gorbachev's mention of "God on High," and calling on Ronald Reagan to call his bluff at the summit, Father Regis Combs (Letters, Sept. 13) has given us a graphic example of the awful gap of misunderstanding that exists between our two countries. The members of the Soviet political hierarchy have always been completely candid about their atheism. We might recall the U-2 spy plane flap when Nikita Khrushchev stated "Before God, my hands are clean." His staff made it quite clear at that time that the use of God's name in an ethical statement was merely a figure of speech in the modern Russian idiom.

Re "As gas prices soared, he filled up with prayer," Aug. 14 It is moments like these that you begin to wonder where sanity ends and delirium begins. To believe God would tend his concerns toward the price of oil is preposterous. Surely God, previously, kept gas prices low so God-fearing people would be more wasteful in their driving and spew more pollutants into the air to kill more of his loyal subjects more quickly than they would otherwise have. Time to pray for an improved catalytic converter, I suppose, to cover the period before the prayers for a fuel-cell car have been fully answered.

Re the overuse of God and Jesus by Joseph Lieberman and George W. Bush (letters, Aug. 31): The term "god" is inclusive and encompassing. Other religions can refer to their deity by a different name. Bush refers continually to Jesus and had declared a date as Jesus Day in Texas. This violates the doctrine of separation of church and state. Both men refer to either God or Jesus too frequently. They have, by now, convinced us that they are men of faith and we can assume they have the qualities of justice and morality that faith engenders.

Because the understanding of history by American reactionaries does not reach back much further than 1776, they fail to realize that Renaissance (or traditional) humanism was God-centric and otherworldly in the accepted Judeo-Christian sense. Evidently, Garrity feels humanism and secularism are quite the same thing. Historically speaking, I must disagree. The secular-humanist, in fact, is a critter that cannot exist by traditional definitions. JOHN ALAN WALKER Big Pine

Why all the fuss about Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori's remark that Japan is "a divine nation with the emperor at its center" (May 27)? Have we forgotten "one nation under God" (U.S. Pledge of Allegiance) and President Thomas Jefferson's statement, "The sacred rights of mankind . . . are written by the hand of divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power"? Are divinity and democracy incompatible? CHARLES F. DAY Laguna Niguel

Rabbi Harvey J. Fields certainly wrote a stirring appeal to the clergy and churches of the world (Letters, June 29) concerning the moral imperative "to exert pressure for peaceful solutions in the face of those who insist on the power of the fist, the gun and the bomb . . . ." particularly in South Africa. I would disagree on one point, however. Fields says "the business of religion is to . . . work for the release of the oppressed and the relief of the victimized . . . to crash some sense over the heads of embittered competitive factions."

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa defended his performance during a platform kerfuffle at the Democratic National Convention this week, saying that he took the actions called for by President Obama and followed procedure when Democrats realized they had left the words “God” and “Jerusalem” out of the party platform. Such a change requires a two-thirds vote by delegates, and on Wednesday they were asked to approve language invoking God and affirming Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

God Is Not One The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World — And Why Their Differences Matter Stephen Prothero HarperOne: 388 pp., $26.99