Mr Berlinerblau states that "JANET and a few others expressed a desire to cobble together a mass movement of secularists and atheists."

I don't really know whether a mass movement of secularists and atheists is a realistic possibility. But I wonder if there are at least as many atheists, secularists, and moderately religious people, a group at least as large and could have as much clout as the "values" voters, a group who are a lot more interested in what the candidate has done so far in their lives and what they intend to do about American foreign and domestic policy in the future, rather than in their professions of faith and which church they attend. And, frankly, it is getting to the point that I just won't vote for, and I am suspicious, of someone who talks constantly of their faith. The current Occupant of the White House did that, and look what we have to show for it. In my mind there is now an inverse correlation between professions of faith and competency running this country, and I will take competency over faith any day.

M. Jacques: Before you launch into interminable scholarly inquiries into the "religion" of each and every presidential candidate, you might want to consider whether any of them are really Christian and, indeed, whether most of the professed "Christians" in America really are such. You seem to believe we are. Certainly, 80 percent or so of us claim to be good Church-going Christians, but in daily life and daily thought and basic convictions, most of us Americans are quite alien to and ignorant of Jesus's precepts and instead evince a kind of "cultural religiosity" or an ostentatious but shallow "faithiness" which passes for spiritual life. For example, every American Christian denomination but one (Southern Baptists), even those of the Papist persuasion, officially came out in principle against Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq. But most Americans, at the time, thought it was a wonderful idea -- how many, 75 % or so? The war violated every tenet of the Christian doctrine of waging "just war". But Americans said, who cares, bring it on.