The problem is not the Reverend Rod Parsley and his views on Islam as a "false religion" that must be destroyed. He is only parroting what all sorts of right-wing Christian "leaders" have said -- although his words will certainly not hurt John McCain with the Christian right. I must confess that I find it difficult not to confuse Parsley with Ian Paisley, also a reverend, the crackpot fundamentalist Presbyterian ("save Ulster from sodomy") and long-time obstructionist of attempts to improve relations between Catholics and Protestants in northern Ireland.

Nor is the the problem the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr., and his views about AIDS being a white plot to destroy the black community, or Hillary Clinton's personal reverend, who has said that he respects Wright (even while Hillary says that she would have dumped Wright as her pastor many moons ago.

The real problem is that not a single candidate has the courage and conviction to stand up for the separation of church and state. The problem is the exaggerated respect that Americans have for all religion. If McCain's, Obama's, and Clinton's barbers and hairdressers were speaking out about religion or politics, no one would pay any attention to them. Personally, I would rather listen to a barber's than to a preacher's opinions. Barbers, at least, deal with physical reality--the hairs on the heads in front of them--and not with supernatural beliefs for which there is no evidence.

Of course McCain should disavow Parsley's views, just as Barack Obama has disavowed Wright's views. But there would be no need for the candidates to disavow any minister's views if they had taken a critical look at religion in general, and their own relations with clerics in particular, a long time ago.

Religious advisers should take no part in our political campaigns. Candidates should not have religious advisory committees when they are running for the secular office of President of the United States. One thing is certain: if you took a close look at the expressed views of most religious figures, you could find something to offend everyone. I suppose we should be glad that none of the remaining candidates for the presidency is a Roman Catholic, because the pope is coming to visit the United States this month. If a Catholic were running, the pundits would be buzzing with endless, tedious questions about whether the candidate shared the pope's views on contraception and abortion.

The true mystery is why the majority of Americans, having had a recent look at the goofy views of many clerics--yes, "spiritual advisers" to candidates for the highest office in the land--still regard faith as an essential qualification for the presidency. As Robert Green Ingersoll, known as the "Great Agnostic," said more than a century ago, "Each nation has created a god, and the god has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved, and he was invariably found on the side of those in power. Each god was intensely patriotic, and detested all nations but his own." One might say the same of all of these pitifully ignorant "spiritual advisers," whether their targets are Muslims or secularists who would have us (gasp!) turn to reason, not faith, to solve our problems.

Oh, for a candidate who would proclaim another truth articulated by Ingersoll: "Surely it is sublime to think that the brain is a castle, and that within its curious bastions and winding halls the soul, in spite of all worlds and all beings, is the supreme sovereign of itself." Ingersoll, by the way, was using the word "soul" in a secular, not a religious sense. For a secularist, the soul simply means the human thought and human achievements that live on after the physical death of an individual.