“The Great Derangement:

A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire,”By Matt Taibbi(Spiegel & Grau, New York, $24, hardback, 270 pages)

This book has some real gems of insight — wisdom, even.

Check this one out, for example:

“When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that’s when the real weirdness begins.” (P.132)

Unfortunately, such valid points are scattered thinly — and with considerably more verbiage — through 270 pages of smarmy, self-righteous, arrogance trying to masquerade as humor.

Don’t get me wrong, I did laugh at some of this.

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It is hard to imagine that James P. Carse’s book “The Religious Case Against Belief” is much different from his lectures at New York University. In fact, his book is probably the consummate Cliffs Notes for his class. An academic approach seems to work well for such a volatile subject, and Carse is careful to argue his assertions from the standpoint of education rather than persuasion.

I have not yet finished the book, so I will revisit the topic again later, but if I don’t turn in my mid-term paper, Dr. Carse will certainly never let me pass with anything higher than a C.

The good professor contends that there are three kinds of ignorance; there is a simple lack of knowledge, there is willful lack of knowledge and there is acknowledgment that while one searches for knowledge, one has so much more yet to be known. He argues that the common ground for the majority of beliefs is willful lack of knowledge.

He cites first the case of Galileo before church officials and Pope Urban VIII as the scientist was forced to abjure his teaching that the earth was not the center of the universe. The men of the cloth had ample reason and example to agree that previous teachings about earth’s station were incorrect. The only way they could have thought otherwise was that they chose not to see it.

Herein lies Carse’s point: Belief creates an essential point in which the believer has no reason to continue questioning. It sets a reference and also a limit. The men who condemned Galileo’s teaching refused to believe the earth was not the center of the universe because it presented an affront to their stated beliefs. There was no reason to question whether those beliefs were well-founded. They were beliefs; and so to the believer they were truths not to be questioned. As Carse puts it, they “claimed the quest for truth had been completed.”

Carse makes good use of historical examples as his definition of belief develops. It is almost as if he expects the reader is making the same disapproving expression he must have seen hundreds of times in lecture halls. And who could blame him considering the majority of Americans ascribe to a religion and hold their own set of beliefs?

Carse’s terse writing style makes for dense reading, but I have read nearly half the book without yet seeing how religion and belief are in opposition. Still, I wish only that I had a chance to raise my hand and ask a few questions.

“American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America”By Chris HedgesCopyright 2006Free Press

Paperback, $14

274 pages

The sentence that’s key to understanding this Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter’s book appears on the last page of the new paperback edition, which is actually part of an interview of the author that appeared Jan. 8, 2007, in Salon.com:

“I don’t know how much it’s apparent, but it’s an angry book.”

That it is.

But it’s not particularly informative about the link between the Christian Right and the “fascist shift” described in Naomi Wolf’s “The End of America” (see my review here).

The vast majority of Hedges’ book describes the various ways in which pillars of the Christian Right condemn the left, the independent woman, the homosexual, the Muslim — and exploit the poor, the female, the old and the non-white.

In this, Hedges is, ahem, preaching to the choir, I think.

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