"What about the children?" has become the standard response to any controversy, especially about women. If the kids come first,mom comes second.

The kids are fine. They are best served by examples of love, respect and responsibility which comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. It doesn't mean a parent being with them 24/7.

Mom is a much more defined role than Dad, but its power is overestimated. If staying at home is so great, why aren't waves of men vying for the job? Addressing the basic needs of children is not a mental challenge, it's an emotional, physical and psychic one. There are no standards, no marks of achievement, no goals that have to do with the caretaker, only with the kids.

Having a job means bringing home money. Otherwise a stay-at-home- mom is not just working for free, but is also an expense. Sure child care costs, but so does health insurance, food, utilities, classes.... All sorts of pyramid schemes like Amway, Shaklee, Koscot and other selling from home scams target those unfulfilled mothers. Without money a wife and mother becomes exactly what Caitlin Flanaghan says she becomes, indebted.

Of course, there are parents who use their time without a job to essentially volunteer for valuable causes. If it were not for angry mothers devoted to making things better for their children, schools and neighborhoods would be in a much worse state than they are. A redefinition of work that includes flex time, family leave and really does primatize family values would change the discussion utterly.

Women in this affluent society strive to disappear, starving themselves to meet what is sold as perfection, the ideal model size 0. People forget that models are set pieces, culled and coached into walking coat hangers to show off clothes or artificially plumped to show off lingerie or cosmetics.

Nudes, like the ones Nimoy and other artists choose, focus on the relationship of light and space to a body, on how a body, a person exists in space and time. The view from the outside, looking at the work, is as important as the view of the subject inside the work.

Arguments about the size and position of advertising or porn models hit the core issue of what is being sold, the women and the stuff they wear. The size of art models is irrelevant because it's not designed to sell you that woman or what she holds, but how she is in a multi-layered context. No one is selling obesity as a goal, but acknowledging that large women have shape and lightness.

Theology is a metaphor for coping with the world around us, not a method by which we are able to examine the world. A theological mindset inhibits rather than encourages exploration because in the beginning and at the end is not a curiosity to banish ignorance, but a renaming of the unknown as the unknowable. More confusingly, postulating an omnicient God creates a tension between God and the universe He (always "He") created.

Prayer is the coinage of theology; inquiry. especially scientific inquiry, is the currency of discovery. Prayers, by Mr. Haught's own explanation are made intended to be answered, but are made to be denied for the greater, invisible to the individual, good. That dynamic denies the very personal relationship Haught espouses as basic to religious belief.

Although Haught denies it, investing in prayers or miracles separates and elevates believers over heathens. Yet the preponderance of historical evidence provides more examples of theology excusing cruelty, encouraging ignorance and injuring those Haught says it serves. Acquinas and other philosopher scientists always came up against the power of established religion and the mythology of God.

Hope doesn't need the justification of theology; it may, like theology, simply be a coping mechanism. It is not a question of belief in the ineffable - athiests understand that knowing the molecular structure of water is not the same as sensing water's motion. Religion positions an intermediary between us and experience.

Therein lies the tension. We can't know the universe without God, but we can't know God. God defines and creates the physical world, spritual existence and morality, yet God is above and outside all those spheres. This means for us to allow evil to happen without acting upon it is morally wrong, say allow creationists to misapprpriate theology for politcal power, but for God it's not only OK, it's the core of His being.

Although being or doing good might require some faith, it does not require God. It does require asking some really good questions.

As with pilots' pay, I've seen the Pummer's sort of misrepresentation of teachers' salaries as I have of many professions that we take for granted. People say they highly value certain things - getting to a destination on time and safely, education, child care, clean food, safe drugs, information - but when it comes to the cost of getting those things, suddenly we cheap out.

Pilot's hours, like teacher's hours, are not compensated for the real time they are at work. It's not just air time that counts for pilots as it's not just in classroom time that counts as teaching. There's homework, continuing education, the before and after school/flying hours, the stress of the job itself.

We like our myths, especially the ones that tell us everything is easy or simple or somehow mediated - better yet, solved! - by technology. To those people I ask, "If it's so easy, why isn't everyone doing it?"