"I have also learned, lo these many years, that they will also leave you alone if you just politely say "No thanks".

Dear Conorcat, you have not met my beloved hillbillies back east. I have even done a reverse exorcism on one of them, trying to cast IN Satan. I've replied to the daily "Jesus emails" with venom mixed liberally with reason. Nothing happens. My dearest and closest cousin, who is like a sister to me, tells me she "worries" about me. Her daughter asks me, repeatedly, if I believe in God (I do, but not that portrait of Zeuss they got in their little pea brains). I love them dearly, but I have learned that "No thank you" only spurs them on to planning an intervention. Blessed are yew becuz you got sensible volk in your tree apparently. Mine, nope, there's just no stopping Tha Lawd.

I do love them. I even love the...what did you call them? The absurd Jesus stories? It was something like that. Listen, he may never have existed, I've certainly never met the gentleman, but he seems like a sympathetic character in the stories, at least, and one very ethical guy, not to mention a magus of some stature. It's not a bad story. You just had the wrong people reading it to you. They probably wanted your soul as well as your attention. Thank God you resisted! I guess that's the difference between the Bay area and Orange County. I'm surrounded by more refined versions of the same thing here, but it's so damned pretty I just can't bring myself to pull out. So I love my neighbor, forgive him his delusions (and he mine, just for the record) and it's all working out OK. Of course if I had to take on Rick Warren's whole swarm I'd probably go down in a hail of bullets and bibles, but I try to not make eye contact when I'm near the Saddleback mosque.

It's when I go back to the DC area and suburban redneck hell of Maryland and Virginia where all the unwashed yahoos dwell that I have to force myself to just kinda make lame, glib "amen"s or, failing at that, quote scripture back to them, ask them probing questions about the nature of their faith, and generally screw with their minds. The only way I'm gonna get them totally off the subject is with a .357, and like I said, I really love them, so jerking them around is the next best (and often interesting) option. If you can get away with "No thanks", well - your people have just plain given up on you, and that's actually kinda sad. I wouldn't want that to happen. I'd rather they just keep plaguing me with their crazy crap, because someday something I say will resonate with maybe one of the younger ones, and then the fire will be set. In the meantime, hell, it's all in the family. And that's worth something.

fvttodk_doog, you went and said everything I would have had I had the presence of mind. In so doing you saved me a lot of blood pressure medication. Thank you for a beautifully rendered assessment not only of Dayenu's frantic, pre-recorded reaction to Cole's take on the Walt-Mearsheimer book, but of the entire problem of Israel as an annex of the Christian Right's stranglehold on middle east policies and politics, whether you intended it that way or not. Because in the end (at least according to Christian eschatological thinking) the Jews will have to be cleaned out of there after the Arabs (muslim or not) have been drowned. That's how far we've come in a millenium.

Again, thank you. For once (and I am sure to the relief of many) I am left with virtually nothing to say. It's a pleasure.