I tried that for a while. Then one day, while I was being rushed by the membership committee -- there is no other way to describe it -- one of the members began to point out with great pride how many members held advanced degrees, implying that therein lay the superiority of the Unitarian church. I began to hear the voice of my grandfather -- railroad worker, high school dropout, WWI machine gunner, self-taught scholar, storyteller extraordinaire -- in my ear: "Education can expand your mind or inflate your head." That was the end of that.

Mind you, Grandpa was all for higher education. He just thought it was a tool rather than a badge of rank. He also pointed out that one could always learn a trade after college.

I understand about hate. It can color people's perceptions for a very long time. Usually red.

I understand the danger you speak of. Religious intolerance is a powerful force, no matter where it lives. Isolation, torture, repression, violent death: all can be laid at its doorstep.

I only wish to point out that handing religious people back the same portion that some of them have handed us will make us feel better for a little while, but it will feed the martyr complex of the extremists and make those who might want to talk reluctant to do so. Who wants to talk when one has every expectation of being slapped?

Once, quite a few years ago -- and you others, if I've told this before, I'm sorry -- I was involved in a bitter fight with some right-wingers over school policy. One of the school board members who identified himself as a Christian during his election campaign stopped to talk to me one night after a small meeting. He had gradually come to understand that I was there to be heard, and to stick up for my children, just as he was. He asked me why I didn't believe in God, and I told him I saw no conclusive proof in either direction. I said that I would need faith to believe in something without proof, and I didn't have faith, nor did I miss it. "If there really is a God, and if God wants me to have faith, then I suppose God will give it to me," I said. He got a funny half-smile on his face and said, "That sounds an awful lot like faith to me." I laughed. "I suppose it does, but in what?" His turn to laugh.

We left it at that -- the parking lot was dark, and everyone else had left -- but after that I was more interested in what he had to say, and he would always solicit my comments. It was an important thawing point, one of many in the community at that time, and things gradually improved. (We also voted the idiots out, but this gentleman was reelected.) And all because we could ask and answer without mutual derision, and without either of us having to change who we were to understand the other.

He took a chance that I wouldn't savage him, which I had been known to do to others in his group when they were being especially stupid. Somebody's got to take that chance in every conversation between adversaries. I guess I'm saying that it's difficult to do that if one thinks of one's adversary in two dimensions, because depth won't make an appearance.