"Nashua belongs to Jesus Christ."

That's the slogan on the bumper sticker of a car in the parking lot of my apartment complex in Nashua, New Hampshire. I've seen it several times over the last few weeks. It's either a campaign of some sort, or else I keep noticing the same two or three cars. I'd ask somebody, but the cars are always either empty or moving.

To me it sounds like a threat, like non-Christians should get out of town or something. Is that paranoid? Maybe the people who drive these cars are just clueless and don't realize that it sounds that way.

What do the rest of you think? Have you run into this in your town? What's it supposed to mean?

... is a children's fantasy: Un Lun Dun by China Mieville.

To get the gist of Un Lun Dun, picture this standard fantasy pattern: There's a parallel world (UnLondon) in which magic works, inanimate objects move and talk on their own, and so forth. This world is facing a crisis, but there are prophecies of a Chosen One who will save the day by performing a series of great ... oh, never mind.

Within about five minutes of the Chosen One's appearance, it's obvious that none of that is going to work. If the world is going to be saved, an Unchosen One is going to have to pick up the slack and make something up.

Something started today that I'd been looking forward to for a while: My first column appeared on the UU World web site. I've been an occasional contributor to UU World for a couple years now (since their editors noticed something I blogged), but now I've become a regular six-times-a-year columnist for their web site.

So I thought I'd post a note to invite you all to check out my first column Does Humanism Need to be New? It collects my observations after attending the New Humanism Conference at Harvard, where I got to see Salman Rushdie, E. O. Wilson, Ned Lamont, and the author of "I Sold My Soul on eBay."

A top Bush appointee like Peter Pace puts his foot in his mouth, and so naturally it becomes a problem for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Get that? Me neither.

So let’s back up and take it step by step. How did Barack and Hillary screw up? What should Democratic candidates do differently in the future?

Well, I can take that assignment off my list, because somebody has done it already: Newsweek editor Jon Meacham's American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation is the book I wanted to write.

The religious type most Other to Harris is the Muslim suicide bomber, whom Harris portrays as an individualist trying to get to a Paradise -- devaluing his current life in accordance with his insane religious worldview.

The problem I see with this individualistic analysis is it makes nonsense out of any kind of self-sacrifice. Are all heroes crazy?

*That review is in the current issue of UU World and was discussed on SP here.

Secularism and Tolerance After 9/11, my review of Sam Harris' The End of Faith, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, and Reza Aslan's No God But God is now up on the UU World web site. The physical magazines have been mailed to subscribers and I got mine yesterday.

Over the next few weeks I plan to write articles here that spin off of that review and go deeper into various points. (I hope to post the first one later today.) But this would be a good place to have a general discussion.

Let me kick off that discussion by saying a little about why I grouped these three books and wrote this article.

Most of my fellow Kossacks can't get past the fact that McCain went to Jerryville at all. If he did anything short of lifting his robes to moon Rev. Falwell, he was pandering to the religious right. The NYT's Adam Nagourney has McCain giving "a spirited defense of the Iraq War." Thanks for playing, Adam. Next time read the speech.

In reality, McCain did the only honorable thing he could have done, given that he had accepted an invitation from a man he had described in 2000 as an "agent of intolerance". He gave a lecture on tolerance.

Liberal religion shoots itself in the foot if it pretends that the born-again experience is just a myth or illusion. To the people who have experienced it, the born-again experience may be the most important single event in their lives. When you tell them it didn't happen, you're just telling them that you have no idea what you're talking about. And if your argument against their religion ignores the experience, it is irrelevent.

You've gotta have hope
Mustn't sit around and mope
Nothin's half as bad as it may appear
Wait'll next year and hope

All teens ought to think this way, because their powers are growing. If you can't do something now, wait until you're stronger, wiser, richer, and better connected, then try again. Hope keeps making sense through your twenties and maybe even into your thirties. Haven't met the right girl yet? Think you deserve a better job? Can't afford your dream house? Wait and try again.

But I turned 49 today.

I was particularly struck by this enlightening reference to 12th-century Islamic theology:

So, Ibn Rush'd said, if God doesn't use human language, then the writing down of the Koran, as received in the human mind from the Angel Gabriel, is itself an act of interpretation. The original text is itself an act of interpretation.

The article examines the gap between liberal self-perception and the horrible things conservatives say about us. A lot of liberals ask "How can they think that?" with a sense of outrage, but I try to take the question seriously: How can they think that? And what can we say to make ourselves understood?