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I have to give the word to the boys, and I get the word from God whether
to bomb or not.” So maybe there’ s some kind of bipartisan theological
tradition going on in the White House.

But if these leaders are not delusional, then they’ re deceptive. And
in order to deceive others, one must first deceive oneself until self-
deception morphs into virtual reality. In any case, we have our religious
fanatics, and they have theirs. In September 2007, on the eve of the sixth
anniversary of 9/11, Osama bin Laden warned the American people that
they should reject their capitalist way of life and embrace Islam to end the
Iraq war, or else his followers would “escalate the killing and fighting
against you.”

George Bush once proclaimed, “God is not neutral,” which is the
antithesis of my own spiritual path, my own peculiar relationship with the
universe--based on the notion that God is totally neutral--though I’ ve
learned that whatever people believe in, works for them.

My own belief in a deity disappeared when I was thirteen. I was
working early mornings in a candy store across the street from our
apartment building. My job was to insert different sections of the
newspaper into the main section. On the day after the United States
dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, I would read that headline

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