[Nigel Mace]

Sorry, Bill - as one of the life-long professional members of "the Ivory Tower", a definition I'd reject, though there are many worse places - I'll leave your opinion on this matter aside. My barb was at one of Charlie's particularly preposterous anti-rational and anti-intellectual fulminations and his messianic dismissal of any such intelligent formulations of view under the superior, but irrational and unknowable, claims of a personal mandate from his God.

To mirror your phrase, people may take or leave that statement too, but I am with Thomas Paine. I'm sure you'll recognise the quotation. "To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason .... is like administering medicine to the dead..."

In that "Ivory Tower" of which you are so suspicious, I spent quite a chunk of time, many years back, reading and discussing rather a lot of theology (though it was not my subject) and, to return to the intended matter of this thread, much of those debates has been haunting me now. In the NYT piece Gregory cited in post 310, David Brooks began precisely where that past intellectual experience has been taking me - the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and most particularly the episode in a cafe in Berlin when Hitler and his circle entered. Should he stay sitting or stand as the crowd rose to 'Heil' and applaud? In a tense exchange with his friend Ebehard Bethge, whom I met and was able to quiz on the matter, "Not here, not now" was whispered and they stood. Later in different circumstances and when he believed, rationally as well as theologically, that it finally mattered Bonhoeffer bore a lasting witness. Like Quincy, I don't agree with the NYT article's conclusion, but I do agree that what I think of as Bonhoeffer and Bethge's 'cafe question' is now being asked - and given recent revelations, perhaps even more.

However, it is being asked, I realise, primarily of US citizens - not me. We have our own power-crazed delusionals to worry about, and one of the chief of them has, rather un-Englishly, started to speak of her following her God - so there's plenty to be concerned about here too.