It has been my custom to read for half an hour before drifting off to sleep at bedtime.

However, last night in reading Robert Wright's article in the June 15 Time Magazine edition, "De-Coding God's Changing Moods", I was so horrified with the very first paragraph that I couldn't have a peaceful sleep all night long.

I read more than once Robert Wright's first paragraph, which both startled and deeply depressed me.  Wright wrote as follows:

"The ancient Israelites got straightforward guidance from scripture on how to handle people who didn't worship Israel's God, Yahweh, 'You shall annihilate them -- the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebsuites -- just as the Lord your God has commanded.'"

Before the war we heard that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction threatening us.  After no weapons of mass destruction were found we heard that George Bush would bring democracy and freedom first to Iraq and from there it would spread to the rest of the Middle East.

Bush's response to the scandalous firing of some of the best federal prosecutors in the U.S.A. was commented on in a Seattle Post Intelligencer March 15 editorial:

"President Bush said Wednesday that he had confidence in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.  But he `frankly is not happy about' the way Gonzales had handled the dismissal of federal prosecutors, a move that has spawned a congressional investigation into whether the White House allowed politics to interfere with law enforcement."

In short, Bush is unhappy with the handling of the firings but approves of the actions themselves.

I hear the discussion over the public display of the Ten Commandments, a Jewish and Christian religious symbol.  I don't understand the issue, either from a religious or a secular point of view.

I realize this argument, posed as religion stemming the tide of secularism really does not have a secular point, but what is the religious point? If putting a statue of the Ten Commandments on the court house lawn, or posting a copy of them in the hallways of our schools would improve the morality of our nation I don't think there would be a discussion and these monuments would have been installed years ago. Religious structures have no power to improve morality. Count the churches in our cities and towns and ask yourself if they have succeeded in making us a moral nation.