I have elsewhere mentioned this story, that while on a working field trip where I and my co-workers were grouped in mancamps I shared a two bedroom unit with an electrician named Hamann. I'd been brought up celebrating Purim every year where the story of good king Ahasueras replacing his disobediant wife Vashti with the comely Esther who with the aide of her brother Mordecai foiled the evil counselor Haman who was planning to destory all the Jews of Persia. I was wondering if I was going to write home how I was sleeping every night within six feet of Hamann.

At one of our breaks someone asked him about his name. He looked up from his sandwich and said:

"He was a German king who hated the Jews."

I broke in: "He was a Persian king"

Hamann replied: "Well I don't know about that. I always heard it was German." Other than the name, he was a good man, a good worker, and my reflections on the occurrence of a name left me bemused.

After the four week trip I flew back to Anchorage and saw that my next door neighbor, a seamstress, was doing some knitting on her porch. I walked over there and she asked me how was my trip.

Without giving a thought to what I was about to say I uttered:
"I've learned to stop blaming Christians for all my problems."

Without looking up from her stitches my neighbor Christine said: "That's very nice, Robo, they're still going to blame you!.

Over the years in work or social venues, I've heard many seemingly insensitive comments on religion or race which I hesitated to challenge. Looking back I've regretted my silence on only a couple of occasions. For the most part it was folks trying to be their version of open minded, humorous, or acknowledging. The average fundamentalist Christian I know, and I know a lot of 'em, is more open minded than the description suggests. There's too much sectarianism around for anyone to fell they're in a monolithic state of ownership. And the American experience is full of that cross linked effect where seemngly unlike people joined efforts and created something new that captured the imagination.

Meanwhile, the history of the United States is drenched in religion, but a very interesting approach toward religion that must not be ignored, that of the questioner. People in the United States have been long concerned with morality, the Bible, the keeping of the faith, and the changes about to come. I recall visiting the Saugus iron works, one of the first if not the first North American foundry, and the cheap labor they imported from England to run it in the 17th century were Scots prisoners of the Puritans. It was a major issue in the area whether it was proper or not to have so many unchurched men in the area.

I think that the idea of secularism needs to made distinct as to why the 'freedom from religion' is not a religion in itself. My father was not obviously devout, but he made sure that his children had a religious education, rather than grow up, for want of a better word, preyed upon by a phenomenon of belief we did not understand. One of his favorite stories was to repeat what a supposedly atheist colleague had told him: "I don't believe in God, I don't go to church, and all my children are healthy, knock on wood.