During the Council of Nicea, jolly old St. Nicholas got so fed up with Arius, who taught that Jesus was just a man, that he walked up and slapped him! That unbishoplike behavior got him in trouble. The council almost stripped him of his office, but Nicholas said he was sorry, so he was forgiven.

The point is, the original Santa Claus was someone who flew off the handle when he heard someone minimizing Christ. Perhaps we can battle our culture's increasingly Christ-less Christmas by enlisting Santa in his original cause. The poor girls' stockings have become part of our Christmas imagery. So should the St. Nicholas slap.

Not a violent hit of the kind that got the good bishop in trouble, just a gentle, admonitory tap on the cheek. This should be reserved not for out-and-out nonbelievers, but for heretics (that is, people in the church who deny its teachings), Christians who forget about Jesus, and people who try to take Christ out of Christmas.

This will take a little tweaking of the mythology. Santa and his elves live at the North Pole where they compile a list of who is naughty, who is nice, and who is Nicean. On Christmas Eve, flying reindeer pull his sleigh full of gifts. And after he comes down the chimney, he will steal into the rooms of people dreaming of sugarplums who think they can do without Christ and slap them awake.

Advocates of intelligent design don't talk about God, and they use scientific-sounding language. But Judge Jones's opinion, all 139 pages of it, makes abundantly clear that intelligent design -- which posits that the complexity of natural life shows distinctive elements of design -- is nonetheless religious at its core. While its partisans do not identify who the designer is, they offer a supernatural explanation for natural phenomena, which is an essentially nonscientific approach -- untested and indeed untestable....

The separation of church and state does not tolerate the promulgation of religion in public schools. Case law has clarified that this restriction prevents jurisdictions both from prohibiting the teaching of evolution and from requiring the teaching of creationism as science alongside it. Judge Jones has taken an important additional step, holding that it also forbids the teaching of creationism masked in scientific lingo, even without overt references to God. If a school district adopts a policy of promoting a religious cosmology, however couched, in an effort to undermine science and thereby instill religious values, that policy must fall. As other jurisdictions contemplate similar acts of what Judge Jones calls "breathtaking inanity," this is a good principle for courts to follow.

In a far-reaching decision, Judge John E. Jones 3d concluded that intelligent design is not science.

"In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science," Jones wrote. "We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents."

He scolded the board's majority for requiring teachers to read a statement to high school biology students that noted "gaps" in Darwin's theory of evolution and directed them to a book on intelligent design in the school library.

"The breathtaking inanity of the board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial," Jones said in a 139-page decision. "The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources."

Jones said those who disagree with the decision - the first-ever federal trial on the teaching of intelligent design - "will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge." But the judge, a Republican appointed to the bench by President Bush, said "this is manifestly not an activist Court."

Intelligent-design proponents argue that intelligent design is "science" and not "religion," and should therefore be taught in the science classroom. Intelligent design is the idea that design, and not random genetic mutation and selection, accounts for the incredible biological complexity we see around us.

I am not sure they are completely right, but proponents such as Drs. Michael Behe and William Demski have forcefully defended their claims in debates, conferences, scientific articles, and popular books such as Darwin's Black Box and The Design Inference. Even assuming, however, that intelligent design is not scientific but is instead religious, the Constitution -- properly interpreted -- does not exclude it from public-school classrooms. Unfortunately, the recent Dover case shows just how far the Supreme Court's establishment-clause case law has strayed and also serves as a cautionary note to others who would include intelligent design in the public-school science classroom.

Over the years, we have gotten used to the American Civil Liberties Union launching legalistic jihads against recognitions of Christmas, in between coming to the rescue of murderers and terrorists.

The ACLU invokes that famous phrase about a "wall of separation between church and state" -- a phrase found nowhere in the Constitution but somehow considered to be part of Constitutional law.

The Constitution forbad Congress from creating "an establishment of religion" but this was no mysterious concept known only to deep thinking legal scholars.

The people who wrote the Constitution all knew exactly what an establishment of religion was because they had all lived under one -- the established Church of England.

Being established meant that everyone had to pay taxes to support that church, whether they belonged to it or not, and that people who didn't belong to the established church could not be admitted to various institutions or be appointed to certain official positions.

This had nothing to do with Christmas, merry or otherwise.

Through the website, inSPOTLA.org, users can send a free, unsigned electronic postcard with a standard message or a personal note, thus avoiding an awkward conversation that many people would rather not have. The idea is to help people be more forthcoming with sexual partners so those at risk of sexually transmitted diseases get tested and practice safer sex.

The website, which anyone can use but is primarily aimed at people who seek casual sex online, is part of a broader national campaign. San Francisco launched a website in October 2004 that covered other infections, such as gonorrhea and chlamydia, which has generated about 20,000 e-mails. Only this month did it include HIV. Seattle, Philadelphia and Indiana are planning to launch inSPOT sites next year.

"It will help more people get tested early," said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, public health director for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, which has invested more than $14,000 in the effort so far and plans to spend $8,000 annually on its operation. "We can get people into treatment and get them to modify their behavior."

But some say the e-cards are an insensitive way to inform people of unpleasant or even alarming news. "There's something about an anonymous e-mail that is a chicken way to do it," said Jeffrey Prang, a West Hollywood councilman.

The point is, Christian prayer is trinitarian but it is not generic. It may be possible to address the Trinity without mentioning any of the divine persons. But surely no Christian could accept the terms of the Indiana decision, that you can pray only if you do not invoke your God.

Let us assume that the court's concern for a strict separation of church and state is valid. Let us further assume the tenets of multiculturalism and the value of religious diversity. If I ask someone to pray for me, I can only expect that person to pray to the deity he believes in, using the forms of his religion. A Muslim will give an Islamic prayer. A Hindu will give a Hindu prayer. And a Christian will give a Christian prayer. Each person will pray according to his particular beliefs and the practices of his religion. The same must hold true when a legislature asks someone to pray.

In the Indiana ruling, a federal court dictates the content of a prayer, forbids the invocation of a particular deity, and mandates that prayers may only be directed to a universal divinity who reigns in an interfaith pantheon. That is not religious tolerance; it is religious intolerance. It does not promote religious diversity; it eliminates religious diversity. And when a federal court tells people who they can and cannot pray to and how they are allowed to pray, what we have is state-sponsored religion.

[Michael] Schiavo announced Wednesday that he has opened TerriPAC to strike back at politicians who tried to keep his brain-damaged wife alive through congressional legislation he termed a "sickening exercise in raw political power."

Throughout the years, Schiavo maintained that his wife would not have wanted to be kept alive artificially after being robbed of her brain function. Her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, had sought to keep the feeding tube intact and had rallied anti-abortion forces to their side.

The case became a media spectacle, and then a congressional slugfest, when GOP leaders brought lawmakers back from Easter recess for an emergency vote on behalf of the Schindlers.

"It is not so simple to forget those politicians who shamelessly sought to squeeze political leverage out of my family's most emotional hour," said Schiavo, a Clearwater nurse who pointed out that he was a Republican before the congressional action.

Rep. Dave Weldon...who proposed the House legislation, said Schiavo's political-action committee struck him as a "political stunt" because it focused on Republicans but not Democrats who voted for the bill. But, he said, he welcomed public attention to the issue.

On one side church groups, backed by the film's producer Disney, are promoting the story's message as Christian, with Jesus represented by Aslan saving a world fallen into sin.

Others say it is just an adventure story that draws on a variety of religious and folklore sources. Douglas Gresham, Lewis's stepson, said recently: "Churches in Britain and America are promoting the film as a Christian film, but it's not . . . and the Narnia books aren't Christian novels."

The letter, written from Magdalene College, Cambridge, where Lewis was a don, contradicts this. "Supposing there really was a world like Narnia . . . and supposing Christ wanted to go into that world and save it (as He did ours) what might have happened?" he wrote.

Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to? Poor child Edmund, to blame for everything, must bear the full weight of a guilt only Christians know how to inflict, with a twisted knife to the heart. Every one of those thorns, the nuns used to tell my mother, is hammered into Jesus's holy head every day that you don't eat your greens or say your prayers when you are told. So the resurrected Aslan gives Edmund a long, life-changing talking-to high up on the rocks out of our earshot. When the poor boy comes back down with the sacred lion's breath upon him he is transformed unrecognisably into a Stepford brother, well and truly purged....

Lewis said he hoped the book would soften-up religious reflexes and "make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life". Holiness drenches the Chronicles. When, in the book, the children first hear someone say, mysteriously, "Aslan is on the move", he writes: "Now a very curious thing happened. None of the children knew who Aslan was any more than you do; but the moment the Beaver had spoken these words everyone felt quite different. Perhaps it has sometimes happened to you in a dream that someone says something which you don't understand but in the dream it feels as if it had enormous meaning ..." So Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children's minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy - but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism.

Children are supposed to fall in love with the hypnotic Aslan, though he is not a character: he is pure, raw, awesome power. He is an emblem for everything an atheist objects to in religion. His divine presence is a way to avoid humans taking responsibility for everything here and now on earth, where no one is watching, no one is guiding, no one is judging and there is no other place yet to come. Without an Aslan, there is no one here but ourselves to suffer for our sins, no one to redeem us but ourselves: we are obliged to settle our own disputes and do what we can. We need no holy guide books, only a very human moral compass. Everyone needs ghosts, spirits, marvels and poetic imaginings, but we can do well without an Aslan.

On the day of the [Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood] oral argument, protesters outside the Supreme Court building carried signs reading "Keep Abortion Legal" and "Stop Abortion Now" -- the slogans, respectively, of those who want no retrenchment from the virtually unlimited right to abortion that Roe created, and of those who want virtually all abortions banned.

But those aren't the only two choices, and they aren't the choices most Americans would make. As poll after poll makes clear, the public is ambivalent on this subject. Most people believe that abortion is a great evil, but most also believe that abortion decisions should be left to a woman and her doctor. At the same time, a large majority also supports regulating abortion in specific ways -- by mandating waiting periods or preabortion counseling, for example, or by requiring parental notice or consent for a minor's abortion.

No rational abortion policy can encompass all those stands. But then, Americans are out of practice at setting abortion policy. They haven't been allowed to do so for more than 30 years, ever since Roe struck down the laws of 50 states, took the issue away from voters and lawmakers, and carved a practically unlimited "right to choose" into constitutional granite.

Far from settling the matter once and for all, Roe turned abortion into perhaps the most unsettled subject in American politics. It certainly polarized the two parties. Republicans became officially and explicitly antiabortion, writing language into their national platform that proclaims the inviolable right to life of the unborn and endorsing a constitutional amendment that would ban nearly all abortions. Democrats became adamant defenders of abortion on demand, with *their* platform taking a hard line against any restrictions at all: "We stand proudly for a woman's right to choose . . . regardless of her ability to pay."

In 1984, the Supreme Court launched one of America's worst traditions: Christmas Agonistes. This is the ritual where everyone goes batty about what to "do" about Christmas. The court invented it in a decision called Lynch vs. Donnelly, the upshot of which was that if someone is offended at a creche or Christmas tree at city hall, they can go whining to a judge about it....Liberals use the state to impose their morality all the time, and they get away with it because their faith isn't called a religion.

Yet conservatives should be wary of launching a backlash. Just as it is counterproductive for a secular liberal to take offense at a well-intentioned "Merry Christmas," it doesn't help if a conservative says "Merry Christmas" when he really means "Eat yuletide, you atheistic b******!" If you're putting up a Christmas tree in order to tick off the ACLU, you've really missed the point.

Of course, none of this would be problem if judges in Washington minded their business to begin with. But that's the real heresy for some liberals.

In 1965 the Supreme Court, citing a constitutional right to privacy, struck down a Connecticut law criminalizing the use of contraceptives. In 1968 a University of Alabama law professor, although acknowledging that legislative reforms of abortion laws were advancing nationwide, suggested a route to reform -- judicial fiat -- that would be quicker and easier than democratic persuasion. The tactic would be to get courts -- ideally, the Supreme Court -- to declare, building on the Connecticut case, that restrictions on abortions violate a privacy right that is a "penumbral right emanating from values" embodied in various provisions of the U.S. Constitution, as applied to the states through the 14th Amendment.

Which is what the Supreme Court did in 1973. But in 1970, when that argument reached Friendly, he warned in his preliminary opinion about the argument's "disturbing sweep" and its invitation to judicial imprudence....

The day after Roe was decided, the New York Times called it a "resolution" of the abortion issue. Not really. Roe short-circuited a democratic process of accommodating abortion differences -- a process that had produced a larger increase in the number of legal abortions in the three years before the Roe decision than were to occur in the three years after....

In the polarized post-Roe politics, many Democrats are now poised to oppose the confirmation of Sam Alito on the grounds that abortion rights, unlike all other rights (to free speech, private property, etc.), must be utterly unrestricted. Because Americans recoil from such immoderation, Democrats, after three decades of political difficulties, have reason to believe, if not the reasonableness to recognize, that they, especially, would have been better off if Friendly's preliminary opinion had been issued and if it had spared the nation Roe's diminishment of democracy and embitterment of politics.

The gap between the West and the Middle East deepened owing to the political faults of the West, such as European colonialism and the American support for Middle East tyrannies, and, more recently, the barbaric terrorism of fanatics who act and kill in the name of Islam. Yet, despite these political conflicts, the perception of the West in the minds of devout Muslims remains the greatest underlying problem. Although they admire its freedom, they detest its materialism....But what exactly is materialism? Isn't it more obviously represented by the extravagance of pop stars than by the sophisticated theories of atheist scientists and scholars? Isn't the cultural materialism of, say, Madonna, quite different from the philosophical materialism of Richard Dawkins?

Well, it is self-evident that they look dissimilar, but the worldviews they represent are intertwined. Cultural materialism means living as if there were no God or moral absolutes, and all that matters is matter. Philosophical materialism means to argue that there is no God to establish any moral absolutes, and matter is all there is. The former worldview finds its justification in the latter. Actually, in the modern world, philosophical materialists act as the secular priesthood of a lifestyle based on hedonism and moral relativism. The priesthood convinces the masses that we are all accidental occurrences who are not under any Divine judgment; and the masses live, earn, spend, and have relationships according to this supposition. A popular MTV hit summarizes this presumption bluntly...The biological justification for promiscuity -- that we are "nuthin' but mammals" -- is no accident: The idea that we are all mere animals is at the heart of cultural materialism. And that idea is, of course, based on Darwinism. That's why Darwinism, in the words of Daniel Dennett, one of its hard-core proponents, acts as a "universal acid; it eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized worldview."

That "revolutionized worldview" -- in which God is denied, attacked, and ridiculed -- is the grand problem we Muslims have with the West. It is true that some fanatics among us hate the West's liberty and democracy, too. Yet for the sane and pious Muslim majority, those are welcome attributes. This majority's only problem is the materialism that encompasses the West. And they would welcome those who would save the West -- and thus the whole world -- from it.

We fear questioning the evolutionist dogma. Someone might call us fanatical. "Intemperate" was the word George Will used. So we go along with the dogmas of materialism, lest we be considered ignorant or uneducated or driven by a religious agenda.

Charles Krauthammer tells us that Isaac Newton was religious and if he saw no conflict between science and religion, why can't we take our thin gruel of evolutionary science like good children and be satisfied, without dragging a Designer into the picture?

Because it isn't real science, Charles. Newton, in fact, thought that the "most beautiful system" of sun, planets, and comets could "only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being." But the laws of physics that govern these motions are simplicity itself compared with the immense complexity of the biological machinery that governs the development, proliferation, growth, and aging of millions of reproductive species. These mechanisms have yet to be discovered or described. To believe that the feeble tautology of natural selection -- laissez-faire political economy from the 1830s imported into biology -- constitutes a sufficient explanation of the marvels of nature is to display a credulity that makes our fundamentalists seem sagacious by comparison....

The underlying problem, rarely discussed, is that the conclusions of evolutionism are based not on science, but on a philosophy: the philosophy of materialism, or naturalism. Living creatures, including human beings, are here on Earth, and we got here somehow. If atoms and molecules in motion are all that exist, then their random interactions must account for everything that exists, including us. That is the true underpinning of Darwinism. What needs to be examined in detail is not so much the religion behind intelligent design as the philosophy behind evolution.

South Africa's highest court ruled today that same-sex marriages enjoy the same legal status as those between men and women, effectively making the nation one of just five worldwide that have removed legal barriers to gay and lesbian unions.

But the Constitutional Court, as the high court is known, effectively stayed its ruling for one year to give the Parliament time to amend a 1961 marriage law to reflect its decision. Should the legislature balk, the court said, the law will be automatically changed to make its provisions gender-neutral.

Few expect the Parliament to resist, even though African nations are generally intolerant of gay relationships and many South Africans are conservative on social issues. Among political factions here, only the tiny African Christian Democratic Party, whose positions carry a strong religious undercurrent, called for a constitutional amendment to bar gay marriages.