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religion is the parallel postulate ...

Personally I prefer the more complex and nuanced non-Euclidean Conservativism of Hitchens, Dawkins, et. al. They've arrived at it through rational thought, hard work teased out from a few sensible premises while the nabobs of religion seem to be up to something else entirely. While a dime store psychologist might say they're all up to "will to power" ... these limousine televangelists are really off-putting, exploiting their gullible flock who apparently can't spell, with no qualms.

This observation in no different than Grabar's observation that literary talent and intelligence may in fact be genetically related to being prone to depression (undoubtedly when the real world doesn't behave and succumb to one's reason, intellect, and rational thought: idiotic northeastern liberal elites like Bush; coopting a Southern accent, cowboy boots, and "god bless America" while espousing open borders, spending our hard-earned dollars like a drunken sailor, and selling our country down the toilet for instance, while nominating his cronies like Alberto and Harriet and entrusting our ports to gulf emirates ... excuse me but how was any of that different than Hillary(care) and her travel office coup?). Heck even Clinton was more aggressive in Kosovo than Bush has been so far in Iraq.

Anecdotally speaking, the greats of literature seem to be disproportionately represented in the ranks of the clinically depressed and emotionally unstable: Plath, Genet, Hemingway, et. al.

In general I read Buchanan and Coulter "religiously;" I truly love their patriotism and faith in America in spite of some of the above but personally I cringe every time they mention religion with no sense of irony. They fail to consider that many who agree with their demonization of the Democrat (sic) religion can't abide their own wholesale adoption of this same sort of "faith"-based knowledge system which is clearly a retrograde alternative to the proven set of unknowability principles as embodied in the science of Godel, evolution, and quantum mechanics.

I've found that almost everyone who truly understands Godel, evolution, and the hard sciences is at least familiar with religious thought; including those who may have rejected it down the road for other strains of thought including atheism, OTOH there are legions of religionists who just have no conception of rational thought and the hard sciences beyond "that's what the bible says."

Regardless of whether you believe in the deconstructionists or not, the bible reads no differently than any set of man-made allegorical writings and in this regard; the quality of these writings whether you believe them to be fiction or non-fiction (ontologically speaking would they be even better as literature were they actually true?) is often inferior in quality to the writings that were implicitly about "the bible" and religion as embodied in the greats of literature and philosophy: Dostoyevsky and the great philosophers who've tackled religion and religious issues: Descartes, Spinoza, Nietzsche, et. al. all seem to have more interesting things to say about religion than the de facto religious texts themselves: the Bible, the Koran, Confucius, etc. I'll take my religion through my own exegesis and hermeneutics thank you; I don't need one of these polyester preachers as my interlocutor ... and if that's an insult to Jerry , Jim, Tammy Faye, Orel, Pat, et. al. then so be it. The difference between them and Hitchens and Dawkins is that you might actually learn something if you understand the thought processes of the latter two, while the rest seem to be about empire building for the sake of themselves and their own empire.