Doesn’t it seem sometimes that the people who are NOT religious are a whole lot more fun than the people who are?  At times the church suffers more at the hands of its friends than at the hands of its enemies.  It suffers more from the rigidly righteous than from the blatantly irreligious.  There are those who in their self-righteous zeal appoint themselves as monitors of other people’s morals and delight in pointing their fingers at the failings of everybody but themselves. 

Let’s face it: there have been a good many unattractive religious people.  In his book “America,” Alistair Cooke tells of a time in the early days of our country when there was a Native American king who would not renounce his traditional religion to embrace the Christianity of the conquistadors, even when they burne…