A GALAXY APART

From the bucolic hills of Woodstock, N.Y., where I've been taking a few days' vacation at a cousin's "shack," the world looks like a dark smudge on the horizon. The distant crackle of lightning and thunder -- in reality dispiriting news of bombings, deaths and disaster -- seems part of another galaxy. I'd rather leave it that way, at least for today.

It's not possible, however, not when Americans believe you can't be moral unless you believe in God (by a margin of 58 percent to 40 percent); not when they are more likely to believe in the Virgin Birth than in evolution (by a whopping margin of 83 percent to 28 percent); not when 47 percent of U.S. non-Christians believe in the Virgin Birth, "despite the lack of scientific or historical evidence, and despite the doubts of Biblical scholars," Nicholas Kristof recently wrote.

I've stolen all the numbers from a Kristof column, "Believe It or Not," in The New York Times (free registration required). He took them from several different polls, including a 1998 Harris poll, which also found that 86 percent of American adults believe in miracles, 89 percent believe in Heaven, and 73 percent believe in the Devil and in Hell.

If you missed his column, I hope you'll thank me for the theft. (The opinion, though, is my own -- and sure to generate brickbats.) And if those figures are true, you have to ask what century America is living in. The answer seems to be "sometime during the Dark Ages," even further from reality than Woodstock.

Postscript: Not to end on such a sour note, I offer "Slaughtering Cows and Popping Cherries," a reminiscence about The Realist and other unsung national treasures of a lost era, by the irrepressible Paul Krassner. His editorial brilliance and blunt courage long preceded -- in fact, made possible -- the satires of the National Lampoon, Spy, Doonesbury and "Saturday Night Live." And they never drew as much blood.