Jack Beatty on Pat Robertson

Beatty’s column was a perceptive and well-written perspective on Robertson, the religious right, and its most warped contingent--the Christian Reconstructionist movement.

It is unfortunate, however, that Beatty chooses to use the same kind of polemic so frequently employed by those he criticizes when he describes people of faith as “so hard up for hope that they will believe in tacky miracles.”

I hope that people of good will and intelligence, like Beatty, can view each other with respect and speak of each other without derision, whether or not they define themselves as religious or secularist.

As a person of faith I am able to understand, to some degree, and to respect the secularist view, even though to me it is absent of hope in terms of experiencing and interpreting the great joys and profound sorrows of life and is ultimately less than fully humanizing.

Similarly, I would seek understanding and respect from Beatty, even though he might view my faith in a benevolent and personally present God as a thoughtless exercise in comforting self-deception and false hope.

Neither one of us deserves to be called a fool because we choose one side or other of this argument, each side having attracted some of the greatest minds in human history.

MICHAEL J. PUTNAM

Torrance