Don’t Take Bush’s Decisions on Faith

Re “Fundamentally, Bush Works on Faith,” Opinion, April 11: Faith requires quiet reflection and more than a bit of self-doubt, because you can never really be sure you are hearing the voice of God or just voices in your head. Reflection and self-doubt are characteristics not usually associated with this president, and he certainly should not be congratulated for his in-by-9, out-by-5 approach to divining God’s will. (Bible in the morning, bombs in the afternoon.)

Being devout is not the same as being right, a distinction that many Americans seem increasingly incapable of making. Unlike President Bush, I don’t know whether God wants us to bring freedom to the people of Iraq by blowing the limbs off their children, poisoning their soil with depleted uranium and sending our own country further down the hellhole of eternal debt, but I’d bet against it because I don’t think God is psychotic. About Bush, I’m not so sure.

Richard Levinson

Van Nuys

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Any tolerant person would agree with Peter and Rochelle Schweizer that Bush’s faith does not necessarily cause him to make bad decisions. They go on to say, however, that “a commander in chief who lacks core convictions rooted in something greater than himself ... lacks an identifiable moral compass.” One whiffs here the faint scent, masked but identifiable, of a familiar, ancient form of intolerance. Nowadays, it is worth pausing to remember that one cannot tell how moral a person is on the basis of what faith he does, or does not, profess.

Peter Yates

Culver City

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The funny thing is that the quotes from Psalm 55 and the rest of the Bible could easily be repeated by an Islamic jihadist. Even more so because Islam regards the Bible as a holy book. Unfortunately, most of the people who are jihadist are narrowly Islamic, citing their faith as justification for what they do.

There is a bad habit among humans: We forget that the most important thing cannot be translated into any language and agreed upon by definitions. We can only know what to do when we listen to our hearts, loving others as we love ourselves.

Steve Mattern

Corona