26 November—Breaking news. Well, somewhat heart-breaking news. It appears that a reader with a rather clever nom de email (as relatively few people have these days) @ comcast.com—a reader who came to The Monitor having appreciated your humble editor’s brilliantly pointed op-eds in the Republican-American—didn’t appreciate yesterday’s animadversions on organized religion.

The gravitas of this disquisition demands we use the editorial plural personal pronoun—we, us, our.

The totally anonymous reader, whose hometown and gender are unknown to us (and irrelevant anyway) was highly complimentary about our writings through the years and was good enough to cite essays we’d forgotten about, even one critical of private schools that must have been published over three decades ago. Is that a fan or is that a fan?

That’s why it’s heartbreaking that the obviously charitable, intelligent, literate anonymous reader should have taken offense at our reference to “Christian theocrats and other sanctimonious hypocrites,” correlating them with toilet paper, and “accusing” (the reader’s word) religions of being no different from political parties and social clubs. The reader identifies as a “social agnostic Presbyterian because the church is convenient” and agrees with us that Donald Trump is a disgraceful wannabe Hitler and that there’s no good reason to proscribe the display of the Ten Commandments on public property or teaching of the Bible in schools.

That’s even more heartbreaking.

But as God would put it in his preferred language, Sed peccaviums vere? Have we really sinned? Would the charitable reader be less aggrieved had we correlated the Christian theocrats with bath tissue rather than toilet paper and not likened organized religions to political parties and social clubs?

But that’s precisely what religions are. “Veritas liberabit vos,”—The truth will make you free—as Jesus told some of his fellow Jews, according to John 8:32 (after he took a crash course in Latin). And we cited Christian theocrats only because, given the current domestic political situation, they’re the most worrisome threat to freedom of religion and freedom from religion in the United States. But venturing abroad while sticking with the ever-popular Abrahamic deity (i.e., God), Jewish and Muslim theocrats are every bit as threatening wherever they can do harm.

Of course, believers in and practitioners of aggressive religions and aggressive factions of all religions allegedly don’t consider it harmful when they force their practices on the populace at large. Militant theocrats all want their own communions to metastasize as far and wide as possible, come what may. All allegedly in the name of a or the god.

Happily and luckily, however, most people who believe in, practice, and preach religions, whatever they may be, aren’t aggressive, nasty theocrats. They’re only sheep. God bless ’em.

So while we fully understand the thoughtful, faithful agnostic Presbyterian reader’s grievance, we offer no apology for stating the truth. Quia veritas nocet—Because the truth hurts. And in all events we take pride in being an equal opportunity offender . . .