"I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay."

Much has been written and said about Jason Collins' historic announcement, but it seems to me we have not yet reached the deepest implications. As a sympathetic outsider to religion, I'd like to try.

Put simply, it's this:...

I hate to break ranks with my liberal brethren, but there is a clear pattern in the mass killings that this country has suffered over the past 10 years. If, as the evidence strongly indicates, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev took part in the mayhem in Boston, then that pattern extends right up...

At a time when mainline churches and other mainstream religions such as Reform Judaism are struggling with dwindling membership, some religious brands continue to flourish. In particular, those that have taken the secular science of marketing as an article of faith have done spectacularly well. Megachurches,...

Benedict XVI. As with the Thane of Cawdor, nothing in his reign became him like the leaving it.

Hardly had the Pope announced his impending retirement than the news media, so savage toward politicians and princesses, began to genuflect before this monarch of the Mother Church. Many gushed...

Oh, what a heavenly year was 2012. I don't mean to say that it was especially pleasant, ending as it did in a series of gruesome massacres and a tiresome political quadrille over taxes. Yet, late in the year "heaven" rose by 29 percent on Google Trends to a five-year...

The heartless massacre in Newtown has many believers crying in agony, "God, where were you?" That in turn has prompted many nonbelievers to growl, "Nowhere!" And so, the ancient arguments over the Problem of Evil sputter to life and spin once again.

Thanks to the advance of knowledge and compassion,...

Since last week, when the Supreme Court accepted two crucial cases on gay marriage, speculation has run through the chattersphere like wildfire. The Court will let voters decide. The Court will let the states decide. The Court will reach a split decision. The Court will strike down discrimination across the...

Kermit the Frog was right. It's not easy being green.

As a science writer, I've long reported on climate change. I've talked with the experts. I've seen the convergent lines of evidence. That's a heavy burden on my conscience. Ignorance is bliss.

When I see people...

"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another." -- Jonathan Swift, circa 1726

Hate has become the tonic chord of our times. Its frequency in the news has more than doubled in the last five years, and, according to Google...

Disclaimer: This post contains violent imagery.

Families huddling in their homes as the armed forces of their own country bomb and strafe them. Prisoners soaked in gasoline and set ablaze like human torches. Children tortured before their parents' eyes. Just when it seemed that the horrors unfolding in Syria...

Hate is much like climate: just as a single weather event implies nothing about global warming, no one has any business generalizing from a terrible incident like the massacre in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. The humane thing to do is to send our sympathy, help and, if you are...

I wasn't going to write a word about the horror in Colorado. Survivors of the mass shooting in Aurora and loved ones of the dead deserve our sympathy, support, and public policy silence for awhile. I disdain all the chatter about gun control policy at a moment like this. But...

In the beginning -- well, very nearly the beginning -- God said stuff like this: "Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."

Whew....

My adopted hometown of Lincoln, Neb., has erected not one but two statues of the man for whom it is named. Suddenly, they have taken on a new significance. One, standing in front of our city hall, portrays young Lincoln the railsplitter. Upright, stern and muscular, this Lincoln was, for...

Maybe he's having second thoughts. Maybe my letter got some doubts going. Unlikely, but I can hope.

Whatever the reason, Ron Brown, assistant football coach of the Nebraska Cornhuskers and fiery, born-again preacher, backed out of the opportunity to make national headlines again this week. Citing a media frenzy, he...

A fresh wind is blowing through church steeples and minarets. It's got the archbishops, pastors, rabbis and imams of Old Time Religion in a reactionary rage. And no wonder. As Bob Dylan sang a generation ago, it'll soon shake their windows and rattle their walls, for the times...

"My friends think just because we live in Hawaii, we live in paradise. ... Are they insane?"

Those lines, as spoken by actor nonpareil George Clooney, helped my fellow Nebraskan Alexander Payne collect another Oscar this year, for the screenplay of his film "The Descendants."

Clooney's character, Matt King, goes on to list the everyday ills that beset Hawaii, which, he tells us, are much the same as those afflicting people on the mainland: cancer, infidelity, homelessness and the rest. That is doubtless true. But, oddly for a shrewd lawyer and landowner who has lived his whole life in the ambrosial isles, he fails to mention that Hawaii is crumbling under the blows of cultural and environmental devastation.

Don't worry: this is not a late-breaking film review. I liked the movie, and I have no quarrel with its focus on family conflict. But all the same, having just returned from Hawaii, I'm here to tell you that it's shocking to see how how science and religion are playing out in "paradise."

The science is simple: climate change and development are killing the islands by inches. Warming, acidifying seas are bleaching the coral. Ever-stronger storms and foolishly placed seawalls are eating the beaches. More than two-thirds of Kauai's beaches are under threat. On Oahu, a quarter of them, gone. Near my brother's home in Kailua lies one of the most beautiful stretches of beach on Earth, but in the five years since I last visited him, half of it has sunk beneath the waves.

Ah well, you may sigh with a Gallic shrug, beaches are for the pampered bourgeoisie. But there's more: Rising seas are swallowing low-lying islands. Untrammeled development and invasive species have made Hawaii the epicenter of the world's unfolding ecological disaster. Only two of every 10,000 acres of American soil lies in Hawaii, yet one-third of all our endangered species struggle for survival there.

You might think that if the very land under your feet were threatened with catastrophe, rescuing it would be your most urgent concern. And so it is, for some Hawaiians. In 2007, a state-commissioned panel released a high-minded plan for sustainability. Some nods to self-preservation have since been nodded: free charging stations for electric vehicles, for example, along with a few wind turbines, are now emplaced. But the fact remains that the vast majority of Hawaii's electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, so the gesture is, well, a gesture.

Where does religion enter in? At the very heart of the matter. Traditional polytheistic, animist Hawaiian religion had everything to do with sustaining life on the slender arc of land that was home to the kānaka maoli, or Hawaiian people. Of course, like all religions, it was multidimensional and more, but there can be no gainsaying that it conferred on the chief a responsibility to negotiate favorable terms with the forces of nature so as to assure prosperity of his people. In return, the chief got to live in comparative luxury. Unlike the pope or president of the Latter Day Saints, however, he was liable to be overthrown if the forces of nature did not cooperate. It was faith with accountability.

Then, the missionaries showed up. As Mark Twain wryly observed, these sanctimonious busybodies labored hard to make the Hawaiian people "permanently miserable" by stamping out their religious culture, traditions and beliefs, and by "telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there."

Since then, Christianity has crushed the remnants of polytheism. Those who have the deepest roots in Hawaii have succumbed to the missionaries in far greater numbers than the newcomers. All over Oahu, I saw "HE>i" bumper stickers on old pickups. (Decoded, it reads, "He is greater than I.") On the Big Island, a native street preacher on a corner in Hilo hollered and shook his Bible at passers by. To find native Hawaiian religion (safely tucked away in the arms of history), you have to go to the Polynesian Cultural Center -- owned and operated by the Mormon church.

What native Hawaiians have traded in for is a religion that, though it varies in its particulars from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon, unites in its focus on the hereafter. Who cares if this world goes to hell, so long as you go to heaven?

In fairness, I must add that the churches to which native Hawaiians today belong aren't entirely indifferent to this world. But for the past two decades right up to the present day, their number one earthly priority is to fight gay marriage.

It's a losing effort in the wrong fight. For if old-time religion continues to share a political bed with the Denier Industry, future Hawaiian beach weddings will have to be conducted underwater. That'll confound the Holy Controllers: Who can tell the sexes of a couple dressed in wet suits?...

Remember the "Defense of Marriage" ballot measures?

Ah, those were simpler, more innocent days. Back then, the religious right contented itself with trying to scare up backwoods voters with church-basement videos about the "Gay Rights Agenda" and gay recruiters in high schools. It all seems so Bush-league now. The dark...

When President Obama used the occasion of the National Prayer Breakfast to say that for the fortunate to pay a little more to help the less fortunate "coincides" with Jesus' teachings, he must have touched a nerve.

How else to explain the volcanic eruption of hate that has spewed from...

You are special.

Don't worry, this is not the start of yet another Joel Osteen sermon. I mean only that your existence, itself a wildly improbable fact, increasingly seems to be the only peg on which cosmologists can hang the existence of our Universe.

Oh, and not...