UPDATED: The 'Bune's Chris Morris on theocracy and the American way of life.

(As of Friday morning, the article finally has been archived at the newspaper's random Internet archive generator: "Religion is who we are.")

Former Tribune Managing Editor Chris Morris returned to the “Opinions” page on Tuesday with a column on a topic of obvious personal interest.

At first, I thought Chris’s new job title, Region Editor, was a misprint given the title of his commentary: “Religion is who we are; keep God in our lives and government.”

My groans were audible.

Ironically, elsewhere on the newspaper’s opinion page are these words, ones aimed at reassuring prospective community columnists:

“The Tribune is looking for columnists from the community. What does it take? It isn’t as hard as you may think. A good opinions column uses facts to support a point of view on a current event or issue.”

Indeed, it’s the essence of simplicity, and yet such an elusive concept.

It saddens me to say this, but why make the use of facts a requirement for guest writers when longtime staffers like Chris Morris can contribute entire columns utterly devoid of them?

As we’ve noted many times before, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. The same might be said of argumentation and reasoning.

There's a reason for this.

Our world advances not from the individual’s observation that macadamia nuts are the favored aphrodisiac of space aliens from the planet Zoltan, but from his or her ability to provide proof for such an assertion. Lacking this proof, we’re under no obligation to credit the statement.

By its very nature, religion is unable to provide such reality-based proof for its assertions, which are accepted by adherents on the basis of faith.

When it comes to living together as a community, and because there can be no demonstrable advantage with respect to proof on the part of one system of religious beliefs compared to another, a civil society that purports to respect and protect the consciences of all its members seeks not to promote one set of religious beliefs over the other.

That’s my America. Imperfect, muddled, often infuriating in its inconsistency, but possessing an ideal worth striving toward.

Unfortunately, it is not Chris’s.

He begins with this sentence:

“I believe in God and in his son, Jesus Christ. I am a proud member of St. Mary’s Catholic Church, consider myself a Christian, and believe in the power of prayer.”

From this admirable statement of personal belief, Chris promptly ventures from the specific to the general:

“I have become a minority in the United States of America … for some reason we are not supposed to pray … we have been so worried about being politically correct that we have turned our backs on what has made this country great – Christian values, morality and faith in God.”

But, later he qualifies:

“I am not a fan of television evangelists, and I detest those who try to tell us what is right and what is wrong. I do not consider myself part of the Christian Right.”

Chris’s pretzel logic is amplified at this juncture, for certainly he does not detest himself?

Yet the whole of his column is devoted to doing precisely what he claims to abhor, telling me, a non-believer, in no uncertain terms that certain beliefs are right (God, prayer, religion), and others are wrong (taking “God out of our Statehouse, schools, and other public arenas”), and stating quite clearly that any other way than his own of looking at the question of America’s supposedly innate Christianity is both “absolute wrong” and intended to “punish the majority just to please a handful of activists.”

Perhaps you caught the most profound of Chris’s contradictions.

First, he is a member of a persecuted and humiliated minority; then, seconds later, he is insistent that his dominant Christian majority not be forced to consider the rights of the minority, which he views as stemming from activists and other forgettable troublemakers who can sit there silently during mandated prayer and stop intruding upon the quality time of the numerically superior.

Well, which is it?

Minority, or majority? How do we balance the interests of the two? Why does it matter who says what during a public holiday that derives most of its trappings from ancient, pagan Rome? If you are confident and secure in your beliefs and your values system, why must other people pay homage to them each and every day?

Why do you need that homage?

And, where are the facts, Chris?

Not your opinions, but the facts?

Although such a reminder may prove inconvenient to Chris’s regrettably untutored and homogenized view of political and religious history, it’s worth remembering that at one time in America’s past – in fact, for a very long time – his apocryphal arguments (such as they are) for preserving the nation’s Christian heritage in support of the founding fathers and their genius were directed not against the ACLU or resident Muslims, but against his own Roman Catholic Church!

You can look it up, Chris … unless, of course, you’re afraid that simple matters like research and understanding – and empathy -- might compromise the intensity of prejudices left unexamined for so very long.

Facts, reasoning, knowledge … if anything, these are the stuff that made America “great,” if by this we mean powerful and determined in the material and the philosophical senses -- and how many people came to America to escape the exact same confining version of ideological conformity that Chris now incorrectly (and lazily) exalts as the founding American principle, and wishes us all to accept?

Perhaps his own Catholic ancestors, that’s who.

Chris, when we lose sight of the importance of knowledge, of thought, of ideas – that’s when truly bad things happen.

Frustration is understandable. Illogic is not.