To the editor:

Columnist Leonard Pitts got something right in his one weak subject – religion – then, under pressure from indignant literalists, backpedaled and apologized for his “arrogance,” rescuing foolishness again from the jaws of reason.

I’ll reaffirm what his now-humbled intelligence tried to tell him in the first place. Any sane adult who literally believes the Adam and Eve story, given access to overwhelming evidence of human evolution from non-human ancestors and the immense time scales involved, the flat absurdity of details regarding what Adam and Eve experienced (spontaneous generation, interspecies dialogues, magic trees producing knowledge and sin), the dubious sources for this hearsay account and its obvious derivation from earlier myths not having anything to do with the Judeo-Christian Bible – any modern American literally accepting this First Couple fantasy is indeed willfully, disgracefully ignorant and a “fool” by any reasonable definition. Let’s at least get that much right.

If Sarah Palin is among such believers, Pitts was intuitively correct to harbor questions about her fitness to hold high office in supposedly enlightened times. To pretend otherwise is to disgrace every triumph of reason and notion of progress that has moved us out of darkness. We’ve been dragged backward by these truly arrogant, endlessly offended fools for much too long, and it is time to call this nonsense by its proper name. Pitts failed us, and himself, again – just at the moment when his light peeked from under the bushel.

Bruce S. Springsteen,
Lawrence