Religion can be used to justify good or evil

From the ON FAITH blog in the Washington Post, Susan Jacoby writes about "Faith, Race, and Reason":

During the civil rights movement, most white Protestant churches in the South--those that now make up the Southern Baptist Convention--stood solidly against desegregation. Some of the children of those good churchgoers are as unwilling to accept the legitimacy of a black president as their parents were to accept riding on a bus next to blacks.

It is impossible to have a rational discussion about policy differences with people who run around screaming about killing Granny and calling the president a communist, a socialist, and a Nazi. The new practitioners of the paranoid style are impervious to reason and facts. I thought Obama was extremely eloquent in the conclusion to his speech, when he spoke about two sides of the American character--the side that almost instinctively distrusts government and the side that cares about other, less fortunate citizens. I'm sure that the Obama-haters weren't listening to a word he said. What we are seeing now is a third and worse facet of the American character--the bullying, ignorant facet in which certain people view anyone else's gain as their loss.