One book I read during my recent travels was Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. Perhaps you've read it, too.  If so, you likely have not forgotten it.  It's a harrowing portrait of cultural fervor gone too far.  America has collapsed, imploded over political excess and machination, and a tiny group of the elite is controlling the lives of thousands of people.  So controlling is this elite forces a group of fertile women, the Handmaids, to bear children for the Commanders, the rulers of the now truncated nation.  Pregnancy machines and nothing more.  Any dissent is punished severely, usually by torture and a horrible death.

    In a forward to a more recent edition of her novel, Margaret Atwood insists that she has no animus against religion.  Rather, she says, she does not wish to see religion used to exploit people.  Which, the careful reader will readily see, is what happens in Handmaid's Tale.

    Excessive devotion to any religious or political creed or, even more, person--say, a demagogue--always creates more problems than it solves.  It never turns out well, and will lead inevitably to immense social carnage and destruction.  And no nation is immune to such things:  the world of Handmaid's Tale can happen anywhere.

    We're called to love our liberty to express ourselves, but not to use this liberty to make our liberty the sole definition of what freedom can be.