Get this excerpt from an interview with Lynn Margulis, billed as "a biologist, the widow of Carl Sagan," in El Periodico from March 31.

Margolis: I hate anthropocentrism! And that aggressiveness toward the environment, and that idea that we are invulnerable, that we are children of God...

Interviewer: Lower your voice, the creationists will hear you, they're so strong (tan en alza) in the United States.

Margolis: The drama in the United States is that nobody studies philosophy or history. There is a fundamental cultural error: if you're not a Christian, you're a thief, a drug addict, someone horrible to your parents, a sinner! And, of course, if we atheist scientists win, the criminals around the world will win.

Interviewer: Do you really mean it?

Margolis: Do you want the truth? The Christians are much greater criminals than the scientists. The three monotheistic religions seem horrible to me. Before they appeared, more than 2000 years ago, we were linked to nature. But, in order to concentrate power, they invented religions, which are the basis of almost all wars. The United States, which is very Christian, has not even admitted the history of slavery...

Interviewer: I'm afraid that Bush won't invite you to the White House.

Margolis: Bush is more Fascist than your Franco! He has diverted money from science to the "National Strategy for the Security of the Fatherland." They need money for Iraq...They don't like the idea of Gaia, not at all.

Comments: 1) What's the difference between "anthropocentrism" and the humanism of Erasmus and Spinoza and the French Encyclopedists? 2) The idea that we are all children of God is the basis for the idea of human equality. Without it, no attempt to abolish slavery and wars of extermination would ever have been made. 3) To my knowledge, not one public school in the United States teaches creationism. Certainly no public universities do. Religious schools can do what they want, n'est-ce pas?

4) Many people in the United States study philosophy and history. I myself remember a class we had in school called "history." I also seem to remember that the University of Kansas had departments with the names "history" and "philosophy." I even took some courses in those fields. In fact, you have to in order to graduate. Hey, there's even a TV channel called the History Channel. And people like David McCullough and Stephen Ambrose and John Keegan and Jared Diamond and Niall Ferguson and Simon Schama seem to sell quite a few books in the US.

5) Margolis's portrait of the lot of the atheist in the United States is completely false. I know this because I am an American atheist. Nobody thinks you're a criminal, or even a bad person. Some people will think you're wrong. They might even argue with you, though religious proselytizing is considered extremely bad form socially. Well? Ever heard of standing up for your beliefs? Or, you could just avoid discussing the subject.

6) Not all scientists are atheists. 7) Note that even the interviewer thinks that Margolis might be exaggerating a little bit. 8) How dare she compare Christians with criminals. I guarantee you she would not do the same with Buddhists, Muslims, Shintoists, Hindus, or any other religious group. 9) Judaism, the first monotheistic religion, began some 3000-3500 years ago, not 2000. Margolis should learn some history. 10) It is psuedo-historical wishful thinking to believe that before monotheistic religion, humans were "linked to nature" in a way we are not today. Idealizing past civilizations or pre-civilizations is childish. 11) Religion was the basis of World War II? Or World War I? Or the Boer War? Or the Franco-Prussian War? Or the Civil War? Or the Napoleonic Wars? Or the American Revolution? Or the Seven Years' War? Or the War of the Spanish Succession? Should I go on? For Margolis's historical information, Thucydides said that war had three causes, honor, fear, and interest, a conclusion she should at least consider, as he's pretty much an expert on the subject.

12) The United States today is less "Christian" than it has ever been since independence, at least if you go by the percentage of people defining themselves as such. 13) The US certainly does accept the reality of slavery. School history courses pretty much teach about nothing else. It is the number one historical subject that Americans obsess over. 14) How dare she call Bush a Fascist. The United States is a democratic republic and saying anything else is blatantly false anti-American propaganda.

15) I am also offended that she says Bush was worse than Franco. Uh, Franco was the dictator for 39 years, who seized power in a military coup that led to a civil war, and had some 100,000 of his political enemies executed. This is an insult to the Spaniards who suffered under his dictatorship. 16) The Iraq war is expensive, yes, but it is a very small proportion of the US budget, a couple of percent at most, and an even tinier proportion of GDP. There is no need to "divert money from science." Enormous amounts of US government money are spent on all sorts of scientific projects. Sure some of those scientific projects are related to defense--and many of them lead to advances that society as a whole benefits from. Example: The Internet itself.

17) The most ironic thing in the whole interview is the last line, in which Margolis makes it clear that she herself has religious faith. She just believes in Gaia, not God.

Ms. Margolis, it's not religions that cause war, nor is it nations, nor is it politics. It is fanaticism about them. Many religious, national, and political groups are perfectly peaceful; in fact, probably the vast majority are. Look at the Methodists, the Catholics, the Jews, the Sufis, the Canadians, the Bangladeshis, the Chileans, the Japanese, the PP, CiU, and the PSOE. The dangerous groups, like the Nazis, the Communists, the Islamists, the Basque abertzale nationalists, and you radical environmentalists, are willing to kill for their cause, whatever it is. Any cause can provoke violence, if those who promote it are extremist enough.

One last comment. My experience shows that almost all anti-American prejudice in Europe is based on stereotypes that the Europeans get from leftist American political and media sources. Ms. Margolis is merely repeating blue-state elite Democratic Party prejudices about those nasty red-state conservative people who believe in Jesus, calling them ignorant and backward and mentally primitive.

See, you anti-American Europeans out there, the stuff that you guys say about all Americans is simply and exactly what the minority of snobby leftist self-hating Americans say about the rest of their compatriots. (It's actually quite similar to what enlightened Barcelona sophisticates say about the rest of the Spaniards.) I'm not sure whether you got it from them, or they got it from you; I suspect that both the self-hating Americans and the anti-American Europeans feed off one another and always have.  And, Ms. Margolis, let me give you a hint: The Europeans believe that BOTH red-state conservatives like me and blue-state leftists like you are EQUALLY ignorant, backward, and mentally primitive. You're not impressing them.