Ben Edward Akerley

• The Lifetime cable channel will screen ‘Prayers for Bobby’ on Tuesday evening. Check your listings for the time.

In 1983, Bobby Griffith, a gay 20-year-old, climbed up on a Portland freeway overpass and backflipped himself in front of an 18-wheeler to end his short but extremely troubled life.

At age 16, I converted from Methodism to Seventh-Day Adventism, the theological equivalent of going from the frying pan into the proverbial fire.

Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World (paperback)

By Bob Avakian

Insight Press, Chicago (4/08) 260 pp $14.95

When Margaret Sanger launched her pioneering journal “The Woman Rebel” in 1914, the masthead proclaimed: “No Gods. No Masters” as a direct affront to the overwhelming and concerted religious opposition to her crusade for birth control.

The genesis of the recent film “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” occurred when actor Ben Stein collaborated with writer Kevin Miller to create a screenplay that would expose a conspiracy against the Intelligent Design movement by arguing that “Big Science” is stifling academic freedom by keeping any discussion of God out of the classroom.

Now let me get this straight.

We are going from having a sitting Prez (Dubya), who declares that evolution is “just a theory,” to having a Veep nominee (Palin), and possible future Prez, who wants creationism taught alongside evolution in all of our public schools.

Is this really the 21st century?

The word pornography derives from two Greek roots meaning “the writing of whores.” The term itself represents taboo and transgressive behavior depicting recreational rather than procreational sex.

It often provokes the same reaction that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart had in 1964 in one of the most famous and oft-quoted phrases in the history of the High Court. After confessing that he could not define pornography, he stated, unequivocally, that “I know it when I see it.”

With the divorce rate hovering at 50 percent of all traditional marriages, with roughly only 50 percent of all families fitting into the nuclear, two opposite-sex parents-mold, and straight couples, with increasing frequency, electing to eschew marriage and to “live in sin,” where can conservative, fundamentalist Christians place the blame for the erosion of America’s moral fabric?

“The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible,” A.J. Jacobs. (Simon & Schuster). October, ’07. 388 pages. $25.

After the runaway success of his 2005 bestseller, “The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World,” describing his experience of devoting a full year to reading and writing about all of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, from “A” to “Z,” Esquire magazine editor A. J. Jacobs decided to undertake still another cover-to-cover project: the Holy Bible.

One month ago, clinical psychologists at the University of Virginia released their clarion call report indicating that teens who have sex at an early age may be less inclined to exhibit delinquent behavior in adulthood than their abstinent peers. The profile also strongly suggests that early sex may play a significant role in helping sexually active teens develop better social relationships later on.

AARP’s official bimonthly organ, AARP The Magazine, is the world’s largest circulation magazine.

The current September-October issue, features an article entitled “Life After Death,” which documents the results of their exclusive recent poll of 1,011 people aged 50 and over about their religious beliefs.

Admittedly, the questions were posed to a relatively limited sample of those whose lives are half over.