The silver lining here, of course, is that having dominated the nation's intellectual landscape for so long, each extremist piece that the Times publishes about religion affords us another opportunity to reassess our own biases and better understand the Times. As it turns out, the paper's views on religion can be traced to the biases of the family that owns it.

The anti-religious viewpoint of The Times appears to be born of two cascading historical traumas, the one experienced by the French and English philosophers of the Enlightenment as they fought to replace what they viewed to be a discredited religious world view based on myth with one based on reason alone; the other being the trauma that owner/publisher Arthur Sulzberger's German-Jewish forebears presumably underwent as they succumbed to the self-abnegating "admission standards" for Jews imposed by a supposedly enlightened Germany. It is no small irony or intimation of providence that at the precise point in history - the late 18th century - that most, up and coming German Jews were renouncing the divinely revealed status of the Bible and their once impregnable allegiance to Zion, America's Puritan-influenced, founding fathers were imagineering our own nation in Zion's image.

We'll spare the reader the details of the newly assimilated Ochs family's emigration from Germany to the US, their establishment of a radical "Reform" seminary in New York, their purchase of the Times, and their tooth and nail fight against the re-establishment of Zion as the modern State of Israel, but the result is that after a century of trying to fashion America in the image of France, The New York Times and its owners finds themselves revealed to be a retrograde and foreign entity stranded in the midst of an increasingly confident, post-European American revolution; a revolution that no longer finds need to apologize for the strength or originality with which it approaches the creative dialectic between what can be seen and what can't, let alone its whole-hearted embrace of Zion. It is sad, of course, that The New York Times is too mired in the traumas of the past to embrace that which is truly great about this land. Rather than breaking forth on a new American heading, Arthur Sulzberger is leading millions of registered Democrats over an anachronistic and pseudo-intellectual cliff.