They were born east of the Sierras, raised in different states and didn’t know each other. Because they settled in three California towns where I had dropped sea anchors during stages of my life, I got to know each of their stories.

The Catholic was a druggie. When she paid the Church of Scientology to “clear” her, her parents were thrilled that it worked even though she began proselytizing for L. Ron Hubbard.

The Jew spent his teenage years looking down his noise at all pious types, especially Christian evangelicals, but suddenly after high school there he was on street corners proclaiming Jesus as Messiah. His parents were dumbstruck. They didn’t know how to talk him out of it, but they got him to promise never to discuss his new faith around other family members. “Because if it gets back to your grandfather, it will kill him.”

The Baptist dropped dead first. He grew up in a Mormon family. When his estranged brother, an LDS bishop from Utah, pitched up to claim the remains, friends pointed out that he had converted to another faith. “Oh that’s OK,” the brother said. “We look at that like joining Rotary.” The deceased lived what his generation called a misspent youth (which I understood extended pretty far into middle age), but according to Baptist doctrine, all of his sins were washed away in “the blood of the Lamb.” Because he never talked about religion, I can’t say how strongly he believed that, but I know his brother the bishop meant exactly what he said. He presided over the Mormon funeral.

Differences greater than Rotary versus Lions Club separate religions. The key issues that divide Catholics from Protestants put them both on the same side of a wider schism with Mormons. The best the proverbial rabbi might say of the minister and the priest going down in the same joke is that they’re followers of an heretical cult of Judaism.

C.S. Lewis wrote about The Tao, borrowing the Chinese word to emphasize the similarities, not the differences, among all religions, including the paganism of the Vikings. Today’s post-modern Scandinavian may claim to be a strict materialist, a secular humanist, a moral relativist, an environmentalist who believes there should be more nude beaches. The hoary Dane may say he believes only in free drugs. But when you steal their pot or break up their ménage à trois, they sound objections that are, wittingly or not, rooted in The Ten Commandments, not to mention Norse mythology and Buddhism.

All of which goes to say that the parents of the Jewish convert to Christianity, as well as the parents of the former Catholic addict, were more or less in the same ballpark. They didn’t believe a thing about their religions that they could pass on to their children. They showed up to temple or to church only on the highest of holy days, had Crucifix or a Menorah merely as household decoration, possibly could tell some confused stories about their respective parts of the Bible, and were more animated in saying things like, “I don’t believe in organized religion, but I am spiritual,” or (my personal favorite), “We don’t want to force feed our children religion. They can make up their own minds when they get to college.” Translation: the loopiest professors at U.C. Santa Cruz have carte blanche to fill the kiddies’ minds with anything at all. (If you still believe there are some fundamentals that will hold up the little darlings, all you need to do is pick any high school teacher and have a five-minute chat. There’s a good chance you’ll discern just one of many chisels chipping away at the base.)

What the parents did demonstrate to their children were good works. The good was defined by secular values, or peer pressure, with some readings from The Los Angeles Times and The San Francisco Chronicle. A generation or so removed good from the unvarnished teachings of prophets and saints. The Jewish Grandfather might have had that kind of grounding.

In Defense of Reason by poet and critic Yvor Winters the argument is brilliantly made that one generation’s faith becomes another generation’s habit of goodness. A habit that requires effort is easy to break, and when goodness is broken there is room for all sorts of things. There are the madness and confusion that had Winter’s contemporary Hart Crane jumping off a steamship, never to be seen again. Most of the rest of us paddle along in ignorance. We don’t know the difference between animism and Islam. Good works for the PTA and hard work in Yoga class become as religion. We tithe a few bucks to the homeless fellow huddling in the doorway of our office block (and here we just signed a petition to the building management to turn on the sprinklers at night so that bums can’t sleep on the sidewalk). Maybe we have given hundreds to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Maybe thousands. Maybe there is this karma thing, and we gave away exactly what a bank robber took in his last stick-up. He’s just doing his part, you know. His ideas of goodness are different from yours, that's all, and he has plenty of peers who think yours are nuts.

“There is eternity,” Solomon said, “in men’s hearts.” The statement generally is taken to mean that there is a built-in place for God. If the Lord is not allowed that place, the emptiness seeks a boarder. There are full-page ads in the paper, signs stuck along the meridian, a day worker on the corner wagging a huge foam rubber arrow that reads, “Open House.” No one necessarily asked your permission, but then there is that boarder who caught the vibe and showed up at your door. He probably didn’t say right away that he wants a lifelong lease with option to buy. But now that he’s inside, he goes about redecorating the whole house no matter what you think the fine print says.

Of the Catholic, the Baptist and the Jew, the Jew had the hardest row to hoe. He had to keep silent about what he loved. He moved the farthest from home and returned the least to visit. His contact with his grandfather was minimal, and he could sense the old man’s awareness that some invisible wedge had split their relationship. When Grandpa died (of natural causes in his sleep), the young man came home in a frenzy of grief and guilt. At the funeral he spotted a favorite aunt, and in her kindness she took him aside, urgently whispering, “Why have you stayed away so long? How are you doing? What’s going on?”

He poured out his heart. Before Abraham there was Jesus. After Abraham there were Jesus. Didn’t she see? God Himself really was the sacrifice for Isaac and for the whole sick world.

Her eyes had widened, and her mouth was slightly open.

“Don’t you get it? I’m a Christian. I couldn’t tell that to Grandpa.”

She looked around to make sure they weren’t overheard. “I understand, dearie.” Then lowering her voice, she spoke as to a priest in a confessional, hoping that here at last would be understanding: “I believe we we’ve been put here by extraterrestrials.”

Suppose you leave Montana to join the Marine Corps. After a couple of nights at the recruit depot in San Diego you get drunk and wake up with Semper Fi tattooed across your backside, and no orifice is sore. In my book you've done a noble thing. But patriotism aside, when it comes to art forms, tattooing rides drag, with body piercing the runt maverick with a busted leg left in the brush for the coyotes to finish off.

Religious folk quote Leviticus 28: 19. "Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the Lord." A superficial reading tells me it might be wrong to do your own inking but OK for someone else. Less facile thinkers say that the passage was meant to admonish ancient Hebrews to set themselves apart from the savage idolaters round about them. Not having a tattoo in those days would be like modern Israel not having a totalitarian government. Christians who have tattoos argue that, if salvation comes from grace, i.e., the free gift of Christ's getting nailed to a cross as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, then many works of Jewish law do not apply, like eating Jimmy Dean Pork Sausage or having a few saints and Harley logos indelibly impregnated in your skin. Liberal Jewish commentators don't buy the part about Jesus but don't see the need for sackcloth and ashes if someone sports a tattoo, while the very orthodox, who have no use for tattoos at all, will let a tattooed person at least get buried in consecrated ground, presuming, of course, that he's dead. Almost everyone has problems with the "cutting" part of Leviticus, which they agree is the modern equivalent of body piercing. Liberals are twitchy because secular psychology suggests a connection between self-loathing and mutilation.

Personally, I've never seen a pierced nipple I didn't like, and a spike through the tongue brings back nostalgic memories of cleft pallet jokes told in elementary school. Those, however, are not reasons to bring the lady home to Mom. My scruples are mostly aesthetic, and that's why I recommend, if you ever think about having a lover's name or the myth of Quetzalcoatl emblazoned anywhere on your body, remember what a moving man said to me while bobbling a box marked "Fragile" in arms sleeved in fading rainbows of color:

"I hope you don't judge a book by it's cover."

Who would ever do such a thing?! I am sure there are tattooed CEOs of international corporations. Their tattoos just don't show above the collars of their shirts. Put that moving man in a suit, keep him standing on one side, and he could have passed. For all I know, he had more integrity. What bothers me is how many tattooed people I've run across lately and how comparatively few seem to have considered that some...this is a hard word for me to say...that some "artists" are better than others. Tattoo aesthetics appear to be a matter of dumb luck, like picking any old inmate with a bottle of India ink and hoping the sewing needle didn't last prick "Born To Die" on a con with hepatitis.

An attractive, pious young lady of my acquaintance recently moved to the Midwest to do good works. Not long afterwards she emailed friends to half-apologize, half-brag about having a butterfly inked to her ankle. "Just a little one." To my mind it was television’s Miami Ink, not scripture or upbringing, that inspired the butterfly, but I mostly wondered about the phrase, "little one." If you belong to the 18th Street Gang, is just a little tack to commemorate your first drive-by better than a big one?

Then I had a fit of charity as I remembered a sweet young thing I recently saw in Target, a wonderful chain store in which I always feel vindicated as a cultural commentator and arbitrator of taste. Of the latter this girl had none. But my God, she was blessed in other ways! She was sashaying about in a very short pleated skirt, and unlike most shoppers, was built for it. You hardly noticed the sunburst coming up from the low-slung waistband, but when you did, it was like, "Morning has broken like the first morning." Before blackbird could speak like the first day, there came another shopper's stage whisper:

"Tramp stamp."

My mind came back to earth and down to the ankle butterfly, which was meant to commemorate the metamorphous of a new life. What it will commemorate all too soon is that everything new gets old. Skin wrinkles; colors fade; an in-your-face motto looses its rebellious punch by age 40. I once helped escort some loonies to a concert celebrating sobriety in a park across from the VA Hospital in West LA. Sitting on the grass near us were two middle-aged women who were French kissing. Wild guess: they were lesbians. What I'm sure is that they were wearing tank tops that showed lots of sagging cleavage and large swaths of color across chests and backs. One look to be tinted in snot-green, and the other was hued in battered-wife blue. At one time those washes of colors depicted....

....It's anyone guess, but black people! Please listen. Those ladies were white. So's the father on OC Chopper. Last year or so he had the company logo tattooed across a shoulder because the older tattoo didn't stand out enough to his liking. Now he has two sort of purpley-reddish blotches, and I for one can't read what either says. That goes triple for anything inked to dark skin. I've watched Lakers and Clippers whose tattoos look like massive bruises and make you wonder what unspeakable things go on in the locker rooms.

Which brings me to Morgan Freeman. I never met Mr. Freeman, but his movie persona always struck me as a fatherly figure who spoke deeply and of deep wisdom, who knew trouble, had overcome it and could get you out of it. What a guy! Then I saw him being interviewed sporting an earring. What a... pirate? Maybe just a middle-aged man desperate to be young again and letting MTV decide how that is supposed to look. Which leaves out original thinker.

Understand that I don't equate earrings for men with body piercing (unless there are more than three per ear), but they are like shoulder pads for women. Looking like a football linebacker wasn't feminine in the Forties, and hey, it didn't get any better in the Eighties. The currency of grown men wanting pretty ears like Latina girls taking first communion is merely an indication of how we all in our degrees are slaves to fashion. We look into mirrors and hardly perceive what's reflected back. Some of us are crazy with self-esteem and can't see that the barn needs painting. Most are crazy like adolescents, anorexics and body builders. Too fat, too thin, too short, too tall. We don't want to look like our parents or the folks down the street. We want to glitter like celebrities made up for the screen and air brushed for the pages of magazines. Then people will notice us. They will respect us. We'll even like ourselves.

And so we wear clothing better suited for other body types, maybe something in camouflage so that we can pretend to be like Marines, a spike or two to prove we're just as tough, and if we can afford it, we'll get a plastic surgeon to cut away any signs of age, individuality and wisdom. A good plastic surgeon, mind you. A stroll down Rodeo Drive shows a range of skills just as vast in the tattoo parlors of Venice Beach.

Aw heck, this is the fifth anniversary of September 11, why not discharge my mind regarding Islam?

Most Moslems are like secular Christians and cultural Jews: they are not familiar with their scriptures; they are ignorant of dogma; they are mostly influenced by media and the people around them. In America it is MTV, not the mosque, that infects the lives of young Moslems. Islamic volunteers for military service number about ten thousand and stand for the United States against all her enemies. There is nothing to worry about from the wannabe rocker or brave solider.

But our jails our are filled with sociopaths to whom Islam gives legitimacy, and unfortunately, America is a country that lets a lot of psychos (regardless of race, creed or national origin) back into our neighborhoods. Our State Department keeps giving visas to radical mullahs who preach hatred from Dearborn to Dallas. Over in DC the Council on American-Islamic Relations makes polite talk out of foreign terrorist diatribes. Yes, they say, the World Trade Center shouldn't have been attacked, but then, U.S. favoritism to Israel is really at the bottom of all the world's wrongs. The American Civil Liberties Union treats it all like free speech. The press lavishes publicity and lobs softball quetions. Dan Rather's bizarre broadcast from pre-war Iraq might well have been called The CBS Evening Stooge With Saddam Hussein. And things haven't changed. The major networks remain what Stalin called "useful idiots," those in the West who just didn't want to know or were covering up.

I hope there is something going on in secret because government at all levels appears most reluctant to probe the depth of freelance jihadism. That's when an individual who has been to the Middle East or has an Arabic last name happens to run over folks on the sidewalk outside a Jewish center, and if there's time, take out other infidels in the next block. Within minutes of this happening in San Francisco the Mayor became a psychiatrist and declared the perp mentally ill. The real fear of politicians, bureaucrats and opinion-makers seems to be that ordinary Americans will become intolerant if faced with facts. Or worse. They'll become patriotic. As any of our bettors on university campuses will tell you: nationalism is the problem. Or is it the environment that's the problem? I'm sure Jerry Falwell is in there someplace. Regardless, think globally, think peace otherwise the ozone will come falling down.

Overseas where the Arab Street snakes from Marseilles to Mecca and on to Manilla, there's a bearded imam at one end shouting the odds. At the other end lots of oil money flows. In between the average guy is a billion or so strong. Typically, he wants to read his smuggled Playboy, not the Koran, but he's got a head full of crazy ideas put there at his mother's breast and in his schools. They boil down to: Jews are subhuman; the Bible lies about the Israelites ever governing the Holy Land; there will be 72 Centerfolds waiting for him in heaven. Well, waiting for a martyr anyway. And maybe not Centerfolds but virgins who should look pretty good if they're in heaven. Jews, therefore, have to be exterminated. Americans probably should be killed too, but they might come right under a caliph. Ditto for the Europeans. OK, and everyone else who doesn't agree. After all, we invented the zero.

In spite of a mentality that weirdly combines Nazism and repressed sexuality with centuries-old grudges and arrogance about the accomplishments of others, most Moslems just want to conform to their neighbors' expectations--put their butts up five times a day for prayer, maybe riot after a particularly good sermon --but they don't want to become suicide bombers or get killed in a war.

That leaves a couple of hundred thousand who do and upwards to a million or more who would like to.

It makes no difference anymore how or why we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we don't set our face to win those wars, take a long look at the junior high kids around you. When they grow older, it will be their blood flowing in our streets, with no guarantee they can finish the job.