About 20 years ago, a good friend asked me an important question.

"What type of a person do you want to be?"

This simple question came at a time of turmoil in my life. I had not been not acting like a very good human being. I knew I was in trouble, but I didn't know what to do. My friend's question, for reasons I still don't completely understand, refused to go away no matter how I tried to ignore it.

One night, I found myself looking in the mirror, and I thought, "What type of person DO I want to be?" Not the person I was at the time, I realized. I made up my mind to change, and although it was painful and often clumsy, I did change. For the better, I think.

I hope you'll excuse my personal story, but I mean to use it to illustrate a larger point, one far more important. I want to talk about where we are as a country right now.

Last week, Amnesty International gave this country as good a tongue-lashing as it has had in a long time. In its yearly report on global human rights, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning group accused the United States of not only encouraging torture around the world through its policies and actions, but of actually practicing it in some cases.

President Bush slammed the report as "absurd" and its supporters accused Amnesty of being "morally bankrupt" and "moving into the realm of evil."

I also found some remarks made by Amnesty leaders too shrill, in particular the comment by  Irene Khan, Amnesty International's secretary-general, that the US prison camp at Guantanamo is the "gulag of our times."

What an inappropriate use of language! Gitmo has more than a few problems, but it's not a gulag. And Amnesty threatens to undermine its mission with rhethoric of that kind.

But even over-the-top statements don't excuse some of the practices outlined in the report. The problem is that while we unquestioningly accept criticism of other nations being singled out in Amnesty's yearly reports, seeing our country's name there seems like a mistake.

But the record proves otherwise, even if you don't trust the Amnesty report, or consider it biased.

Ignore all the rhetoric from both sides for a moment. There are a few things that need to be said:

1) The United States is not North Korea or Sudan or Russia or Zimbabwe or Cuba or Saudi Arabia or any one of a number countries around the world where governments can do really bad things to people's civil and human rights. The United States may not be living up to its ideals in many cases, but it is not evil incarnate.

There are many inspiring things about the US that still make it a symbol of hope for many people around the world. Down deep, I know that our intentions as a country and as a people are good ones.

2) But the road to Abu Ghraib is paved with good intentions.

Our actions are the problem. We are the world's only superpower, and what we do matters. We set a tone that much of the rest of the world follows, sometimes obsessively. When we fail to live up to our ideals, especially when we make so much of them, then the whole world notices.

3) This is the hard truth.

We have tortured people. It wasn't merely 'abuse,' it wasn't 'administrative procedures,' it wasn't 'self-defense' -  in more than a few cases it was torture. And too often those people tortured were guilty of nothing more than of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And while we may not have decapitated them, we have beaten some of them to death while they were in our custody, or shot them as they lay wounded on a floor, or fired indiscriminately on civilians and journalists, killing many, reflexively falling  back on "the fog of war" to excuse our actions.

4) We have sent people to countries whose other practices we publicly abhor, where they are regularly they be tortured or even killed. And we knew exactly what would happen to them when we sent them there.

In some of these cases of what is called "extraordinary rendition," we sent innocent people to horrible fates. Just ask a Canadian man, Maher Arar, who was sent by US authorities to a Syrian jail, where he spent a year being tortured. The Syrian authorities later released him, saying he didn't do anything wrong.

4) It's not a matter of 'a few bad apples.' The cases are too widespread and too pervasive. It is a matter of official (or unofficial) acceptance of certain practices.

5) It is also a belief in the end justifies the means - and that approach always gets you in trouble, regardless of what philosopher Leo Strauss, the touchstone of many neoconservatives, has to say on the matter.

Nothing justifies torture, regardless of what some pundits believe. And how you get to your goal matters as much as the goal itself. Our arming and support of the mujahideen in Afghanistan, and of Saddam Hussein against Iran in the 1980s are just two of the most obvious examples of how Machiavellian strategies can backfire.

5) We have taught other countries that it's OK to ignore the agreements that countries have created together. The breakdown of the nuclear arms reduction talks at the United Nations last month, where the US played a major role in undermining the talks, is the most recent example. In our hubris, we see ourselves as the only people worth listening to. It's our way or the highway.

So what about the reality of living in a dangerous world?

Wanting to protect ourselves is perfectly understandable. Taking appropriate measures to protect ourselves is understandable.

But torture? It accomplishes nothing except that we drag ourselves down to a level far too close to the bad guys for my comfort. And even on a practical level, many military experts say that it produces bad information that only hurts, not helps, your cause.

Even popular culture recognizes the dangers of 'security at any cost,' if officialdom does not. It's a key theme, for instance, of the new Star Wars movie. While I am not one who believes in taking a Hollywood-inspired analogy too far (I do not, for instance, see President Bush as an 'evil Sith Lord'), it's hard to ignore what happens in the name of making the Star Wars world safe from attack.

Ultimately, the real villains of the movie are the well-intentioned politicians who are willing to brush aside civil rights and human rights in order to bring "peace and order" to their world.

The parallels to our world are too obvious to ignore.

And when we, as Americans, look in the mirror, what is the face that we see? A face in which we see not hope, but fear; not wisdom, but anger; not strength, but brutality?

So what kind of country do we want to be?

Organized religion has been, by and large, a positive force in the world. And that's the way we want it to be.

But like the 'Force' in George Lucas's "Star Wars" trilogy, there can be a dark side to the expression of religious belief that can manifest itself in violence, particularly between those who hold differing beliefs about the nature of God or the divine.

Last week conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe looked at this "dark side of the force" as he saw it manifested in  recent events. Jacoby asked an important question: why are we so upset with reports that Newsweek printed a short piece about the desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo, but not at the reaction in Afghanistan that led to the deaths of at least 16 people?

It's hard for those  of us in the West to understand how the alleged mistreatment of a book, even a very holy book, could possibly upser people so much as to cause the deaths of so many people.

(Then again, both Afghanistan president Harmid Karzai and General Richard Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of staff, denied the riots had been prompted by the Newsweek article, calling them instead “a political act against Afghanistan's stability.” Karzai said Monday that "we know who did this" and it wasn't connected to the Koran article.)

But then Jacoby writes that this kind of reaction to a perceived slight is one reason why Muslims are so disrespected in the West - violence, it seems to Jacoby, is second nature to Muslims and to Islam, but not to other religions.

Christians, Jews, and Buddhists don't lash out in homicidal rage when their religion is insulted. They don't call for holy war and riot in the streets. It would be unthinkable for a mainstream priest, rabbi, or lama to demand that a blasphemer be slain.

The above paragraph makes an interesting point. There's only one problem with it - it's wrong.

Christians, Jews, and Buddhists don't "lash out in homocidal rage when their religion is insulted"? Would that it were so.

Unfortunately, even a cursury scan of the headlines from the past few years, or even this past week, shows how wrong it is.

Shall we talk about the religious leaders in Israel who have threatened violence and riots, and perhaps worse, to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his supporters, if he goes ahead with his disengagement plan?

These religious leaders believe they have a 'God-given right' to the Gaza (and the West Bank), and have inspired their followers with the same belief. By defending the settlements through force and threats, they are carrying out God's will.

Let's not forget that one Israeli leader has already died at the hands of a Jewish religious zealot, who believed in 1995 that there was "a religious commandment" to kill Yitzhak Rabin.

No Christian violence? Ignoring the whole decades-long situation in Northern Ireland, there are many other examples.

It was Christian militias who murdered hundreds of people in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982, and it was Serbian Christians who murdered 20,000 Muslims in 1995.

The Associated Press reports that "Members of the Pentecostal religious community in the former Soviet republic of Georgia have been harassed and beaten this month" by members of the the country's dominant Orthodox Christian faith. The attacks, the report noted, had been taking place for years.

The recent Terri Schiavo controversy is chock-a-block with incidents where Christian religious leaders encouraged their followers to react in a manner that was often violent. Michael Schiavo and his family, as well as the Republican judge who ruled against Terri's family, have all received numerous death threats from Christians.

Schiavo himself is still in hiding, after being "Salman Rushdie'd" by the religious right in America.

And we all know how Republican House leader Tom DeLay made a not-so-veiled threat that these judges would get what was coming to them. He later said he "regretted the remark but not the sentiment." And there have been similar provocative remarks by other Christian right leaders.

And what about Christian preachers who say,  quite publicly, it's OK to kill abortion providers or the people who work for them?

And Buddism? Many in North American see Buddhism personified in the presence of the Dalai Lama. But in Buddhist countries like Sri Lanka, and Thailand, violence against religious minorities is a serious problem.

In Sri Lanka, thousands of people have died in clashed between the Tamil Tigers, who are Hindu, and the Buddhist government. Catholic churches have been attacked as well. And the Thai government has come under heavy criticism for its treatment of its Muslim minority.

And let us not forget Arum Shinrikyo, the Buddhist-inspired Japanese cult that carried out one of the worst acts of pre-9/11 terrorism the world had seen.

I could give you countless other examples of religious violence of the kind Jacoby ascribes to the Muslim world being committed by non-Muslim religious groups. But for me, the more important question is why is there religious violence at all.

The best answer I've seen so far was something I found at Belief.net - an interview with Charles Kimball, a religion professor at Wake Forest University who was director of the Middle East Office at the National Council of Churches from 1983-90.

Kimball says there are several factors that can lead followers of a religious tradition to violence "that contradicts what’s at the very heart of their religious tradition":

* A belief that only they know what God wants.

* Blind obedience to a leader- "When people become so convinced of a particular person or charismatic leader that they blindly will follow that person."

* The end justifies the means. Kimball says this is one of the "scariest" notions of all.

The problem is when people become convinced they know the route to the peaceable kingdom and they are God’s agents to make it happen. And here is where you get groups of extremist Jews whose messianic mission leads them to tunnel under the Dome of the Rock and try to blow it up in order to facilitate the building of the Third Temple. Or Christian fundamentalist groups who long for Armageddon to the point that they will support violent extremists trying to destroy the Dome of the Rock.

The behaviors outlined by Kimball are not just found in Islam. They can be demonstrated by all religious groups, as we have seen above.

And that's why, once again, I again find myself marveling at the wisdom of America's founding fathers when it came to religion. Their creation of a safeguard against this happening - by basically putting all religion on an equal footing, and saying no one religion would be the 'official' religion of America - is the reason we've largely been able to avoid this kind of religious violence.

And while it's right to decry any violence in the name of religion, as Jacoby did, it's wrong to say only one religion has a problem in that way. To do otherwise only serves to prevent us from stopping all religious violence, and keeps us from focusing on the messages of hope, justice and meaning that all religions contain at their cores.

All of us have, no doubt, at one time or another, said something really dumb. I know I certainly have.

You know, the kind of statement that can bring an entire room of chatting people to dead silence. Almost as soon as the words leave your lips, you realize, "I shouldn't have said that."

Perhaps it was anger, or ignorance, or incomplete information. Whatever the reason, you have that "D'ohhh" moment and wish you could take it back, because it often makes you look really  ridiculous.

Apparently, however, evangelist Pat Robertson, one of the founders of the Christian Coalition and the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), never has one of these "D'ohh" moments after saying something really dumb.

Take his two most recent statements that fall into this category. He made both of them last Sunday on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

First, he said that no Muslims should be allowed to serve either as judges in the US (which, of course, violates Article VI, Section 3 of the US Constitution which states: "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States") - or in the president's cabinet, for that matter.

Then he said that "the out-of-control judiciary" is the greatest threat that America has faced in the last 400 years - a greater threat than the Civil War, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and Al Qaeda.

And when Mr. Stephanopoulos gave Robertson the chance to backtrack, or to say that his remarks were "taken out of context" (always a favorite fallback), he said no, he really believed that.

These were interesting comments to make as we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the defeat of perhaps the greatest evil the earth has ever known, in a struggle that killed millions of people worldwide, including hundreds of thousands of Americans.

It would be easy to dismiss Robertson as a foolish bigot. After all, he continually shows himself to be the kind of person who would run into a burning building with a can of gasoline. But the problem is that he is a powerful foolish bigot, and when he makes statements like the ones above, people's lives are affected.

His show, The 700 Club is seen in 96 percent of the television markets in the US, and has a daily audience of 1 million. He has the ear of the White House (remember, he also ran for president once) and appears on TV talk shows.

So let's turn Robertson's statement on its head.

The crusade of people like Robertson, GOP representative Tom DeLay and James Dobson of the Focus on the Family against anyone who doesn't automatically parrot their values, may actually be one of the greatest dangers our country has ever faced. (Unlike Robertson, however, I still think that Al Qaeda and Nazi Germany rank higher on the list.)

Why do I believe that? Because these men and their supporters would take several of the founding principles of this country - in particular the belief in religious tolerance and freedom of thought - and trash them in order to achieve their narrow, right-wing Christian agenda.

If you take their flawed logic at face value, you end up with the ridiculous spectacle of conservative southern federal appeal judges (especially in the Terry Schiavo case), and even right-of-center jurists like Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, being labelled 'enemies of the state' because they aren't toeing the religious right's guidelines.

I've said it before and I'll keep on saying it. One of this country's greatest achievements is its embrace of religious diversity and tolerance. It hasn't always been easy, and it still isn't easy, but it has always been a forward movement. One only has to look at countries like Iraq or Northern Ireland or Nigeria to see the danger of what can happen when religious convictions are allowed to rule over common sense.

You can especially see this danger in Robertson's comments about Muslims, although he's also made disparaging statements against other religious beliefs as well. In 1995, he said that Hinduism was "demonic" and that Hindus should  not be allowed to enter the United States. Christians have felt his wrath as well - he insinuated in 1991 that Presbyterians, Methodists and Episcopalians reflect the "spirit of the Antichrist."

And it's not a dumb thing to say that  when I hear conservatives condemn those who disagree with them as "evil," or hint that judges who give unfavorable rulings will "have to answer for them," I hear uncomfortable echoes of 1930s Germany, or Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

Now, Pat Robertson has every right as an American to say dumb things as often as he likes. That's because the US Constitution - the very document that stands in his way  - gives him those protections. But that doesn't mean the rest of us have to sit around and just nod our heads in a "There goes Pat again" manner.

Because the rest of us, who believe that the rule of law and the practice of religious tolerance help make the United States the great country that it is, cannot afford to be silent. We just can't. Now more than ever, we have to speak up against the kinds of statements made by Robertson and his ilk.

And that is not at all a dumb thing to say.