By DAVID YOUNT, Scripps Howard News Service

The Creator's commandment to love others as we love ourselves is, unfortunately not self-fulfilling. More often than not it is honored in the breach.

With every good intention, some American parents deliberately deprive their children of exposure to religion for fear of indoctrinating them. They reason that when the kids are old enough, they can choose for themselves whether or not to embrace a religious faith.

I don't normally use this column for birth announcements, but indulge me just this once. The long-awaited second child of Virginia, our eldest daughter, has just made her entrance into this tired old world, making it seem fresh and new again. The baby girl weighed in at 7 pounds 7 ounces. Her parents named her to honor my wife, but spelled "Rebecca" as "Rebekah."

The popular disgust over sanctioning torture to extract information from suspected terrorists was predictable. Most of us were aware that some foreign governments sanction such inhumane treatment, but assumed that Americans were "above" such brutal behavior. We expect higher standards of conduct from our elected officials. Now we are enraged and ashamed.

President Ronald Reagan's secretary of education, alarmed at the erosion of religious faith in America, once remarked that we were becoming "the kind of country we used to send missionaries to."
William Bennett's prediction is being realized.
Newsweek celebrated Easter this year with a cover story lamenting "The Rise and Fall of Christian America."

When Jesus told his apostles that the poor will always be with us, we never predicted that we might one day be numbered among them. But here we are, 20 centuries later, in the midst of a global recession.

With nearly 5 million adherents, Islam is fast becoming America's second religious faith. According to a recent Gallup poll, Muslim Americans are already the most racially diverse group in the nation.

The good news from a recent survey of American teenagers is that a majority of them (54 percent) look to their parents as role models for the kind of adults they hope to be.

At age 13 Alfie Patten has fathered a daughter, Maisie. The mother, 15-year-old Chantelle Steadman, was already sleeping with more than five boys when her child was conceived. Asked how he intends to provide for their child financially, Alfie replied, "What does financially mean?"

Two massive surveys of the religious landscape reveal that fewer Americans today claim to be Christian, and that church attendance is slipping. Meanwhile, a commentator in the Christian Science Monitor predicts that the steady decline in mainstream Protestantism will be matched by the erosion of evangelical Christianity.