The Devil and Secular Humanism: The Children of the Enlightenment.

Time spent m airport waiting areas and on planes is well spent trying to catch up on one's reading. A recent weekend dash to California and back allowed me to get nearly through four books worthy of comment: Yours, Isaac Asimov: A Lifetime of Letters, edited by Stanley Asimov; The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice by Christopher Hitchens; The Devil and Secular Humanism. The Children of the Enlightenment by Howard B. Radest; and The Turning Tide: The Fall of Liberalism and the Rise of Common Sense by Pat Robertson.

Although Isaac Asimov, president of the American Humanist Association until his untimely death in 1992, did not believe in immortality in the traditional religious sense, he certainly achieved it with his nearly 500 published books, his unpretentious and infectious good humor and good will, his monumental accomplishments in the area of science popularization, and his strong support for humanism and other liberal causes. During his lifetime, he received an estimated 100,000 letters and personally answered about 90 percent of them--the equivalent in words of another hundred books or so.

His younger brother, journalist Stanley Asimov, who died in August 1995, silent a year sifting through 45,000 or so of Isaac's letters in Boston University's archives to produce Yours, Isaac Asimov (Doubleday, 332 pp., $24.95). The letters deal with nearly every subject under the sun: writing, science, science fiction, pseudoscience, humor, religion, women's rights, and overpopulation, to mention but a few. The Asimov of these letters is the same Asimov we see in his books and articles and in everything else he did: a nice, decent, ordinary guy who just happened to be a genius. When I had the honor of introducing him at a 1988 conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I concluded by saying that Isaac Asimov was "not a Renaissance man but a one-man Renaissance" His letters are a delightful read.

One of the most venerated of con, temporary sacred cows is Mother Teresa of Calcutta--the Albanian nun whose only proclaimed wish is "to serve God." In The Missionary Position (Verso, 98 pp., $12.95), British writer Christopher Hitchens performs the useful task of sticking a pin into her overinflated balloon. Hitchens shows that Mother Teresa is "a religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermonizer, and an accomplice of worldly secular powers," as well as "the emissary of a very determined and very politicized papacy." According to the author, she treats the poor not so much as people in need but as the instruments of her work in "a fundamentalist religious campaign" and "on occasion for piety."

Hitchens further states that Mother Teresa has taken in "hoards of money" for which there is no public accounting, runs "a haphazard and cranky institution {in Calcutta} which would expose itself to litigation and protest were it run by any branch of the medical profession," and tolerates no "questioning of authority" within her religious order. Although she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, Hitchens wonders what she "had ever done, or even claimed to do, for the cause of peace." Quite to the contrary, he points out, by her all-out opposition to abortion rights and family planning, she has been an obstacle to peace. He marvels at the fact that Mother Teresa's "Missionaries of Charity have for decades been the recipients of the extraordinary largesse of governments, large foundations, corporations, and private citizens."

Hitchens concludes this fascinating and eminently readable book with: "There is no conceit equal to false modesty ... no worldliness to compare with ostentatious otherworldliness."

It is too bad that the undeserving and overrated Mother Teresa reaps such a rich harvest of adulation and fame while the far more valuable work of organizations of humanists, rationalists, and atheists in India--which have improved human rights while opposing superstition--is little known or appreciated outside the country.

On a more positive note--and better late than never--I highly recommend Howard Radest's The Devil and Secular Humanism (The Humanist Institute, 2 West 64th Street, New York, NY 10023; 171 pp., $17.00). Dean emeritus of the Humanist Institute, former director of the Ethical Culture Fieldstone Schools, and founder and chair of Columbia's Seminar on Moral Education, Radest has long been one of our leading humanist philosophers and thinkers.

In this excellent book (I liked every, thing about it except the title), Radest explores the roots of modern humanism, examines its diversity, and frankly discusses its shortcomings. These short, comings, he shows, have to do not with any defects in humanist philosophy but, rather, with how humanists and humanist organizations present themselves to the world. Even if there were no humanist organizations, he writes, there would still be a vast number of humanists and humanism would still be an important and viable life-stance (or, dispensing with false modesty, the most rational life-stance). The big problem for the humanist movement, Radest explains, is to learn how to harmonize strong individualism and skepticism with the budding of effective organizations that serve the intellectual, emotional, and ethical needs of individuals, families, and communities.

Finally, let's look at The Turning Tide (Word Publishing, 332 pp., $5.99) by Pat Robertson, the televangelist, politician whose radical "Contract with the American Family" agenda was scored by an American Humanist Association board resolution a few days after it was promulgated in May 1995. Though I would not recommend buying this or any other Robertson book (which would only encourage and subsidize his brand of destructive ultra-conservatism), it is instructive to pass through what he exhibits of his mental world in order to see what kind of country he and his numerous allies would have us all live in.

Not content with merely campaigning for a political agenda (tax support for sectarian and other private schools; downgrading public education; reintroducing sectarian practices in public schools; restricting reproductive rights; replacing public welfare programs with tax-supported sectarian charities; redistribution of income upward; ending public support for the arts, public broad, casting, and legal services for the poor; and so on), Robertson, ignoring the ethical injunction of the man he calls his "Redeemer," demonizes and scapegoats numerous enemies. Among them: "liberals"; People for the American Way, which he insists is "an avidly anti-Christian group"; "secular humanists .. with a well-defined and dangerous agenda. ... an evolutionary hypothesis based on the ideas of Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and others"; "the public school system in America ... that resembles the state-owned factories of the former Soviet Union"; "the liberal educational bureaucracy and its socialist friends and supporters"; the National Endowment for the Arts; and "radical feminists, homosexuals, Planned Parenthood, the {American Civil Liberties Union}, People for the American Way, and their radical allies." In other words, everyone to the left of Robertson is evil and dangerous.

The stomach-heaving Turning Tide accuses liberals of forbidding children to pray in school, imagines a "vendetta against religious values that has been waged ... by liberal courts, liberal educators, and the liberal media," accuses public education of being since "early in the nineteenth century ... a vehicle for socialism and anti-religious cleansing," insists that "institutionalized day care .. is turning millions of children into zombies," and extols the Republican Party, whose 1988 presidential nomination Robertson fell far short of getting, as "becoming more and more the party of Christian social thinkers "

It does not matter if this nonsense is clinical paranoia, cynical demagoguery, or both. Robertson is the top of a very big and dangerous iceberg blocking our path to the future. Most American Christians, Jews, and religiously unaffiliated people do not buy into Robertson's agenda when their noses are rubbed in it. The question is: will decent, thinking Americans across the spectrum be strong enough to hold the line against mindless Robertsonism and its allies"

Edd Doerr is president of the American Humanist Association, executive director of Americans for Religious Liberty, and author or coauthor if fifteen books.