Unbelievable.

Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety, by Wendy Kaminer (Pantheon, 272 pp., $24)

Wendy Kaminer belongs to that snarky club of embattled liberal intellectuals perhaps best represented by left-wing journalist Christopher Hitchens. Aside from making a name for himself as a rapier-tongued Puck on the Sunday talk-show circuit, he has made a cottage industry out of bashing, of all people, Mother Teresa. In recent years Hitchens has written a book, The Missionary Position, and a documentary, Hell's Angel, both of which maintained that the saintly nun from Calcutta was a venal PR machine for the Pope and the Catholic Church. In Sleeping with Extra- Terrestrials, Kaminer, in her own more socially acceptable, less bibulous way, is likewise trying to save us from "the perils of piety"-the pestilence of organized religion and its encroachment on public life. Should we be surprised that Katha Pollitt, atheist-in-chief at The Nation and author of a book called Reasonable Creatures, has given Kaminer's book a gushing blurb? After all, these rearguard rationalists have to stick together, floating perilously as they are on a shrinking iceberg of sense in a sea of credulity.

Faith and belief are easy targets for enlightened ridicule. After all, what could be a flimsier straw man than a phenomenon that has never claimed to be anything but irrational? Why does Kaminer, a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly, a widely published social critic, and a fellow at Radcliffe College who clearly prides herself on her acumen, impartiality, and reasoned prose, feel the need to write a book that proves irrationality is irrational? Doesn't the truth of this statement count as a priori knowledge, if anything does? We need only consult the dictionary to learn what Wendy Kaminer takes nearly 300 pages to tell us. But it is always the people who think irrationality should wither in the pure light of reason who feel the need to write long books that kill it dead on every page, only to see it rise up again stronger than ever on the next.

Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials is a jeremiad of the most dispassionate kind-an appeal to the sensible among us, a warning that on the eve of this farcical third millennium, our increasingly superstitious, churchy age is in danger of becoming another Salem, Massachusetts, or, worse, another Dayton, Tennessee. Kaminer clearly fancies herself a latter-day H. L. Mencken doing battle with the demons of dogmatism and political reaction that threaten our secular freedoms. She is here to skepticize us out of our silly fascination with angels, aliens, miracles, near-death experiences, junk science, creationism, a Gorgonzola moon, and (for Kaminer, a delusion of the same order) the virgin birth of Jesus Christ.

Kaminer makes no effort to understand the reasons for the persistence of such beliefs in a rational, skeptical age. She knows only that she has a jaundiced liberal's saucy eye to cast on every subject, from school vouchers (they'll only religify education by putting more kids in the dreaded Catholic schools) to the impeachment of President Clinton, which she likens to Greek tragedy when she calls it "Clinton's misfortune (or his self-determined fate)." Kaminer presents the Lewinsky affair as a matter of the right to privacy trumping the right-wing preoccupation with sexual morality. The word "perjury" is absent from her analysis.

The point of bringing up Clinton is to address the second and more heartfelt part of the book's subtitle-the "perils of piety." According to Kaminer, the impeachment of the president, like the advent of public- school vouchers, showed just how dangerous it is to blur the line between church and state. Clinton's ordeal proves only one thing to Kaminer: When moralists control the government, we'll all be on trial for our sex lives. Beware of Republicans in power! Imagine what it will be like. Lying under oath will be a punishable offense, and Chinese spies will have to find a room at the Washington Hilton.

Much of what Kaminer purports to cover in this book-the weird and whirling world of self-help-she has already critiqued roundly in her previous book, I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions. Her real agenda here is to ridicule Catholicism and, to some extent, the political agenda of the Christian Right. Of course she never says outright that she's targeting papists and other superstitious dupes, preferring easy targets like New Age spirituality seminars and do- it-yourself therapy manuals, suicidal cults like Heaven's Gate, and saccharine television shows like Touched by an Angel-manifestations of irrationalism that no serious person of faith would defend. How hard is it to show that Deepak Chopra's elevator doesn't go to the top floor, or that The Celestine Prophecy lacks the compelling authority of a rational proof?

But for all the time she spends maligning half-baked pop gurus and other lightweight spiritual charlatans, comments like the following announce her real thesis: "The Reverend Sun Myung Moon is always fair game, but not the pope."

Anyone familiar with the recent uproar over the dung-flung, pornographized painting of the Virgin Mary that is now being proudly exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art would argue that, on the contrary, Catholicism is most definitely fair game these days. This was the case long before Hitchens declared war on the Missionaries of Charity, and it has been especially true in the avant-garde art world. Remember NEA-funded sculptor Andres Serrano's Piss Christ-a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine-which by a not-so-strange coincidence is now being re-exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art? One wonders how arty liberals would have reacted if someone had exhibited a dung-encrusted picture of two gay men having sex. Then, clinically speaking at least, the dung would have made some sense.

And what about what's happening in the cinema of late? Stigmata, which stars Gabriel Byrne, Jonathan Pryce, and Patricia Arquette, is typical history-by-Hollywood fare, wherein an atheist raver-chick (Arquette) receives the wounds of Christ. She becomes possessed by someone who sounds like the straight, Franciscan version of Harvey Fierstein, and begins channeling what Vatican insiders know to be the lost gospel of Jesus Christ, written by Jesus himself. This is the kind of heresy that used to result in an auto-da-fe; now it sells theater tickets. The forthcoming Dogma, which stars Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Alanis Morissette, Salma Hayek, and Chris Rock, has likewise been dubbed unabashedly "blasphemous" by more than one critic. The film, which like Stigmata rewrites history with a politically correct pen (making Jesus black and God a woman), pays obligatory homage to Roe v. Wade by showing the last remaining descendant of Mary and Joseph working in an abortion clinic. Despite the Catholic League's vociferous protests, Dogma is enjoying more than a little positive pre-release hype.

Kaminer's one sensible pronouncement in Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials- though only tenuously linked to her thesis-is that the U.S. government should end its war on drugs. Again, this is Kaminer writing an op-ed on whatever catches her fancy, framed in the context of her pet peeve, irrationalism. Kaminer writes: "The irrationality of the drug war is matched only by its popularity with politicians, who refuse to consider facts like these: alcohol is associated with much more violent crime than any illegal drug." This stubborn refusal to consider the "facts" is the root of all evil in Kaminer's world.

Perhaps what is most irritating about Kaminer's book is the tone-deaf arrogance with which she approaches all things metaphysical. Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials is peppered with sneering asides like "the notion of God is irrelevant to me," or "a sensible person might wonder . . . " Kaminer laments our "utter failure to criticize, much less satirize, America's romance with God." But she displays a similar lack of self- knowledge, and, like so many modern rationalists, she has no sense of humor. Kaminer fails to realize that she has fallen into the perennial atheist's trap: In her godless world, she has made herself God. She too in her own way is a victim of faith: not in an unseen Creator but in the supremacy of her own mind, the superiority of her skeptical convictions, and the limitless powers of rationality. But even Socrates, the patron saint of skeptics like Ms. Kaminer, proclaimed that he knew nothing; the first Western rationalist knew that reason has its limits, and that the arrogant assurance of sophists is a form of stupidity.

Miss Vincent is writing a biography of Hamlet.