Before Ban took his oath in the vaulted General Assembly hall, representatives from 192 countries gave a thundering ovation to outgoing Secretary-General Kofi Annan, 68, who will step down after 10 years in office.

Although Annan brought international spotlight to the issues of human rights and development, saying they deserve as much attention as matters of war and peace, his tenure also was blemished by findings of corruption and mismanagement in the $64-billion Iraq oil-for-food scandal.

Annan's grand vision of reforming the institution was scuttled by developing countries, which viewed the changes as a power grab by U.N. bureaucrats and by the United States, which proposed a more stringent plan.

While praising Annan's "high ideals, noble aspirations and bold initiatives," Ban hinted at a shift from his predecessor's approach.

"The time has come for a new day in relations between the secretariat and member states," he said. "The dark night of distrust and disrespect has lasted far too long."

He also said he would strive to "lead by example" to set high ethical standards at the world body, a statement also seen by diplomats as a subtle swipe at Annan and the scandals that have been exposed at U.N. agencies under his watch.

Ban, whose career as a South Korean diplomat kept him largely out of the spotlight, has said that his modest and unassuming demeanor should not be mistaken for weakness or indecision.

He told the press that he would not evade questions, as he was reputed to do as foreign minister.

"Your colleagues in Korea may have dubbed me the 'slippery eel' because I was too charming for them to be able to catch me," he said. "But I promise today that I can be a pretty straight shooter when I need to."

Addressing concerns that he would be more of an administrator than a leader, Ban said that he was willing to personally engage to find solutions to the standoffs involving Darfur, Iran and North Korea.

"The suffering of the people of Darfur is simply unacceptable," he told reporters. He said he would push leaders in Sudan to allow U.N. peacekeepers to protect the people of Darfur if the government could not halt the violence.

He also said he would meet with Iranian leaders "wherever and when" to discuss their denial of the Holocaust, an attitude he called "not acceptable." He told a news conference that among the many crises in the world, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians was at the core of tensions in the Middle East and "the most serious issue with which we must deal." He said he planned to revitalize the "road map" peace initiative and to speak soon with leaders in the region.

But Ban left most of his concrete plans and policies vague, saying he would like to resolve issues in the Middle East, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq in each case "in a peaceful way through dialogue."

The new secretary-general also made it clear that despite all his calls for dialogue, he won't be doing it in French.

French is the second official working language of the United Nations, and Ban's resume says that he speaks it - an unstated requirement for his new post. French President Jacques Chirac interviewed Ban to make sure he could pass muster as a Francophone.

But when a Canadian reporter asked Ban in French why it should be one of the U.N.'s working languages, he didn't understand.

"If you speak 'lentement en francais' [slowly in French] I will do my best," he said.

In the end, he relied on an interpreter and answered the question in English, earning him a new nickname from the press corps: "Franco-phony."

Religion f**king blows!" declares comedian Roseanne Barr in her latest HBO special. Her pronouncement, both in its declarative certainty and self-congratulatory defiance, could easily serve as the succinct moral of Richard Dawkins' documentary, The Root of All Evil.

The big-screen version of a two-part British television series follows the noted biologist as he embarks on a global road-trip to the veritable bastions of theological conviction -- the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a Christian conservative stronghold in Colorado Springs, a Hassidic community in the heart of London -- bullying, berating and heckling the devoutly faithful he encounters along his way.

Confronting cancer patients who have traveled to Lourdes in hopes of a cure, Dawkins tells the viewer in the first scene, "It may seem tough to question the beliefs of these poor, desperate people's faith." By the end of the documentary, Dawkins' bravado is not in doubt. When talking to Ted Haggard, a New Life Church pastor (more recently infamous for his predilection for crystal meth and gay prostitutes), after witnessing one of his sermons, Dawkins tells him, "I was almost reminded of the Nuremberg rallies ... Dr. Goebbels would have been proud." To a hapless guide at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, he taunts, "Do you really believe that Jesus' body lay here?" And then there's his remark -- "I'm really worried for the well-being of your children" -- to a Hassidic school teacher, Rabbi Herschel Gluck, whom Dawkins accuses of brainwashing innocent kids.

As he storms his way around the world in the state of high dudgeon, Dawkins' attitude can be best described as apocalyptic outrage. The effect is in turns bewildering, embarrassing, grating and even unintentionally comic, as we watch the distinguished Oxford University Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science channel his inner Borat. When the astonished rabbi exclaims, "You are a fundamentalist believer," even a sympathetic, true-blue San Francisco audience cannot help but chuckle in assent.

As his rabbinical nemesis rightly suspects, Dawkins' fondness for sweeping generalizations reflects his own deep-seated fundamentalism, a virulent form of atheism that mirrors the polarized worldview of the religious extremists it claims to oppose. "They condemn not just belief in God, but respect for belief in God. Religion is not just wrong; it's evil," writes Gary Wolf in his Wired Magazine cover story, "The New Atheism," whose leading exponents include -- in addition to Dawkins -- Daniel Dennett, a philosophy professor at Yale, punk rocker Greg Graffin and Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. These are the self-styled "Brights," the moniker of choice for Dawkins to describe "a person whose worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements."

The "bright" worldview is also remarkably free of complexity. Dawkins' view of faith can be summed up thus: Religion is dangerous because it requires that we suspend our powers of reason to place our faith in the shared delusion that is God. This, he asserts, is the first step on that "slippery slope" to hatred and violence.

When we cede our "critical faculties" to believe in the idea of a higher power, Dawkins claims, we are immediately invested in a panoply of increasingly ludicrous propositions: that the Virgin Mary ascended directly to heaven, Moses parted the seas, God created the world in seven days, or beautiful virgins await good Muslims in heaven. Why not, he asks, believe in fairies or hobgoblins?

Faith, in his universe, is interchangeable with superstition, eccentricity, madness, and, at its most benign, infantilism. Religious conviction is a marker of human backwardness, both in a historical and psychological sense. According to Dawkins, human beings invented religion as a "crutch" for ignorance. Without science to help us understand the world around us, we turned to gods/faith/superstition to cope with our sense of helplessness. Today, religion remains a source of succor to those unable to outgrow their childish desire to see the world in terms of "black and white, as a battle between good and evil" -- unlike atheists who are "responsible adults and accept that life is complex."

"We're brought from cradle to believe that there is something good about faith," says Dawkins, as he compares this belief to "a virus that infects the young, for generation after generation." Fortunate are the "responsible adults" who grow up to shake off these beliefs, unlike the rest of humanity who remain trapped in their infantile desire to be taken care of by an all-powerful deity.

Unlike fairytales, however, our religious beliefs are not harmless, says Dawkins, they instead lay the foundation for the murder and mayhem inevitably wreaked by true believers. His evidence: the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Crusades, the 9/11 attacks, and less spectacular crimes against humanity like suicide bombers, anti-abortion killers, and so on.

This broad-stroked caricature of faith is delivered with a breathtaking disregard for historical context, in which social, political or economic conditions are simply ignored or discounted. "[Dawkins] has a simple-as-that, plain-as-day approach to the grandest questions, unencumbered by doubt, consistency, or countervailing information," writes Marilynne Robinson in the November Harpers', while reviewing his bestselling book, The God Delusion. And on screen he is no different. Of course, there are sound political causes for the Palestinian conflict, Dawkins hurriedly acknowledges -- only to assert in the same breath that the real culprit is religion, which teaches its adherents to think, "I'm right and you're wrong."

Not unlike the religious simpletons he claims to disdain, Dawkins sees the world in terms of a battle of Good vs. Evil, cloaked here as Science vs. Religion. Where Religion is corrupt, tyrannical and false, Science offers intellectual integrity, freedom and truth. As Robinson notes, Dawkins fails to acknowledge Science's less admirable achievements, be they eugenics, Hiroshima, or the more mundane travesties committed by unethical doctors or fat-cat researchers in service of corporate funding.

"Dawkins implicitly defines science as a clear-eyed quest for truth, chaste as an algorithm, while religion is atavistic, mad, and mired in crime," Robinson writes.

In this version of atheist theology, Science attains the same status as Dawkins' loathed "alpha male in sky," whose laws rule all things known and unknown. If we do not quite understand how the universe was created or the human brain works -- or the competing, contradictory claims about the virtues of, say, table salt -- all we need to do is wait and keep faith in the scientific method, which will reveal all in good time. The ways of Science are no less sacred or mysterious than that of God.

Like his fellow fundamentalists, Dawkins has no use for moderation or its practitioners. The people of faith featured in his documentary are strict, true believers, who adhere to the most rigid interpretations of their respective faiths. There are no Muslim doctors, church-going geneticists or Catholics who support abortion rights. Anyone who believes in evolution and God is just as deluded or in denial, and, as he tells Wired, "really on the side of the fundamentalists."

Nothing less than a complete renunciation of all things spiritual will suffice. "As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers," he writes in The God Delusion, in an eerie echo of President Bush's post-9/11 point of view: "You're either with us or against us."

It would be silly to argue that the new atheists' crusade is as dangerous as the so-called war on terror, but that crusade does give aid and comfort to fundamentalists everywhere by affirming their view of faith: one, science and religion are mutually opposed and exclusive worldviews; two, religion is immutable and outside history; and therefore, three, the Bible (or the Quran, for that matter) must be taken literally, and is not open to interpretation. For both camps, ignoring one law or moderating a single injunction is the first step toward rejecting the faith in its entirety.

This great war of ontologies, seductive though it may be in our beleaguered times, becomes immediately absurd if we remind ourselves of one simple fact: Science and Religion are historical in the richest sense of the word. They both inform and reflect our changing ideas about ourselves and the world around us. From the practice of throwing a woman on her husband's funeral pyre in India to determining intelligence by the shape of person's skull in Europe -- both of which seem hateful today -- religious and scientific beliefs ebb, rise and transmute themselves over time. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the vast bulk of what we call History, which the Brights seem just as willing to rewrite as their theological adversaries.

As innately human endeavors, religion and science are therefore as unreasonable, noble, immoral, kind, tyrannical, odious, compassionate -- in other words, irredeemably human -- as the people who literally embody them. Yes, the laws of nature and those of God might still exist without human beings, but there would be no one to name or know them as such, or act on that knowledge. Taken together, they express our need to both submit and to control, to know and to believe, to be in the visible world and to transcend it.

That the vast majority of us would find it difficult to choose between the two should be hardly surprising. The antidote to fanaticism is not a new puritanism of reason, but the contradictory, ambiguous, compromised reality of ordinary human experience.

He's not exactly the type of Democrat you'd be likely to see backslapping New York City fat cats on their way into an elaborate fund raiser for Hillary Clinton. In fact, Jon Tester, the senator-elect from Montana, isn't your typical Democrat. He's almost not a Democrat at all, or at least not the kind we're used to seeing run around Washington these days. In fact Tester ran his campaign against Senator Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) on just that platform. He was tired of the scandals and dishonesty that engulf our national politics and professed that the polluted Beltway could use a little Montana house cleanin'. Voters agreed, and Burns, who had ties to the now incarcerated power broker Jack Abramoff, was defeated in one of the tightest races in state history.

A State Senator and organic farmer by trade, Jon operates his family's homestead just outside Big Sandy in northern Montana where the winter chills can chatter your teeth as early as mid-September. When I say he's not really even a Democrat, that may be a bit of an understatement. Tester is essentially an NRA approved neo-populist with libertarian tendencies who wants to immediately redeploy troops from Iraq as well as repeal the PATRIOT Act. And although nobody would consider Tester an anti-globalization activist, his position on international trade is more in line with the protesters who shut down Seattle in 1999 than with the Democratic Leadership Council.

On a recent Meet the Press broadcast Tester even addressed the most evaded issue in national politics: Poverty. "There's no more middle class," he confessed to Tim Russert, "the working poor aren't even being addressed. Those are the people who brought us here [to Congress] and they need to be empowered. It's time to show them attention ... We have to use policy to help that situation."

In a debate last September, Sen. Conrad Burns attempted to paint Tester as weak on terror. "We cannot afford another 9/11," Burns chided. "I can tell you that right now, he [Tester] wants to weaken the PATRIOT Act." To which Tester countered, "Let me be clear. I don't want to weaken the PATRIOT Act. I want to get rid of it."

Tester built his campaign from the ground up, shunning support from nationally known Democrats like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, as he knew they'd rub Montanans the wrong way. Instead, the nearly 300 pound farmer who lost three fingers in a meat grinding accident as a child, drove around the state so he could chat face-to-face with his potential constituents.

Fortunately for Tester, he's used to bucking the system. His first foray with the Washington Consensus came in 1998 when he ran for the Montana legislature because he was outraged over the huge energy hikes that had resulted from the state's deregulation of the power industry. And he's been speaking out against policies that pit working folks against the corporate class ever since. That's why he supports renewable energies and a livable minimum wage.

Still, Tester isn't the perfect politician. While he may remain strong on many issues, he is a bit wishy-washy on a few social justice concerns, such as the death penalty and gay rights. Nevertheless, Tester's campaign and personal appeal may serve as a winning blueprint for left-leaning populists out here in the Interior West. Indeed Brian Schweitzer used the exact formula to become Governor of Montana two years ago.

We should keep an eye on the senator-to-be when he takes office next month. If Jon Tester shuns the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, and truly speaks for the people of Montana, he could have a profound effect on our national discourse. Not to mention the way business is done in Washington.

Now, Gary surely realized that he wouldn't get away with hacking into the classified files of the U.S. Government. But, to me at least, the punishment doesn't fit the crime - at all. Okay, he did hack the U.S. military on a large scale, and in doing so he set himself on the path to inevitable arrest. And an arrest, in a case like this, is likely to result in some form of punishment.

But 70 years in Guantanamo for searching for UFO data? Come on! He's no terrorist. The unfortunate fact is that Gary - if convicted and sentenced - is likely to become a convenient scapegoat and pawn in a far bigger picture. Here will be the chance for official authorities to use Gary as an example, to throw him in jail for the rest of his natural life, and then send out the message to others: "Do something similar and this will be your fate, too. For the remainder of your entire life."

The main reason why I suspect that authorities are so keen to throw the book at Gary and make an example of him, is because a decade ago a similar tactic was used against a Welsh man named Matthew Bevan, who I interviewed extensively for a chapter in my recently published "On the Trail of the Saucer Spies" book. And the earlier tactic failed - which is why I suspect steps are being taken to ensure that Gary's case doesn't similarly collapse.

Matt's case eerily parallels that of Gary. He, too, hacked into U.S. military computer systems in search of data on crashed UFOs, and claimed to have found evidence of anti-gravity style research undertaken at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Like Gary, Matt was arrested. Similarly, Gary has been accused of damaging U.S. computer systems; and it was claimed that Matt had altered data contained on the systems he penetrated.

The big difference, however, is that Matt's case collapsed when U.S. Intelligence refused to provide to the British judge at Bow Street Magistrates Court (where the case was held) firm evidence of the damage that Matt had caused. With no evidence provided, the judge suggested that the prosecution should think long and hard about whether or not they wanted to proceed.

The prosecution did think long and hard and decided to drop the case; Matt was a free man.

It seems, however, that steps have been taken - by pushing to have him extradited and tried in the U.S. - to ensure that Gary doesn't walk away equally as free as Matt Bevan.

At the very least, Gary should be allowed to serve his time in a British prison. Indeed, it's certain that even if he walks free, Gary will not attempt something like this again - ever.

But, it's that convenient scapegoat/pawn angle that will, I suspect, be Gary's downfall.