By David Weigel

 | Posted Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, at 3:58 PM ET

WASHINGTON

At an appearance at George Washington University here Saturday night, Bill Maher bounded into territory that the news media have been gingerly tiptoeing around.

Magic underwear. Baptizing dead people. Celestial marriages. Private planets. Racism. Polygamy.

“By any standard, Mormonism is more ridiculous than any other religion,” asserted the famously nonbelieving comic who skewered the “fairy tales” of several faiths in his documentary “Religulous.” “It’s a religion founded on the idea of polygamy. They call it The Principle. That sounds like The Prime Directive in ‘Star Trek.’ ”

He said he expects the Romney crowd — fighting back after Robert Jeffress, a Texas Baptist pastor supporting Rick Perry, labeled Mormonism a non-Christian “cult” — to once more “gloss over the differences between Christians and Mormons.”

Maher was not easy on the religion he was raised in either. He referred to the Roman Catholic Church as “an international child sex ring.”

But atheists, like Catholics and evangelical Christians, seem especially wary of Mormons, dubbed the “ultimate shape-shifters” by Maher.

In a Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll released on Tuesday, people were asked what single word came to mind for Republican candidates. For Herman Cain it was 9-9-9; for Rick Perry, Texas; and for Mitt Romney, Mormon. In the debate Tuesday night, Romney said it was repugnant that “we should choose people based on their religion.”

In The Times on Sunday, Sheryl Gay Stolberg chronicled Romney’s role as a bishop in Boston often giving imperious pastoral guidance on everything from divorce to abortion.

Stolberg reported that Romney, who would later run for Senate as a supporter of abortion rights against Teddy Kennedy and then flip to oppose those rights in Republican presidential primaries, showed up unannounced at a hospital in his role as bishop. He “sternly” warned a married mother of four, who was considering terminating a pregnancy because of a potentially dangerous blood clot, not to go forward.

Another famous nonbeliever, Christopher Hitchens, wrote in Slate on Monday about “the weird and sinister belief system of the LDS,” the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Aside from Joseph Smith, whom Hitchens calls “a fraud and conjurer well known to the authorities in upstate New York,” the writer also wonders about the Mormon practice of amassing archives of the dead and “praying them in” as a way to “retrospectively ‘baptize’ everybody as a convert.”

Hitchens noted that they “got hold of a list of those put to death by the Nazis’ Final Solution” and “began making these massacred Jews into honorary LDS members as well.” He called it “a crass attempt at mass identity theft from the deceased.”

The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank.

It took Ernest Michel, then chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, three years to get Mormons to agree to stop proxy-baptizing Holocaust victims.

Mormons desisted in 1995 after Michel, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported, “discovered that his own mother, father, grandmother and best childhood friend, all from Mannheim, Germany, had been posthumously baptized.”

Michel told the news agency that “I was hurt that my parents, who were killed as Jews in Auschwitz, were being listed as members of the Mormon faith.”

Richard Bushman, a Mormon who is a professor emeritus of history at Columbia University, said that after “the Jewish dust-up,” Mormons “backed away” from “going to extravagant lengths to collect the names of every last person who ever lived and baptize them — even George Washington.” Now they will do it for Mormons who bring a relative or ancestor’s name into the temple, he said.

Bushman said that “Mormons believe that Christ is the divine son of God who atoned for our sins, but we don’t believe in the Trinity in the sense that there are three in one. We believe the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are three distinct persons.”

Kent Jackson, the associate dean of religion at Brigham Young University, says that while Mormons are Christians, “Mormonism is not part of the Christian family tree.”

It probably won’t comfort skeptical evangelicals and Catholics to know that Mormons think that while other Christians merely “have a portion of the truth, what God revealed to Joseph Smith is the fullness of the truth,” as Jackson says. “We have no qualms about saying evangelicals, Catholics and Protestants can go to heaven, including Pastor Jeffress. We just believe that the highest blessings of heaven come” to Mormons.

As for those planets that devout Mormon couples might get after death, Jackson says that’s a canard. But Bushman says it’s part of “Mormon lore,” and that it’s based on the belief that if humans can become like God, and God has the whole universe, then maybe Mormons will get to run a bit of that universe.

As for the special garment that Mitt wears, “we wouldn’t say ‘magic underwear,’ ” Bushman explains.

It is meant to denote “moral protection,” a sign that they are “a consecrated people like the priests of ancient Israel.”

And it’s not only a one-piece any more. “There’s a two-piece now,” he said.

Republicans are the ones who have made faith part of the presidential test. Now we’ll see if Mitt can pass it.

Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

MILWAUKEE — The booming started early. In the first three innings of Game 6 of the National League Championship Series at Miller Park, the St. Louis Cardinals and theMilwaukee Brewers combined for six home runs (a major league postseason record) and 13 runs to chase both starting pitchers with remarkable haste, even for this series.

Milwaukee’s Shaun Marcum? Done after one inning and four runs. Edwin Jackson of the Cardinals? Pulled for a pinch-hitter after allowing three home runs in two innings. The ball often jumps here when the roof is closed, as it was Sunday night, but this was extraordinary.

By the time things calmed down, St. Louis led by five runs. The rest of the 12-6 clinching victory for the Cardinals proved another stressful exercise for Manager Tony La Russa, who broke his own N.L.C.S. record for pitching changes while watching his magnificent bullpen allow only two runs and three hits over the final seven innings — a quality start in reverse.

La Russa summoned relievers so often in this series that they worked more innings (282/3 innings) than his starters (241/3). Only Chris Carpenter, in Game 3, pitched as far as five innings. The 28 changes was one more than La Russa made in seven games against Atlanta in 1996.

The relievers held batters to a .155 average while compiling a 1.88 E.R.A. Still, La Russa said he never relaxed until Jason Motte, the last of the six St. Louis pitchers, struck out pinch-hitter Mark Kotsay swinging on a 99-mile-an-hour fastball to end it. Motte then opened his arms to accept a hug and a lift from catcher Yadier Molina.

“It was 12-6, and I was sweating bullets,” La Russa said in the Champagne-drenched Cardinals clubhouse while Motte accepted a beer shower nearby from several teammates. “The Brewers are very dangerous. Not fun. Every three outs you get are an ordeal, and that’s what you’re up against when you play them.”

Milwaukee hoped to extend the series at Miller Park, where it led the majors with 57 victories. But another poor start by Marcum, who finished the postseason 0-3 with a 14.90 E.R.A., and more sloppiness in the field doomed the Brewers in their first league championship series in 29 years. Milwaukee committed three errors, all in one inning, giving them seven in two games and a record-tying 10 in the series.

David Freese, the young Cardinals third baseman who persevered through two years of ankle problems, slugged a three-run homer in the first inning and batted .545 in the series to win the M.V.P. award. He needed a triple for the cycle when La Russa removed him in a double-switch in the eighth.

“Not too many people get a chance to do this in their hometown,” said Freese, who grew up in Wildwood, Mo. “It’s an unbelievable feeling.”

Almost from the minute the Brewers lost Game 5 in St. Louis, Milwaukee Manager Ron Roenicke vigorously defended his choice of Marcum for Game 6 even though No. 5 starter Chris Narveson had a 1.20 E.R.A. in 15 innings against the Cardinals this season. He refused to consider the ace Yovani Gallardo on three days’ rest, preferring to hold him back for a possible Game 7.

After the game, Roenicke stuck by his choice. “I know it was the right decision,” he said. “I’m not second-guessing anything there.”

Two first-inning mistakes by the Brewers hurt Marcum. Jon Jay should have been out stealing second with Albert Pujols up, but catcher Jonathan Lucroy bounced the throw and second baseman Rickie Weeks couldn’t handle it. Pujols drew a full-count walk before Lance Berkman lined an R.B.I. single to center. Berkman moved up to second when center fielder Nyjer Morgan’s throw to third overshot the cutoff man.

Marcum pounced on Matt Holliday’s squib and shoveled it to Lucroy with his glove to get Pujols. But he hung the next pitch to Freese, who homered to left for a 4-0 lead.

The power rush continued in the Milwaukee first, with the leadoff batter Corey Hart homering. Roenicke brought in Narveson to relieve Marcum and he wasn’t much better, allowing five runs in an inning and two-thirds. Rafael Furcal homered in the second for St. Louis, but Jackson gave up two more, a solo to Weeks and a two-run shot by Lucroy. That made it a one–run game and kept the sellout crowd of 43,926 engaged.

Pujols made it 6-4 by driving his second homer of the series so far into the second deck in left field in the third that he paused for several seconds to admire it. The Cardinals went on to load the bases against the left-handed Narveson and scored another on Nick Punto’s sacrifice fly.

With a chance to break it open, La Russa sent up the right-handed-batting Allen Craig to hit for the ineffective Jackson. The right-hander LaTroy Hawkins relieved, and Craig grounded a two-run single through the middle for a 9-4 lead.

The Cardinal bullpen finished it off from there.

Fernando Salas gave up Yuniesky Betancourt’s run-scoring double over two innings. The lefthander Marc Rzepczynski, normally a one- or two-batter specialist, went two and a third innings and allowed one run before Octavio Dotel, Lance Lynn and Motte combined to retire eight of the last nine batters. The Cardinals would add two unearned runs on three Brewer errors in the fifth, two on one play by third baseman Jerry Hairston Jr., and a run-scoring single by Pujols in the eighth.

“We just couldn’t touch their bullpen,” Roenicke said.

INSIDE PITCH

The crowd gave Milwaukee’s PRINCE FIELDER, a pending free agent, standing ovations before and after he grounded out in the eighth, presumably his final at-bat in a Milwaukee uniform. “It was awesome, because playing here was awesome,” said Fielder, who homered in the first two games of the series but was 1 for 14 from Game 3 on to finish 4 for 20 (.200).

Copyright.2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

In a quiet corner across the street from Zuccotti Park, a cluster of 25 solemn-faced protesters struggled one night to give Occupy Wall Street what critics have found to be most lacking.

“We absolutely need demands,” said Shawn Redden, 35, an earnest history teacher in the group. “Like Frederick Douglass said, ‘Power concedes nothing without a demand.’ ”

The influence and staying power of Occupy Wall Street are undeniable: similar movements have sprouted around the world, as the original group enters its fifth week in the financial district. Yet a frequent criticism of the protesters has been the absence of specific policy demands.

Mr. Redden and other demonstrators formed the Demands Working Group about a week and a half ago, hoping to identify specific actions they would formally ask local and federal governments to adopt. But the very nature of Occupy Wall Street has made that task difficult, in New York and elsewhere.

Although Occupy Seattle has a running tally of votes on its Web site — 395 votes to “nationalize the Federal Reserve,” 138 for “universal education” and 245 to “end corporate personhood,” for example — Mike Hines, a member of the group, said the list would soon be removed because the provisions had not been clearly explained and because some people were not capable of voting online.

“It feels like we’re all in a similar boat,” Mr. Hines said of other Occupy movements. “We all want to include as many voices as possible.”

In New York, the demands committee held a two-hour open forum last Monday, coming up with two major categories: jobs for all and civil rights. The team will continue to meet twice a week to develop a list of specific proposals, which it will then discuss with protesters and eventually take to the General Assembly, a nightly gathering of the hundreds of protesters in the park.

A two-thirds majority would have to approve each proposal, and any passionate opponent could call for the entire vote to be delayed.

The General Assembly has already adopted a “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” which includes a list of grievances against corporations and a call for others to join the group in peaceful assembly. To many protesters, that general statement is enough, and the open democracy of Zuccotti Park is the point of the movement.

“Demands are disempowering since they require someone else to respond,” said Gabriel Willow, a protester strolling past a sleeping-bag pod of young adults in the park last Monday. “It’s not like we couldn’t come up with any, but I don’t think people would vote for them.”

Although Monday’s open forum was meagerly attended, politically active members like Cecily McMillan and David Haack, who first proposed formulating demands in a pre-campout planning meeting in August, said they were ready to take action. Mr. Haack, who in 2009 tried to run for the White Plains City Council, admitted feeling disillusioned after the group struck down their proposal in August, but now he feels inspired by the movement’s “true democratic process,” even if it means slower progress going forward.

“Let’s give ourselves two weeks,” Ms. McMillan said about presenting provisions to the General Assembly. Ms. McMillan, 23, a New School graduate student, feels such dedication to the cause that she has contemplated taking a sabbatical from her studies — but she has begun to worry that the movement could become “a joke” without specific goals. Still, with the right demands, she said, more union members and diverse contingencies could join.

In Austin, Tex., participants agreed on four demands, including an end to corporate personhood and tax reform. One Austin activist, Lauren Walker, linked the movement’s goals directly to government officials.

“This is our time because we’re coming up to the 2012 elections,” she said, suggesting that protesters saw the presidential election as a “deadline” to draft revolutionary policy suggestions.

Elsewhere, Occupy Boston, Occupy D.C. and Occupy Philadelphia were among the many groups in the movement slowly formulating demands, though in each city, opposition has arisen from skeptical demonstrators.

In Boston, Meghann Sheridan wrote on the group’s Facebook page, “The process is the message.” In Baltimore, Cullen Nawalkowsky, a protester, said by phone that the point was a “public sphere not moderated by commodities or mainstream political discourse.” An Occupy Cleveland participant, Harrison Kalodimos, is even writing a statement about why demands are not the answer.

Joseph Schwartz, a political science professor and an Occupy Philadelphia participant, said he thought the movement’s “anarchist strain” discouraged a demand-making environment.

Whatever it is, New York’s small group of focused activists said they would not yield.

“If we don’t make demands, the political parties will make them for us,” a longtime protester, Eric Lerner, 64, said from his spot in the cluster last Monday. “We have to get it right this time.”

Copyright.2011. The New York Times Company, All Rights Reserved

WASHINGTON

HEMINGWAY could be hard on women. And women could be hard on Hemingway.

I have always been a Fitzgerald girl. What could be more gorgeous than “The Great Gatsby”?

If you perused Hemingway in college in the first flush of feminism, he seemed like a relic. As F. Scott Fitzgerald noted, Hemingway needed a new wife for every big book. And even when he was cheating on a wife with her friend, he painted himself as a victim of predatory and trusting women.

Writing in “A Moveable Feast” about dumping his older first wife, Hadley, for his older second wife, Pauline, he whinged that “the oldest trick” is “that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband.”

But Hemingway is enjoying a renaissance this year, the 50th anniversary of his suicide by shotgun, so it is time to give that most self-consciously masculine American writer another look.

Papa is popping. There’s a new volume of his lusty letters. He was the funniest character in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.” A staging of “The Sun Also Rises” is playing off-Broadway. “The Paris Wife,” a novel about Hadley Hemingway by Paula McLain, was a best seller. And the bittersweet biography of Hadley by my friend Gioia Diliberto, which inspired McLain, has just been reissued under the title “Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway’s First Wife.”

Paul Hendrickson has written a captivating book called “Hemingway’s Boat,” about Ernest’s 27-year love affair with Pilar, his mahogany cabin cruiser that outlasted three of his wives “and all his ruin.” Papa played Fats Waller records on a scratchy phonograph on the boat, where he “dominated” marlins, propositioned women, hunted German subs, saved guests from shark attacks and drank daiquiris, trying not to fall off the flying bridge.

“He’d acted like a boor and a bully and an overly competitive jerk on this boat,” Hendrickson writes.

Diliberto recalled that when her Hadley bio was first published in 1992, she was surprised to find her book readings filled with men “who looked like stage-three Hemingways with white beards and safari jackets straining over their bellies. They all wanted to be Hemingway, to live his outdoorsy, action-packed life.

“No woman wants to be a Hemingway heroine who totally submerges her identity to her lover. As Catherine Barkley said in ‘A Farewell To Arms,’ ‘I want you so much I want to be you too.’ We’d much rather be dressed in floaty silk, sipping Champagne on Jay Gatsby’s terrace.”

But Diliberto says women are wrong to think Hemingway has nothing to offer them. Especially now that women are rising and men are declining, as The Atlantic has noted in two cover stories, women can feel secure enough to “relax and enjoy him,” as Diliberto puts it.

“Much of Hemingway’s work, particularly the stories he wrote during his marriage to Hadley,” she said, “brilliantly chart the emotional nuances in relationships between men and women.”

Hendrickson notes that after Hemingway’s death, “it was very fashionable to put him down for his misogyny. But now scholars, ironically including great female scholars, have burrowed down into him and found this sly and deceptive sensitivity toward women. He understood there was something about himself so sensitive, a tuning-fork tremulousness, that it was almost as though it shamed him, and he put on the he-man act.”

That “Kansas City-boy brutality,” as Gertrude Stein called it, was an authentic part of him. But Hendrickson believes it was also a mask covering up “a tortured sexual ambiguity.”

The loathed mother, Grace, who raised her little boy for a few years as his older sister’s “twin,” dressing him in frilly bonnets, frocks and Mary Janes, imbued him with sexual confusion.

Following up on interviews with the author’s sons that he did 24 years ago for The Washington Post, Hendrickson explores the bond between Hemingway and his youngest son, Gigi, a doctor who was a manic depressive, transsexual and heterosexual and who sometimes called himself Gloria Hemingway. He married four times, had eight children and died in the women’s annex of a Miami jail cell after being picked up for exposing himself.

“I believe that the son was acting out in some ways the tortured sexual ambiguities that the father felt,” Hendrickson said, suggesting that it created a deep, dark bond between them.

In his posthumously published novel “The Garden of Eden,” Hemingway writes about a beautiful, unstable woman on her honeymoon in France who keeps cropping her hair shorter, sleeps with a woman and does “devil” things in bed to her writer husband, pretending she’s the man and he’s the woman.

Hendrickson says that women should give Hemingway a chance: “You just have to fight past the misperceptions and stereotypes.”

Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights reserved

WASHINGTON

SOMETIMES it feels as though I spend half my time working and the other half trying to ameliorate the strain of working.

Ever since one particularly clenched day of columnizing years ago, when I found myself curled up on the floor of my house davening, I’ve tried various remedies for the ravages of stress: better nutrition, caramels, gym, green tea Popsicles, kavakava, kale, kombucha, cupcakes, chocolate, chardonnay — sometimes in concurrent combinations.

The one that works best is yoga.

So I was intrigued to open my mail on Friday and find the galley of an upcoming book by the Times science writer William Broad, who made his name reporting about space weapons and biological warfare, on “The Science of Yoga: The Myths and the Rewards.”

I stopped reading about the Rick Perry supporter who denounced Mormonism as a cult, and started reading about my own cult. I was eager to know the science behind the blissful state of mind produced by savasana — corpse pose. It can’t just be the buckwheat-scented eye pillow.

Broad suggests that only an ancient tradition of centering — “an anti-civilization pill” — may be able to neutralize the “dissipating influence” of the Internet and the frantic information flow.

Once esoteric and exotic, yoga is now so prevalent that in 2010, the city of Cambridge, Mass., began printing soothing yoga poses on parking tickets.

But as I read on, I began to feel a little stressed out.

Does yoga make you fat?

“For decades, teachers of yoga have hailed the discipline as a great way to shed pounds,” Broad writes. “But it turns out that yoga works so well at reducing the body’s metabolic rate that — all things being equal — people who take up the practice will burn fewer calories, prompting them to gain weight and deposit new layers of fat. And for better or worse, scientists have found that the individuals most skilled at lowering their metabolisms are women.”

Broad follows that up with another of yoga’s “dirty little secrets,” writing: “Yoga has produced waves of injuries. Take strokes, which arise when clogged vessels divert blood from the brain. Doctors have found that certain poses can result in brain damage that turns practitioners into cripples with drooping eyelids and flailing limbs.”

Now I was very tense. The next paragraph made me coil tighter.

“Darker still, some authorities warn of madness,” Broad advises. “As Carl Jung put it, advanced yoga can ‘let loose a flood of sufferings of which no sane person ever dreamed.’ ”

Maybe caramels work better than chaturanga.

But finally Broad, who has practiced yoga since he was a freshman in college in 1970, began enumerating benefits.

The discipline that started out centuries ago as “a sex cult,” with rapacious vagabond yogis focused on “the path to the ecstatic union” and enlightenment known as Tantra, maintains its ability to calm and arouse at the same time.

“A small trove of illuminating reports and investigations,” Broad writes, show that yoga “can in fact result in surges of sex hormones and brainwaves, among other signs of sexual arousal.”

New medical scans, he reports, “indicate that advanced yogis can shut their eyes and light up their brains in states of ecstasy indistinguishable from those of sexual climax.” One yogini described it as the best sex she never had.

Fast breathing, the author wryly observes, fans the flames.

Being a vegetarian reduces the level of testosterone in the body, but yoga appears to raise it, as well as lowering fight-or-flight hormones and improving circulation and inner flexibility.

After giving “Sex and the City” a shout-out for coining the word “yogasm,” Broad primly concludes, “The findings may also help introduce into the consumer society a number of practical methods for the treatment of sexual disorders and the revitalization of sex lives — hopefully reducing our dependence on costly pills and potions.”

I started to relax again, especially when I got to the final chapter, where Broad explores the intersection between yoga and creativity.

Artists who got rid of aches and gained inspiration from yoga include the violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin, the rock star Sting, and Leopold Stokowski, the conductor best known for leading the Philadelphia Orchestra in the Disney film “Fantasia.”

Stokowski taught yoga to Greta Garbo during a fling in Italy, and Garbo began teaching headstands in Hollywood.

Yoga is a kinder version of alcohol, Broad suggests: “Both do at least part of their mental rejiggering by means of GABA, or gamma-aminobutyric acid. The neurotransmitter slows the firing of neurons, making them less excitable and thus calming the mind.”

He ends by suggesting that political leaders would do well to take up yoga. Herman Cain in corpse pose?

Nah. That would ruin all the fun.

Copyright. 2011 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved