Dear Readers: This will be my last weekly column for roughly one year. I have not been fired, though God knows I have tried. The one obligation of a writer is not to become dull, and this break gives me a chance to concentrate on reporting, reflect and come back with a few new ideas. On occasion, I'll have a piece on these pages until my return as a columnist.

There is a story that Bertrand Russell, when being booked into jail for his pacifist agitation, was given a form that, among other things, asked his religion.

"Agnostic," Lord Russell answered.

The jailer, an agreeable man keen to show deference to a peer, even an officially "disloyal" one, looked it over and said, "Agnostic? Never heard of that one, but I suppose we all believe in the same thing."

Nearly a century later, Russell is hair and bone, his jailer a ghost, but truer words have never been spoken in error. It seems we all believe in the same thing, whether it is consistent, sensible or even possible. In an age of relativism, all things being equal, all things are now equal. An agnostic, a Christian, a Wiccan or a believer in the divinity of broccoli are all accorded the same polite credulity that Russell's unschooled jailer gave a man who had gone out of his way to register disbelief. Our over-arching tolerance has made us ninnies.

This story came to mind last week as I spoke to Avery Cardinal Dulles, a man with whom I have little in common save the unbreakable thread of Catholic faith. He is coming to Pittsburgh next week to speak about the de-Christianization of Europe, a phenomenon that clearly presages the same phenomenon in the states.

Already, Quebec, 10 hours' drive to the north, has become a wasteland in which churches approximate museums. Once the most Catholic of regions, Quebec's religiosity consists of architecture; its people have fallen away, half of the couples do not bother to marry and the idea of disapproving of this trend runs a man a risk of being declared a pompous scold.

It is not that I am so much against sin as I am against it being reclassified as choice of no more consequence than a preference for Camembert over Roquefort. If you must sin to get saved, nobody will have any sense of salvation if we dispense with the recognition of the sin. Reordering of morality into an absence of judgments essentially undoes the system by which the people of the West have always understood the world and their place in it. The history of the West is the history of the church and if the church is cast aside, we free ourselves not only of our baggage, but its contents. We shall go naked into the future.

"We're seeing the evidence of a long, historical movement," Cardinal Dulles said. "I think the whole question of science and religion has to do with it, and the question of politics and religion is the other great question."

His question is this: Given Europe's abandonment of a religious foundation to its society, shedding metaphysics for legal code, what is lost?

Etienne Gilson, a 20th century philosopher who influenced Cardinal Dulles, wrote in his book "The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy" that religious belief is "an indispensable auxiliary to reason."

So, what is to be our new indispensable auxiliary to reason? There is science. But science, while not inherently unethical, does not serve an ethical end. It is a model of inquiry and, as such, it has no more capacity to teach us morals than an automobile has to teach us manners. In centuries earlier, Rene Descartes, Auguste Comte and Immanuel Kant all attempted to turn methodical, logical and scientific inquiry into a model for the construction of a social order, replacing metaphysics with the rule of mathematics and logic. The mystical and the social were cut, one from the other, in hopes of making a more just and orderly world, but we have only succeeded in making ourselves irrelevant to the rules we placed over ourselves.

Consider our security fetish. At the Pittsburgh airport a few years back, I saw a young woman frisking a nun. This was not a muscular nun, mind you, but an elderly woman, still wearing the habit of her order, and redolent of no more threat than perhaps extra algebra homework. The passengers knew she was not a threat and doubtless the poor fool assigned to give her a security patdown and inspect her shoes knew she was no threat, yet the system built around airport security chooses randomly. The good sister's number had come up, so her shoes had to come off.

Doubtless the overall system of security makes us feel safer, but it really has nothing to do with us. When I must remove my shoes and be wand-poked by a 20-something who could not land a job on his municipal police force, I pretty well know that this is not about me; it is about the system we have constructed to build Nerf World. It is numbers, logic and everything but the trust born of innate understanding of how the world works.

The past few centuries seem to have been spent seeking out replacements for the spiritual balance thrown out of kilter when the West tossed aside a millennium of scholarship in favor of a trust only in the physical world. Science and logic have proven poor replacements for faith. Everything from the low birthrate in the West -- "people just want to enjoy life without the problem of children," Cardinal Dulles observed -- to our sudden adherence to "death with dignity" as a hidden cost savings, suggests what we have achieved.

Recovering from such regrettable accomplishments is the trick.

"It's an uphill battle," the cardinal said. "It will take many decades."

Perhaps the climb begins by, every once and again, telling someone not just that he is different, but that he is wrong.