Few things in life are as clear as the futility of a real debate on the clarity of America’s religious origins.

“Debate,” I said? Lay a finger, unsuspectingly, on The New York Times Magazine’s inspection of the attempt by so-called Christian fundamentalists to overhaul history textbooks, and you require treatment for first-degree burns.

Heavy weekend snowfall closed down the capital of the United States. Not that many outside the Washington Beltway were sorry about it. Possibly — by their reasoning — the blizzard was God’s gift to decent government, a holiday from the ceaseless commotion, braggadocio and show-offing that have become the capital’s principle pastimes.

It’s jobs, jobs, jobs now for the Obama team, rather than healthcare, healthcare, healthcare. You have to call it progress, particularly if you’re jobless, or fearful of becoming so at a time when 17 million Americans are either non- or underemployed.

Back to the future — or something like that.

The last time Americans got wound up about the assorted misfeasances and incompetencies of the U.S. Congress, the national conversation opened itself to the possibility of term limits for the members.

Americans sick over Congress’ “healthcare” outrage should be glad to sniff the generally unpolluted air of Christmas Eve in order, at last, to hear the angels sing.

Possibly the best reason for not understanding what’s in the Senate healthcare bill is that no senator knows for sure, not even Harry Reid, without whose subservience to the Obama White House we might have some idea what’s up; but let that go ...

If government would just stop trying to do everything in the world ... Well, wait. Let’s review what the U.S. government is currently up to:

The perceived necessity of a Manhattan Declaration would have jarred the Pilgrims from prayerful contemplation of game birds and the like at harvest festival time, 1621. What — religious liberty so uncertain a thing as to warrant, five centuries later, a 4,700-word document justifying Christian defense of Christian principles?

Yes, yes, says White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. Congress has the power to make everyone buy health insurance. “I don’t believe there’s a lot of case law that would demonstrate the veracity” of comments to the contrary.

The Holy Father — Pope Benedict XVI — offers to let Episcopalians and other Anglicans of Catholic disposition join the Roman Catholic Church, while retaining characteristics of their Anglican identity. And who in the booming pagan market cares a flying broomstick what the pope does about anything?

One element in last summer’s Obama ruckuses — there’s always an Obama ruckus going on, it seems — was a few placards at tea party rallies comparing the president to a certain A. Hitler. Both the comparisons and the ensuing ruckus they caused were rubbish. Couldn’t we all just see Obama heil-ing huge crowds to fury over national enemies and the like? Nope. Not a bit of it.

Plutarch tells us that, back in the fifth-century B.C., when the citizens of Athens were voting on whether to ostracize — i.e., throw out — Aristides the Just, one sourpuss explained his emphatic yes vote: “I am tired of hearing him called ‘the Just.’”

George W. Bush got banged up badly for his foreign policy choices: Iraq, Guantanamo, “torture,” a certain tonal disdain for critics foreign and domestic. It will be interesting to see, in a matter of weeks or possibly days, how his successor, Barack Obama, fares with the critics.

You know — you must — you can’t help it — aren’t you alive?! — that the marketplace isn’t perfect. Haven’t we all been told often enough, amid the political chatter concerning how to crack down on Wall Street?

They’re all over him — swarms, flocks, flights of critics taking apart President Obama: his style, his motives, his modus operandi, assuming he has one.

If the left wing of the left wing of the left wing in American life doesn’t control most of the Obama farmstead’s best and richest acreage, it could be time for new spectacles — since things surely look that way.

Did!

Didn’t!

Did, too!

Didn’t either!

Oh, what a wondrously enlightening healthcare debate we’re having. Democratic hotshots, from the White House on down, blame the throngs protesting at town hall meetings. Baloney. It’s the hotshots who are most to blame.

You can’t make this stuff up. First, the name of the program — Cash for Clunkers. Then the origin, the fountainhead — to wit, the U.S. Congress. Then the results: unexpected demand for participation, unanticipated shortages of cash, bureaucratic unresponsiveness, public and congressional consternation.

According to a recent poll by Political Strategies Inc./Politico, only a quarter of Americans “trust” Nancy Pelosi.

Not that the secular world walks the floor at night worrying over the Episcopal Church and its waning influence over the minds of all decent and honorable Americans. The secular world lost this decent and honorable habit years ago and likely won’t get it back, especially with Episcopalians themselves acting more and more like members of a secular pressure group.

The Sotomayor ruckus, with its senatorial and media back-and-forths about judicial power and racism, is one indicator that Americans like and trust each other less, if possible, than they have since maybe 1861.

Sarah Palin wants to run for president? Quick — get the butterfly net. Who in his — or her — right mind would want to strut into the economic Hiroshima that the Democratic Congress and White House seem bent on precipitating? What a fine mess!

There was symmetry in the news that barraged us one day last week — Michael Jackson, not to mention Farrah Fawcett, had died, and the governor of South Carolina had made a nitwit and a creep out of himself over a woman in Argentina.

It’s only money, we like to say, when we know we shouldn’t be pulling out our wallets, but ...

The “but” is a big one when it comes to health care reform: huge, immense, Himalayan. So big we’re not going to do it, I’ll bet you money.

So here, as if on cue, it being a new day and all, came the Obama administration Monday to announce new arrangements for the way the country does business.

The coming contest, fight, whatever, over Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation to our country’s top court gains context from the California Supreme Court’s 6-2 decision the same day.

All the most interesting issues are moral in character, having to do with how we behave and why. The most interesting story of the past week — with due respect to Nancy Pelosi and other outliers — had to do with abortion, a moral issue of very supreme relevance, no matter of the depth or nature of one’s views on the matter. There was first of all a Gallup Poll. Then there was a presidential visit to Notre Dame University.

I’ve lately been promoting a book I wrote on the plight of the mainline Christian denominations, featuring the Episcopal Church as Exhibit A in the Trainwreck Chronicles.

The President wants an empathetic jurist to replace David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. He will likely get such a one.

Just as the New York Times was front-paging a supposed upsurge in atheism (God? What God?) came complementary tidings from the Pew Research Center.