Columnist Tom Shales has roasted Brit Hume's altar call to Tiger Woods and now Michael Gerson, former speech writer for George Bush and now a commentator himself, tackles Shales.

Gerson sees Shales as:

...an example of those who want to ban all religious discourse from the public sphere. The American idea of religious liberty does not forbid proselytization; it presupposes it. Free, autonomous individuals not only have the right to hold whatever beliefs they wish, they have a right to change those beliefs, and to persuade others to change as well. Just as there is no political liberty without the right to change one's convictions and publicly argue for them, there is no religious liberty without the possibility of conversion and persuasion.

In Shales' worship of secularism, Gerson writes, Shales "distributes the sacrament of the sneer."

(Whatever you think of Gerson's idea, come on, you have to admire that line!)

Elizabeth Scalia, who blogs as The Anchoress, for conservative Catholic journal First Things, wrote this week that Hume had the right message but the "wrong venue." True religious persuasion may be best accomplished in private relationships.

Perhaps the Scientology spokesman Tom Davis caught the essence of the dueling-Gods scene in a post that had nothing to do with Tiger Woods or Brit Hume. Southern Baptists were upset about Scientology outreach in Nashville but Davis said, straight and simple: "We're a religion. We proselytize."

Leave it to Rabbi David Wolpe, in his weekly "Off the Pulpit" message from Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, steps back to look at the larger picture, at why people might feel the need to claim the superiority of their faith to others they think need a rescue line.

His comment is addressed to everyone eager to condemn (or preach to) the golfer or the politician who goes astray, to condemn even as we toss out our religious -- or secular -- remedies as life preservers. Wolpe writes:

Society cannot exist without judgment. Religions judge good and bad. But there is an unseemly glee in our world that says less about the actions of those rebuked than it does about the insecurities of the ones who condemn.

Have you ever tried to change someone else's religious views? How?