Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away …

Thus spake Zarathustra: If God was dead, as Nietzsche declared at the end of the 19th century, it would be necessary to dig him back up. OK, Nietzsche didn’t really say that. Bites said it, and this season’s crop of presidential candidates is in profound agreement.

That’s right brothers and sisters, all of the candidates are believers. Which is why religion has taken front-and-center in the campaign as this issue of SN&R hits the street.

At issue?

Mormonism: fact or fiction?

Bites is dying to hear Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney talk his way out of this one. It might be easier, and certainly more entertaining, if Herr Mitt simply played the popular You Tube video, “Cartoon illustrating Mormon philosophy regarding the origins of mankind,” for a nationwide TV audience, preferably on a Saturday morning, when more people are watching.

In the cartoon, we learn how the Mormon god Elohim, who rules the universe from a secret star base millions of light years away, teleported to Earth, where he impregnated Mary, Martha and Mary Magdalene. Mary gave birth to the Mormon Jesus. This account of the world’s first intergalactic three-way might have gone untold if Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, hadn’t discovered two golden tablets detailing the event buried on his farm in 1827. After he shuffles off this mortal coil, instead of going to heaven, Romney will hook-up with Elohim, the Mormon Jesus and Joseph Smith back at the star base.

That’s Mormonism, in a nutshell.

Awesome.

Judge ye not: Brothers and sisters, before condemning Romney’s spiritual preference, don’t forget that Jesus is just all right with all of the candidates running in this season’s Race to the Bottom. Even Law & Order tough guy Fred Thompson reassures us that he’s “right with God.”

If you gotta believe, you gotta believe.

Some fake it better than others.

Pastor-turned-politician Mike Huckabee insists he has “more respect for an honest atheist than a disingenuous believer,” unless that honest atheist happens to believe in evolution. Twice-divorced, pro-abortion Rudy Giuliani appears to have benefited little from his Roman Catholic upbringing. Texas Congressman Ron Paul, a Baptist father of five who’s been married to the same woman for 50 years, is the straightest-shooting Republican:

“Most religious institutions abandoned their independence long ago, and now serve as cheerleaders for state policies like social services, faith-based welfare, and military aggression in the name of democracy,” Paul writes on his Web site. The government, he adds, “has co-opted religion and family as the primary organizing principle of our society.”

No doubt if he stumbled zombie-like on to today’s political scene, Jesus Christ would be a libertarian.

Return of the Living Dead: Correction. Jesus is back, and he’s a Democrat. The seemingly mild mannered John Edwards claims “faith informs everything I think and do,” including his 2002 vote authorizing the use of force in Iraq, which has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and thousands of U.S. military personnel.

Likewise Sen. Hillary Clinton, when she’s not channeling Eleanor Roosevelt, walks hand-in-hand with the Nazarene. A recent article in Mother Jones reports that, “Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship.”

The list goes on, but you get the picture. The future of the world’s most lethal superpower rests in the hands of lunatics who trace their core beliefs back 3,500 years to the hallucinations of a potentially schizophrenic Hebrew sheepherder.

Groovy.