I've lived 27 of my 70 years on earth in Saudi Arabia, arriving in that desert kingdom as a 3-year-old in 1950 (my dad worked for the new nation's then-fledgling oil company being developed by an American consortium). As an adult, I worked 41 years as a journalist and editor before retiring in 2011. Since retiring, I've written two books: "3,001 Arabian Days," a memoir of growing up in Arabia, and "Holy Smoke: How Christianity Smothered the American Dream," a nonfiction book about the continuing corrosive effect of faith on the U.S. secular system of governance. I've been married for 28 years to a South Dakota woman I met when we were both working in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s.