opinion of this scene

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I enjoyed the scene a lot.  It showed a frustrated president who had just lost an old friend in a car accident as confronting God with his grief and perceived injustice.  A lot of that same stuff goes on in the Psalms and the Book of Job.  But Skoble put God back in charge at the end of the same episode, when Mrs. Landingham appears in Bartlet's imagination in the Oval Office, and she gently scolds him, saying: "God doesn't make cars crash, and you know it.  Stop using me as an excuse."  I don't think the West Wing bashed religion at all, I think it made an effort to distinguish between phony and genuine religiosity (think of the way Al Caldwell was played off against Mary Marsh in the early episodes, or compare the episode where Bartlet scolds the conservative Christian radio talk show host with the episode where Bartlet finds out that the Chinese Christians who made it to America in a boat were genuine.  Personally, the only thing that bothered me about the National Cathedral scene was that it was a little too mild!

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[The scene was just a silly hat tip to progressives that had to live in a fantasy land during the Bush years. I bet they're all hoping that Obama pulls some similar stunt and somehow wins Nebraska, the Dakotas, Louisiana...

If this was true, then there wouldn't have been the follow-up scene with Landingham scolding Bartlet for his impiety.  Neither would the whole "Take the Sabbath Day" episode have even been possible, where Bartlet gets hammered by a Jew, a Quaker and finally at the end a Catholic priest who he confesses to at the end of the episode for allowing a federal execution.  I agree entirely that the West Wing went over the top about a lot of things (the Bartlet-Ritchie election where Bartlet, censured for lying about MS in the first election cycle, wins the Dakotas, Louisianna, Arkansas, Kentucky ect. ect. against a centrist southern governor because of one debate performance??  Good grief..a nod to reality, please!)  But I never found the show to be over the top about religion. 

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[Neither would the whole "Take the Sabbath Day" episode have even been possible, where Bartlet gets hammered by a Jew, a Quaker and finally at the end a Catholic priest who he confesses to at the end of the episode for allowing a federal execution. 

Ok so just a jab at conservatives in general who support the death penalty and "claim" (a word I'm sure the writers would use) to be religious. 

My whole point here is that even if the writers intended for Bartlett to learn a lesson, the clueless, religion haters in the audience likely didn't pick up on it. Where was Tweed's post about the scene at the end? If this was truly supposed to be a religious debate, he would have posted that as well. No doubt that Tweed thought the whole egomaniac Bartlett act was "cool."

I think the "Take the Sabbath Day" episode was a jab at politicians who don't carry their religious values into their governing.  After all, it is Bartlett, and not conservatives, who is targeted in the show as being the hypocrite.  It's true that the Catholic Church has never taught that the death penality should be abolished outright, but Roman Catholic theologians, the last two popes and the majority of Catholic bishops in the American conference have opposed its infliction by the state since the mid-70's.  In the espisode's concluding scene, Bartlet complains to Father Tom Kavenaugh (played beautifully by Karl Malden) that he has prayed and received no direction, and Malden again scolds him, saying that God has sent him a rabbi, a Quaker and a priest to advise him, tells him: "God is the only one who gets to kill people," and takes his confession at the end.  I agree with you that there are a lot of scenes in the West Wing that show Jed Bartlet to have a massive ego (and a few shows that demonstrate that the writers had pretty massive egos too), but most of those same shows take Bartlet to task for that, and that's pretty hard to miss.  And I think this demonstrates that the show is a good political drama--after all, to become president, a guy, no matter whether they are a Democrat or Republican, must have an ego large enough to reach from earth at least to the Orien Nebula. 

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Sure, the show did make fun of religious conservatives sometimes.  But, I have to point out, Bartlett is an American Catholic, and there are plenty of Republican American Catholics.  My dad was one.  He was a very conservative Catholic, both in terms of moral and religious teachings and in terms of political policy.  But he was against the death panalty, following modern church teachings.  He was against many kinds of killing.  He was a staff sargent in WWII aboard an aircraft carrer on the way to mainland Japan when the bombs were dropped, and even though he was relieved not to have to fight, and probably die, on mainland Japan, he maintained all his life that the dropping of those bombs was a sin, because dropping bombs on defensless civilians in his belief was mass murder, even in wartime.  He was, of course, also vehemently opposed to abortion.  Agree or disagree with the Catholic Church about capital punishment or my dad about the bombing of Japan, or whoever, but the label "religious conservatives" does not describe a group of people with identical belief systems, regardless of which party they belong to.     

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The relevance is that you appear to associate every religious conviction that you disagree with as a "liberal" one.  So, you take opposition to the death penalty as a "liberal" policy position, even though it's embraced not only by Catholics in America but Catholics all over the world who espouse very conservative positions like opposition to abortion, contraception, homosexualty, ect. ect. ect.  And therefore, you interpret Bartlett's confession to be a "coming home" to a "liberal" view.  I take it to be a coming home to a Catholic view, not a liberal one.  It's entirely possible that I'm extraordinarily wierd, but I see it that way because I consider myself a liberal, but I have no objection at all to the death penalty provided the crime committed is a capital crime and that a very high threshold of certainity has been reached according to due process that the accused in fact committed the crime.  I don't think "conservative" and "liberal" religious views always correlate with American "conservative" and "liberal" political convictions.       

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I'm revising my post from this morning.  So, fine, some of the scenes in the West Wing were jabs at religious conservatives.  Good for the writers.  No wonder the show was so great!  I'll celebrate with Tweed.

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Will do.