Free Republic

Neither faith nor science can answer the most important questions. So why are believers and atheists still bickering? I went to a debate recently in New York between a rabbi and the famous polemicist Christopher Hitchens, on the question "Does God exist?" Hitchens was called on to speak first, and he won the debate with his first two sentences: "I don't know why I have to speak first. He has the burden of proof." The mostly secular ... audience heartily applauded this sally, which was based on the premise -- never challenged by the rabbi -- that science provides an...

Postmodernism is a worldview characterized by a belief in the lack of an objective truth, and wehich asserts that assertions of objective knowledge are essentially impossible. A strong part of postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from traditional approaches that had previously been dominant... Some postmodernist idea are: Truth is a "social construct," rather than objectively provable. There is no superior culture; Western culture is no better than any other (see cultural relativism)...

Setting priorities in keeping with your values is a daily task for us all. I may, for example, feel the need to spend two hours exercising every day. But if that conflicts with my family responsibilities, I have to consult an overall worldview, a scheme of values, to decide which imperative comes first. So it goes in public life no less than in private. The world Jewish community is united in few things, but a rough consensus has emerged that our greatest worry, our top priority in need of being addressed, is the threat posed by Muslim extremists. With some...

The 18th-century Enlightenment was the single most important intellectual development in human history; it made possible the comfortable, prosperous, stable, and relatively free Western civilization that we enjoy today. Enlightenment thinkers believed in a single, knowable, absolute reality guided by rational natural laws. Individuals—said Enlightenment thinkers—had the faculty of reason, which enabled them to accurately understand the absolute reality. Using reason, individuals could understand not only the factual data of reality but a rational moral system which would instruct them on how they ought to behave. The Enlightenment cultivated the rights of every human being to his life, liberty, property,...

THE ENEMY AT HOME: THE CULTURAL LEFT AND ITS RESPONSIBILITY FOR 9/11 BY DINESH D'SOUZA DOUBLEDAY, 333 PAGES, $26.95 CONSERVATIVES are as deeply factionalized as any other domestic ideological group. But it's still surprising when one of our own writes a book that manages to make him not only the scourge of the Left but hardly more popular on the Right. Such a book is Dinesh D'Souza's "The Enemy at Home," which blames American left-liberals for provoking radical Muslims into committing the attacks of 9/11. From folks on the Right, D'Souza has evoked responses ranging from pure hysteria (e.g. Bruce...

The 18th-century Enlightenment was the single most important intellectual development in human history; it made possible the comfortable, prosperous, stable, and relatively free Western civilization that we enjoy today. Enlightenment thinkers believed in a single, knowable, absolute reality guided by rational natural laws. Individuals—said Enlightenment thinkers—had the faculty of reason, which enabled them to accurately understand the absolute reality. Using reason, individuals could understand not only the factual data of reality but a rational moral system which would instruct them on how they ought to behave. The Enlightenment cultivated the rights of every human being to his life, liberty, property,...

Losing the Enlightenment [A civilization that has lost confidence in itself cannot confront the Islamists.] Our current crisis is not yet a catastrophe, but a real loss of confidence of the spirit. The hard-won effort of the Western Enlightenment of some 2,500 years that, along with Judeo-Christian benevolence, is the foundation of our material progress, common decency, and scientific excellence, is at risk in this new millennium. But our newest foes of Reason are not the enraged Athenian democrats who tried and executed Socrates. And they are not the Christian zealots of the medieval church who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity....

Losing the Enlightenment Remarks at the Claremont Institute's annual Churchill Dinner By Victor Davis HansonPosted November 20, 2006These remarks were delivered on November 10, 2006 at the Claremont Institute's annual dinner in honor of Sir Winston Churchill. (To applause.) Good evening, and thank you very much for the honor of the Statesmanship Award at this annual Claremont Institute dinner in memory of Sir Winston Churchill—a tribute conceived in the name of a great man, bestowed by a great institute, and honored by great past recipients. Tonight I would like to talk of our current crisis—not yet a catastrophe, but...

The most frightening aspect of the present war is how easily our pre-modern enemies from the Middle East have brought a stunned postmodern world back into the Dark Ages. Students of history are sickened when they read of the long-ago, gruesome practice of beheading. ... And how lucky we thought we were to have evolved from such elemental barbarity. ... The 18th-century European Enlightenment gave people freedom to express views formerly censored by clerics and the state. Just imagine what life was like once upon a time when no one could write music, compose fiction or paint without court or...

October 02, 2006, 6:02 a.m. Traitors to the EnlightenmentEurope turns its back on Socrates, Locke, et al. By Victor Davis Hanson The first Western Enlightenment of the Greek fifth-century B.C. sought to explain natural phenomena through reason rather than superstition alone. Ethics were to be discussed in the realm of logic as well as religion. Much of what Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the Sophists thought may today seem self-evident, if not at times nonsensical. But that century was the beginning of the uniquely Western attempt to bring to the human experience empiricism, self-criticism, irony, and tolerance in thinking. The...

Scholars of the Enlightenment should be in high demand these days. For the political and media responses to the plot to bomb up to ten U.S. airliners in mid air above the Atlantic reflect its two-faced intellectual and philosophical heritage. There is that great optimism in human nature, the belief in rationality and science, the conviction that everything has an explanation and that every problem has a solution. There is the unbending belief that “all men are created equals,” that we are entitled to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Then there is the dark side, not of Locke...

How Voltaire praised the 'enlightened despot' Catherine the Great Satirist's heartfelt letters to the woman he admired are bought for Russia Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow Friday June 2, 2006 The Guardian They are the heartfelt correspondence from the great acerbic wit of the European Enlightenment to the last Russian empress, in which he praises her authoritarian style and mocks the extravagances of her French counterparts. For years, the letters from Voltaire to Catherine the Great have been hidden away in a private collection - the contents a mystery. But now, courtesy of a Moscow art dealer, they will be...

The collapse of reason By Cathy Young  |  May 29, 2006 AT A TIME when conservatives dominate all three branches of government and hold an increasingly large share of the Fourth Estate, the academy remains the last liberal stronghold. You would think, then, that liberal intellectuals would offer some thoughtful and productive critiques of conservative policies. But instead, argues one leading liberal intellectual, the academic left is making itself irrelevant by embracing ideological extremism and trying to purge its ranks of those who are not politically correct.

21 February 2006 Europe at a crossroads Address to the American University of Rome by Marcello Pera 1. A geopolitical continental drift The subject I intend to address today is the crisis of the West, and particularly of Europe. In my view this crisis is twofold, both geopolitical and spiritual, with the latter as the main cause of the former. The fact that the Old Continent is in a state of deep crisis has been upheld by many distinguished scholars, observers and a few – unfortunately just a few – political leaders in Europe. This was argued in most alarming...

Odd though it may sound, somewhere in Baghdad a man is working in secrecy to edit new Arabic versions of Liberalism, by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, and In Defense of Global Capitalism, by the Swedish economist Johan Norberg. He is doing this at some risk of kidnap, beating, and death, because he hopes that a new Arabic-language Web site, called LampofLiberty.org -- MisbahAlHurriyya.org in Arabic -- can change the world by publishing liberal classics. Odder still, he may be right. Interviewed by e-mail, he asks to be known by a pseudonym, H. Ali Kamil. A Shiite from Iraq's...

There's no helping you. This site is now just a diversion -- like a train wreck. This site is inherently for and about raving egomaniacs, and Jim's site policies -- which amount to excluding reality and actual dialogue in favor of political/militaristic pornography -- is conducive to cognitive dissonance, which at the times your worldview is threatened leads you into psychotic breaks (on the political cognitive plane, that is, and just maybe in other realms too). Not to mention that your baseline politics is based in mythology about American demographics, science, economics, ethics etc. You spoonfeed each other in the...

Jurate Cannara knew her daughter Laura was different when, as a toddler, she would stand out in the rain, her tiny hands outstretched toward the lightning. "Mama, I need energy," the little girl would tell her. As Laura Mikuseviciuje grew from toddler to child to teen to young woman, Cannara noticed that her daughter's eccentricities only increased with age. "I didn't understand my daughter," said Cannara, who lives in Verona, of her daughter's early expressions of intuition and odd, energetic behavior. According to some, Laura's tendencies are not odd at all; they even have a name. She and others like...

Neanderthals At It Again H.L. Mencken’s final report from the famous Scopes trial in Dayton Tennessee comes roaring down to us after 80 years as sharply edged as ever: "Let no one mistake [the trial] for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details.  It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.  Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its Bill of Rights made a mock...

Cardinal Ratzinger's Thoughts on Evolution An Excerpt From "Truth and Tolerance" ROME, SEPT. 1, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Cardinal Christoph Schönborn's July 7 editorial in the New York Times entitled "Finding Design in Nature" provoked a flurry of reactions, both supportive and critical. Requests have begun to arrive in Rome for Benedict XVI to make some sort of clarification on the Church's stand regarding evolution. The following text, delivered in 1999 as part of a lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (the future Benedict XVI) and subsequently published in the 2004 book "Truth and Tolerance" (Ignatius), can give...

Blair has appeased and prevaricated. Now, as the death cult strikes again, he must oust religion from public lifeTwo weeks on, London is stricken once more. The death cult strikes again, unstoppable in its deranged religious mania. This time no deaths but a savage reminder of the unknown waves of demented killers lining up to murder in the name of God. Whatever they intended, the message was loud and clear: they can and will do this whenever they want and it does indeed spread very real terror. The police have said there are many more of them. The security services...

This review is concise. I posted a picture from the meet-and-greet after the show on my website (click link above). Last night at the Orpheum Theatre (Memphis, TN) my wife and I attended the GlennBeck on Ice program. If you listen to Beck on the radio, you know that he and his staff are trying to come up with a way to describe the show to people in other cities on the tour. We were part of the meet-and-greet after the show and Glenn asked us to call in Wednesday to tell listeners how they felt about the show. If...

In sum, cultures that ignore faith and morals can secure neither freedom nor truth and will sooner or later begin to violate the dignity of their citizens. Totalitarian states were the most obvious example of this, but democracies have also fallen prey to the temptations of unrestrained secular ideologies, especially nihilism.The Pope’s refusal to “go along” with the fads of secular, post-modern society was viewed with rage and amazement. It was, many believed, impossible to stop the historical inevitability of trends embodied by so-called “sexual liberation” and the modern cult of victimhood.

About 15 years ago I wrote a book about crime, tackling the knotty problem of how "technicalities" based on the Bill of Rights could end up excusing people of ancient crimes like robbery and murder. The problem, I found, was the tendency of judges and lawyers to elevate the Constitution to Holy Writ. Murder, rape, and other crimes, you see, are only statutory offenses. There's nothing in the Constitution that says you can't kill someone. On the other hand, if a murderer argues that he wasn't read his Miranda warnings three times in the language of his choice, he is...

<p>It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts. The lesson the President has learned best--and certainly the one that has been the most useful to him--is the axiom that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. One of his Administration's current favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent.</p>

Until the 18th century, there was basically only one kind of Judaism, that which is now called Orthodox. It meant living by the religion's 613 laws, and doing so suffused Jews' lives with their faith. Then, starting with the thinker Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) and moving briskly during the Haskala, or "enlightenment," from the late 18th century, Jews developed a wide variety of alternate interpretations of their religion, most of which diminished the role of faith in their lives and led to a concomitant reduction in Jewish affiliation.These alternatives and other developments, in particular the Holocaust, caused the ranks of the...

Those who do not believe that moral values must come from the Bible or be based upon G-d's moral instruction argue that they have a better source for values: human reason. In fact, the era that began the modern Western assault on Judeo-Christian values is known as the Age of Reason. That age ushered in the modern secular era, a time when the men of "the Enlightenment" hoped they would be liberated from the superstitious shackles of religious faith and rely on reason alone. Reason, without G-d or the Bible, would guide them into an age of unprecedented moral greatness....

In "Better Answers: The Case For Judao-Christian Values," http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42234 Dennis Prager said....."There is an epic battle taking place in the world over what value system humanity will embrace. There are essentially three competitors: European secularism, American Judeo-Christianity and Islam. I have described this battle in previous columns." Under the aegis of European secularism, Americans have been lured and seduced into liberating themselves from the social constraints of America's traditional Judao-Christian moral ethics, which served as both eternally unchanging moral anchor and as the anchor to objective reality. "This much needed liberation," we were told, "is a sign of social enlightenment."...

Ah, Christmastime. Joy to the world. God bless us, everyone. Through the rapturous din of carols and chimes, a stray condemnatory note can be heard, chastising the yuletide revelers for being too materialistic, too concerned with gifts that come wrapped in pretty paper and shiny bows. Who can help but sympathize with such concerns as the groaning hoards of shoppers appear like Huns outside the doors of Wal-Mart? That is why I am so grateful for a special Christmas present — holiday present if you must — for the whole world. No mere thing or shiny bauble, this present is...

"Muslims need … a new Enlightenment, a movement away from brutality." This remark came from a friend of mine as we were discussing the problem of faith in the public square. My friend is by his own description, "a militantly agnostic Jew", a philosophy professor who loves to debate anything that comes to hand. His remark was in response to a discussion of Islamic law. While I acknowledge Muslims are to be admired for their rigorous prayer life, their marvelous emphasis on almsgiving and their belief in Jesus’ virgin birth and consequent great respect for the Blessed Virgin Mary, the...

...Her book is thus animated by dismay and perplexity over the way the French Enlightenment is seen as the main intellectual event of the 18th century, whereas a parallel and in many respects more successful movement in Britain is routinely relegated to an inferior status. Her heroes, therefore, are not Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau as much as Adam Smith, David Hume and Edmund Burke. In a similar spirit, she invokes and concurs with Hannah Arendt's notion that the American revolution, rather than the revolution in France, was the great political watershed of modern times. For Himmelfarb, the contrast between the...

It’s company policy at The New York Times that opinion columnists may not officially endorse presidential candidates. Still, there was no doubt during the past year which man most of the page’s writers were backing. A trio of hysterical pieces published Nov. 4 confirmed that, each claiming that a nationwide outbreak of religious zealotry had led to Sen. John Kerry’s defeat. “The president got re-elected by dividing the country along fault lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule,” wailed Maureen Dowd. Not to be outdone, Tom Friedman chipped in, “We don’t just disagree on what America should be doing;...

John Kerry possessed reason, George Bush possessed faith. That's the consoling critique of the campaign by defeated liberals. But the truth is Kerry displayed neither. Without credible reason or faith, Kerry had nothing to offer Americans except experiments in radicalism. To salvage their self-esteem, liberals are pushing the idea that they have lost the country but retained their reason. It hasn't yet dawned on them that they lost the country because they lost their reason. Their irrational anger and tired theories weren't persuasive. The American people rejected Kerry because of an absence not only of authentic faith but also of...

Ever since Immanuel Kant posed his famous question in 1784--"What is Enlightenment?"--critics and commentators have searched for an answer, and they still do. For it is to the Enlightenment--a particular set of 18th-century ideas--that many thinkers trace the political and intellectual origins of the modern world. To pose Kant's question is to ask nothing less than who we are. The respected historian Gertrude Himmelfarb is the latest critic to take up this challenge. But she gives the question a plural form, asking "What are Enlightenments?" Surveying the experiences of England, France and America, she follows three different "roads to modernity."...

For many, the image of women burned to death for practicing witchcraft is a potent symbol of both Christian intolerance and Christian irrationality. That's why critics of Christianity are so quick to bring the subject up. But as a new book demonstrates, nearly everything we've been told about Christianity and witch-hunts is wrong. Feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly claim that up to nine million European women were burned at the stake for witchcraft. And even non-feminist historians write about how the witch-hunts "consumed millions of innocents." Historian Rodney Stark calls these claims "absurd" and "nonsense." In his new...

Religious Intolerance and the ACLU By Robert Wolf Amendment I of the Constitution of the US reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” and continues with “or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” This is the so-called Establishment clause we hear so much about. The phrase separation of Church and State we hear so often comes from a letter by Thomas Jefferson 21 years later in which he...

<p>"We have always had atheists among us," the philosopher Edmund Burke wrote in his "Reflections on the Revolution in France," "but now they have grown turbulent and seditious." It seems that in our own day some prominent atheists are agitating for greater political and social influence. In this connection, leading atheist thinkers have been writing articles declaring that they should no longer be called "atheists." Rather, they want to be called "brights."</p>

It's been an unusual week in the academy. The academic freedom that so incensed Bill Buckley as a student at Yale decades ago is now acting to protect a conservative scholar under fire. Baylor's J.M. Dawson Institute for Church-State Studies hired Francis Beckwith as its Associate Director last summer. Although previously known as a philosopher who had developed powerful critiques of abortion, Beckwith has used the past few years and a research fellowship at Princeton to transform himself into a legal scholar investigating the controversy over public schools and the teaching of human origins. His research culminated in publication of...

US gyms offer yoga for dogs A chain of gyms in the US has started offering yoga classes for dogs. Crunch is offering "Ruff Yoga" at its New York branch and is considering offering it in other locations. During a recent session in Madison Square Park, the class attracted nearly 20 people and their pets. "We do the traditional poses. The dogs just get incorporated," Crunch's yoga director Suzi Teitelman told Fox News. Yoga guru Bruce Van Horn says the relaxed state people achieve through yoga rubs off on their animals if they're nearby during the exercises. "It actually reduces...

    March 19, 2003, 9:20 a.m. Casualties of Enlightenment Peace (of mind) at any price. By Adam G. Mersereau he more we hear from the antiwar movement, the more evident it becomes that the antiwar movement is not entirely antiwar. War and the brutal killing of innocent people per se do not seem to offend many of the opponents of the pending military action in Iraq. After all, it is Saddam Hussein who is courting war by his defiance of U.N. resolutions and the peace accord that ended the first Gulf War; it is Saddam Hussein who harbors terrorists...

While the United States keeps up the fight against terrorism--a military operation to contain Islamic terrorism it has undertaken since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil--the Islamic Group, a major Egypt-based group founded on extremist Islamic fundamentalism, recently has made open self-criticisms and apologized to the Egyptian public for its past deeds. The extremist group led an aggressive antigovernment terrorism campaign in the 1990s, culminating in a November 1997 attack in Luxor, southern Egypt, in which group members shot or hacked to death 58 foreign tourists, including 10 Japanese. Owing to its fanatical views, the group had long...

"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away [with] all this artificial scaffolding..." ---Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 11 April, 1823; Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon II, 594 " Most people's sex lives...are coming into closer accord with their true desires. I've often thought one attack...

"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away [with] all this artificial scaffolding..." ---Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 11 April, 1823; Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. Lester J. Cappon II, 594 " Most people's sex lives...are coming into closer accord with their true desires. I've often thought one attack...

Enlightenment–bashing, it would seem, is “in.” If anything could unite the discordant voices inside the cacophony of postmodern “discourse,” it must surely be the almost unanimously acknowledged thesis that the Enlightenment project has exhausted itself. What earlier intellectual historians had so smugly called the “triumph of reason” over obscurantist dogma is now looked on as in reality an imperious (and imperial) Will to Power. Reason’s claim to universality is now regarded as just a cover for Europe’s colonial outreach, the velvet glove of reasonability cloaking the iron fist of its aggressive, hegemonic domination of the rest of the globe....

What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. By Bernard Lewis. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 180 pp. $23.00.)For approximately a thousand years, from the death of Muhammad in 632 to the second siege of Vienna in 1683, Muslims had good reason to think that theirs was foremost among civilizations and might become the dominant civilization over all the earth. But in the three hundred years since the siege of Vienna failed, Muslims have been asking: What went wrong? And they have been offering a variety of answers. In this small work, Bernard Lewis, the leading American scholar...