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For the past 150 years archaeologists have been verifying the exact truthfulness of the Bible's detailed records of various events, customs, persons, cities, nations, and geographical locations. Dr. Nelson Glueck probably the greatest modern authority on Israeli archeology, has said, “No archeological discovery has ever controverted [overturned] a Biblical reference. Scores of archeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or in exact detail historical statements in the Bible. And, by the same token, proper evaluation of Biblical descriptions has often led to amazing discoveries.” In every instance where the Bible can be, or has been checked out...

Writing about Sarah Palin in Newsweek last month, I pointed out the crude way in which she tried to Teflon-ize herself when allegations of weird political extremism were made against her. Thus, she had once gone to a Pat Buchanan rally wearing a pro-Buchanan button, but only because she thought it was the polite thing to do. She and her husband had both attended meetings of the Alaskan Independence Party—he as a member—but its name, she later tried to claim, only meant "independent." (The AIP is a straightforward secessionist party.) She didn't disbelieve all the evidence for evolution, only some...

Just a few years ago, it seemed curious that an omniscient, omnipotent God wouldn’t smite tormentors like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. They all published best-selling books excoriating religion and practically inviting lightning bolts. Traditionally, religious wars were fought with swords and sieges; today, they often are fought with books. And in literary circles, these battles have usually been fought at the extremes. Fundamentalists fired volleys of Left Behind novels, in which Jesus returns to Earth to battle the Anti-Christ (whose day job was secretary general of the United Nations). Meanwhile, devout atheists built mocking Web sites like...

On October 30, atheist Christopher Hitchens appeared on Dennis Miller’s Internet radio show condemning Mother Teresa, yet again. Here is one of his choice statements: “The woman was a fanatic and a fundamentalist and a fraud, and millions of people are much worse off because of her life, and it’s a shame there is no hell for your bitch to go to.” Catholic League president Bill Donohue responded today: I once told Hitchens that one of the real reasons he hates Mother Teresa has to do with his socialist ideology: he believes the state should care for the poor, not...

Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights'The woman was a fanatic and a fundamentalist and a fraud, and millions of people are much worse off because of her life'. NEW YORK, NY (Catholic League) - On October 30, atheist Christopher Hitchens appeared on Dennis Miller’s Internet radio show condemning Mother Teresa, yet again. Here is one of his choice statements: “The woman was a fanatic and a fundamentalist and a fraud, and millions of people are much worse off because of her life, and it’s a shame there is no hell for your bitch to go to.” Catholic League...

Catholics and other Christians probably don't care what anyone says about them anymore, given the relative lack of outrage over Richard Dawkins' comments in The Washington Post this week. (See blog post below). So who will notice what Christopher Hitchens just unloaded on the Dennis Miller show this morning? Miller, let it be said, was not buying it at all--merely letting Hitchens spout this about abortion and Mother Theresa: "Mother Theresa spent her whole life saying (that what Calcutta needs) is a huge campaign against family planning. I mean, who comes to that conclusion who isn't a complete fanatic? She...

This week sees the opening on various cinema marquees of the film Collision: a buddy-and-road movie featuring last year's debates between Pastor Douglas Wilson, who is a senior fellow at New St. Andrew's College, and your humble servant. (If I may be forgiven, it's also available on DVD, and you can buy our little book of exchanges, Is Christianity Good for the World?) Newsweek's reviewer beseeches you not to go and see the film, largely on the grounds that it features two middle-aged white men trying to establish which one is the dominant male. I would have thought that this...

Once you begin to notice that special set of ethics known as Hollywood exceptionalism, you may find yourself seeing it everywhere. In a recent book titled We'll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives (and enticingly subtitled A Swingin' Showbiz Saga), late-night music maestro Paul Shaffer feels that he perhaps ought to say something about Phil Spector's conviction for the murder of another human being whose name most people can't remember. So he does say something. "I regret all the tragedy that has surrounded Phil in recent years," is what he chooses to say. Not really even a try,...

Recently there has been a flurry of books from the “New Atheists.� Such figures as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have been holding forth to state . . . well, not anything new.The reason there is nothing new to say is that there cannot, by the nature of the discussion, be anything new to say. When it came to the question “Does God exist?,� St. Thomas could only think of two reasonable objections in the whole history of human thought. Objection 1: It seems that God does not exist, because if one of two contraries be...

According to his obituary in the NY Times, Irving Kristol once felt intimidated among NY intellectuals when he found himself seated with Mary McCarthy on one side, Hannah Arendt on the other, and Diana Trilling across from him. This standard—of intellect, to say nothing of other allures—was very much relaxed by the time he found himself placed next to me at a dinner at the Lehrman Institute in Manhattan in the mid-1980s. Determined to upset his likely expectation of me—I having hung onto a version of Trotskyism many years after he had discarded it—I inquired politely about his time in...

A weird and irrational cult has us in its grip. If the Mormons or the Moonies started taking over the BBC and the Government, which then harangued and persecuted us into wearing funny underwear or getting married in mass ceremonies, we would – I hope – rise in revolt. But the ‘Man-made Climate Change’ fanatics are applauded and praised, even as they force us to abandon perfectly sensible electric lights, and instead subject ourselves to strange, flickering substitutes, simultaneously worse and more costly than the ones they replace. There is worse to come. The same people wish to compel us...

Potential readers should not be deterred by the vaguely Hallmarkish cover—and subtitle—of this book, both of which may be blamed on the publisher. I’m assuming that Broadway Books has a packaging-and-editing style all its own, because on page 88 it makes Elizabeth Edwards tell us something that “Edmund Wilson, the incomparable twentieth-century literary critic, said.” Perhaps someone at the firm felt that this would explain just exactly who Wilson was to a reader who didn’t know, but the effect is to be condescending and to diminish the impact of reading a senator’s wife who is well able to cite Edmund...

An interesting video that showcases Hitchens, who regardless of what you think about him, is doing something very important here. He is a man credible in left circles, at one time one of the most credible, who isn't afraid to strongly condemn one of the most parasitic ideas among leftists, which is that the American ideal is not worth protecting and is in fact itself evil. I think there is a distinction to be made between people who believe there have been crimes committed in the name of American liberation, but also understand that there have been many good and...

The most exciting and underreported news of the past few weeks in Iran has been that the emerging challenger to the increasingly frantic and isolated "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. And Rafsanjani has recently made a visit to the city of Najaf in Iraq to confer with Ayatollah Ali Husaini Sistani, a long-standing opponent of the Khamenei doctrines, as well as meeting in the city of Qum with Jawad al-Shahristani, who is Sistani's representative in Iran. It is this dialectic between Iraqi and Iranian Shiites that underlies the flabbergasting statement issued from Qum...

There is then the larger question of the Iranian theocracy and its continual, arrogant intervention in our affairs: its export of violence and cruelty and lies to Lebanon and Palestine and Iraq and its unashamed defiance of the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Atomic Energy Agency on the nontrivial matter of nuclear weapons. I am sure that I was as impressed as anybody by our president's decision to quote Martin Luther King—rather late in the week—on the arc of justice and the way in which it eventually bends. It was just that in a time of crisis...

It was a crudely stage-managed insult to everyone involved. By Christopher Hitchens For a flavor of the political atmosphere in Tehran, Iran, last week, I quote from a young Iranian comrade who furnishes me with regular updates: I went to the last major Ahmadinejad rally and got the whiff of what I imagine fascism to have been all about. Lots of splotchy boys who can't get a date are given guns and told they're special. It's hard to better this, either as an evocation of the rancid sexual repression that lies at the nasty core of the "Islamic republic" or...

We used to think that Communism would arrive in this country on the bayonets of Soviet soldiers, if it came at all. We never realised that it would instead materialise amid our freedom and prosperity, step by tiny step, in the form of bureaucratic interference and political correctness. As one of the few British people who has actually lived in a Communist country (Moscow in the early Nineties, since you ask), I know better than most what such societies feel like, and how they work. And in the past two weeks I have seen several developments in Britain which seem...

What connects Obama's pronouncements on head scarves and the argument over released Guantanamo detainees? ___ Nothing prepared me for the way in which the authorities at the camp have allowed the most extreme religious cultists among the inmates to be the organizers of the prisoners' daily routine. Suppose that you were a secular or unfanatical person caught in the net by mistake; you would still find yourself being compelled to pray five times a day (the guards are not permitted to interrupt), to have a Quran in your cell, and to eat food prepared to halal (or Sharia) standards. I...

There is a fascinating connection between what President Barack Obama said about head scarves for women in his June 4 speech in Cairo and the argument over the released Guantanamo detainees who have since been found, or found again, in the ranks of the Taliban and al-Qaida. Don't try to guess, but do please read on. Ever since former Vice President Dick Cheney made the most of the New York Times headline of May 21, using Defense Department statistics to suggest that one in seven Guantanamo graduates had "returned to terrorism or militant activity," there has been a huge row...

We're increasingly uncomfortable with religion these days. As a society, we tolerate pastors, priests, rabbis and other religious folks, so long as they confine their message to a vanilla "God is love" theme and bless babies, brides and caskets. But when religious leaders speak out on the issues of the day -- especially using morally tinged language -- the elite gatekeepers of public opinion in the media, government and academia warn shrilly that a new Dark Age is upon us. More and more, we see outright hostility to religion -- particularly to Christianity. Consider the wild popularity of a recent...

Buried at the end of Chris Rovzar and Jada Yuan's fantastic White House Correspondents' Association Dinner party report is an incendiary quote from Christopher Hitchens about the evening's entertainment, comedienne Wanda Sykes: "The president should be squirming in his seat. Not smiling," he said. "The black dyke got it wrong. No one told her the rules." Rovzar and Yuan note that Hitchens was the "last man (barely) standing" of the evening. Other highlights of the always amusing NYMag writers' report include Jada Pinkett's face to face interaction with Tom Cruise, a shoe-less Meghan McCain, an allergy-stricken Elizabeth Banks, and several...

Imagine how you would react if Gordon Brown opened and closed his election rallies by bursting into a song called Bring Me My Machine Gun, swaying and jigging to the hypnotic chorus of this menacing ditty. And how would you feel if the Prime Minister were alleged to be taking campaign money from Colonel Gaddafi; faced 783 counts of fraud, racketeering, tax evasion and corruption which somehow never came to court; and had been acquitted of rape while his fearsome supporters mobbed the courthouse? Then ponder how you would despair if, despite all these things, Mr Brown's party was...

America is not a Christian Nation, so says Christopher Hitchens and is debated by Ken Blackwell

Imagine how you would react if Gordon Brown opened and closed his election rallies by bursting into a song called Bring Me My Machine Gun, swaying and jigging to the hypnotic chorus of this menacing ditty. And how would you feel if the Prime Minister were alleged to be taking campaign money from Colonel Gaddafi; faced 783 counts of fraud, racketeering, tax evasion and corruption which somehow never came to court; and had been acquitted of rape while his fearsome supporters mobbed the courthouse? Then ponder how you would despair if, despite all these things, Mr Brown's party was certain...

Mos Def is curbstomped by Christopher Hitchens

This past Shabbat my family and I hosted Rabbi and Mrs. Nachman Holtzberg, parents of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, the head of Chabad in Mumbai who was brutally murdered with his wife Rivkah. You'd think that a family that watched their son and daughter-in-law slaughtered on TV by Islamic terrorists would feel hatred and a desire for revenge. But what this saintly father asked of our many guests was simply their participation in rebuilding Chabad of Mumbai so that his son's selfless work would continue. What a shame Christopher Hitchens did not join us. It might have dissuaded him from penning...

Why it matters how the media describe killers in Iraq and Ireland. ___ This appeared not as "The News" but as a piece of analysis called "Behind the News." Now, up until the present it has been the policy of the New York Times to describe the gang known as "al-Qaida in Mesopotamia" by the regular wording "a largely homegrown terrorist group that American intelligence says is foreign-led." This cumbersome and misleading formulation was at least intended to split the difference between those who regarded AQM as an intrusion into Iraqi affairs by the Bin Ladenists and those who saw...

Last week Christopher Hitchens and I were attacked in Beirut. Less than 24 hours after we landed at the international airport, a half dozen members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party jumped us on Hamra Street when he defaced one of their signs. He and I were traveling together because the Lebanon Renaissance Foundation invited us to meet Prime Minister Fouad Seniora, Future Movement party leader Saad Hariri, Druze chief Walid Jumblatt, and other leaders of the pro-independence “March 14” coalition. We had just attended a massive rally downtown commemorating the fourth anniversary of the assassination of former Prime Minister...

Look on the bright side: This’ll make for one hell of a Slate column once he gets back. I can only assume they didn’t recognize him, as the opportunity to scalp one of the world’s foremost atheists surely would have been irresistible. I dont know if you find this as news worthy or not, but Christopher Hitchens is currently in Beirut sponsored by the same group that owns that crap NOW Lebanon. He got in a few nights ago and surprisingly went out drinking. On his way out of the bar he saw an SSNP poster and wrote on it...

Don't Let the Mullahs Run Out the Clock Obama must talk directly to the Iranian people. It's strange how some totalitarian types feel the urge to be blunt and honest, even almost confessional. I call as my witness the senior member of the Robert Mugabe coterie who was quoted in the New York Times on Feb. 11 concerning the sham swearing-in of Morgan Tsvangirai as prime minister of Zimbabwe. After the ceremony, according to Celia W. Dugger's report: [A] veteran ZANU-PF official who belongs to the party's politburo said of Mr. Tsvangirai, speaking on the understanding that he would not...

I dare say that you at least suspect that the hope-and-optimism surplus generated by your election is in some part and to some extent your own fault. But it is also in the nature of democratic politics to generate a surplus of expectations, as it is somehow part of the essence of America to produce talk about “dreams.” But in dreams, as we also have good cause to know, begin responsibilities. And nightmares are dreams, too. ... Let me then return this rebuke to you. Having said, quietly but firmly, that the Iranian theocracy cannot be permitted to crash through...

If I never again had to read or write a word about homosexuals, I would be very happy. I really don't want to know what other people do in their bedrooms. But these days they really, really want us all to know. And, more important, they insist that we approve. No longer are we allowed to keep our thoughts to ourselves, while being polite and kind. We are forced to say that we think homosexuality is a good thing, that homosexual couples are equal in all ways to heterosexual married couples. Most emphatically, we are compelled to agree that homosexual...

...The answer, I am reasonably certain, is that it is the events of Sept. 11, 2001, that explain the transformation of George Bush from a rather lazy small-government conservative into an interventionist, in almost every sense, politician. The unfortunate thing about this analysis, from the liberal point of view, is that it leaves such little room for speculation about his Oedipal relationship with his father, his thwarted revenge fantasies about Saddam Hussein, his dry-drunk alcoholism, and all the rest of it. (And, since Laura Bush in the film is even more desirable than the lovely first lady in person, we...

More Than a Good Feeling Why are so many oligarchs, royal families, and special-interest groups giving money to the Clinton Foundation? By Christopher Hitchens Bill Clinton speaks at the Clinton Global Initiative in Hong Kong Here is a thought experiment that does not take very much thought. Picture, if you will, Hillary Clinton facing a foreign-policy conundrum. With whom will she discuss it first and most intently: with her president or her husband? (I did tell you that this wouldn't be difficult.) Here's another one: Will she be swayed in her foreign-policy decisions by electoral considerations focusing on the year...

can absolutely see what Warren hoped to get out of this sordid little trip, the evidence of which he vainly tried to conceal when it threatened to become embarrassing. He wanted to be on video for his open-mouthed followers as he posed "on the road to Damascus." And he didn't care what deals he had to make, with Baath and Toothbrush Central Command, in order to bring off such a fundraising coup. But now it's the sandals of Obama that are being exploited by the same tub-thumper, and one has not merely a right but a duty to object to...

Antidisestablishmentarianism is on the march. Which is odd, considering there is only the faintest whiff of disestablishmentarianism to fight. The Archbishop of Canterbury set this hare running with his usual confused mumbling into his beard. To disestablish the church would be "by no means the end of the world", he said bravely. He hastened to add that he did not want the church sundered from the state right now. And he would oppose "secularists [boo, hiss] trying to push religion into the private sphere". This sent the Telegraph and Mail into a spin, claiming a devilish distestablishment plot on the...

God has had a lot of bad press recently. The four horsemen of atheism, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, have all published books sharply critical of belief in God: respectively, The God Delusion, Breaking the Spell, The End of Faith, and God Is Not Great. Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens pile on the greatest amount of scorn, while Dennett takes the role of good cop. But despite differences of tone and detail, they all agree that belief in God is a kind of superstition. As Harris puts it, religion “is the denial—at once full of hope and...

I think we are all entitled to ask and to keep asking every member of the Obama transition team until we receive a satisfactory answer, the following questions: ___ Will Warren be invited to the solemn ceremony of inauguration without being asked to repudiate what he has directly said to deny salvation to Jews? ___ Will he be giving a national invocation without disowning what his mentor said about civil rights and what his leading supporter says about Mormons? ___ Will the American people be prayed into the next administration, which will be confronted by a possible nuclear Iran and...

The obvious is sometimes the most difficult thing to discern, and few things are more amusing than the efforts of our journals of record to keep "open" minds about the self-evident, and thus to create mysteries when the real task of reportage is to dispel them. An all-time achiever in this category is Fernanda Santos of the New York Times, who managed to write from Bombay on Nov. 27 that the Chabad Jewish center in that city was "an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen who unleashed a series of bloody coordinated attacks at locations in and around Mumbai's commercial...

The obvious is sometimes the most difficult thing to discern, and few things are more amusing than the efforts of our journals of record to keep "open" minds about the self-evident, and thus to create mysteries when the real task of reportage is to dispel them. An all-time achiever in this category is Fernanda Santos of the New York Times, who managed to write from Bombay on Nov. 27 that the Chabad Jewish center in that city was "an unlikely target of the terrorist gunmen who unleashed a series of bloody coordinated attacks at locations in and around Mumbai's commercial...

I hope I am not alone in finding the statements about Bombay from our politicians to be anemic and insipid, and the media coverage of the disastrous and criminal attack too parochially focused on the fate of visiting or resident Americans. [snip] Not to romanticize it overmuch, it is a huge and officially secular federal democracy that is based, like the United States, on ethnic and confessional pluralism. Its political and economic and literary echelons speak English better than most of us do. [snip] It would be good to hear from the president and the president-elect that we regard attacks...

<p>Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell - or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.</p> <p>It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which recorded Obama's victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn't yet a children's picture version of his story, there soon will be. Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find.</p>

It was apt in a small way that the first endorser of Hillary Rodham Clinton for secretary of state should have been Henry Kissinger. The last time he was nominated for any position of responsibility—the chairmanship of the 9/11 commission—he accepted with many florid words about the great honor and responsibility, and then he withdrew when it became clear that he would have to disclose the client list of Kissinger Associates. (See, for the article that began this embarrassing process for him, my Slate column "The Latest Kissinger Outrage.") is possible that the Senate will be as much of a...

Two leading civil rights groups plan to file lawsuits Tuesday against the Bush administration over its domestic spying program.... The Center for Constitutional Rights plans to sue on behalf of four lawyers at the center and a legal assistant there who work on terrorism-related cases at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,... Similarly, the plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit include five Americans who work in international policy and terrorism, along with the A.C.L.U. and three other groups.... One of the A.C.L.U. plaintiffs, Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, ... Also named as plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit are the journalist...

I quote from the column, headed "Reflections by Comrade Fidel" and titled "The Russian Orthodox Church," which was "syndicated," if that's the word, on Oct. 21. This church, wrote Castro: [i]s a spiritual force. It played a major role at critical times in the history of Russia. At the onset of the Great Russian War, after the treacherous Nazi attack, Stalin turned to her for support to the workers and peasants that the October Revolution had changed into the owners of factories and the land. .... It gets worse. As Castro writes in the same column, concerning the visit of...

Here is video of Hardball's Chris Matthews leading a discussion of the possibility of Sen. Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State in Barack Obama's administration. One of the guests is Christopher Hitchens, the rabid agnostic/atheist who supported Obama, but does not like the idea of Hillary being Secretary of State. In fact, Hitchens says if she becomes Secretary of State it will be a "ludicrous embarrassment" for Obama to have given her the job. This will not make the far left of his party happy at all. . . . (Watch Video)

Well, as it happens, our new president has no slave ancestry, and neither branch of his parentage could have been owned by anybody, or at least not by anybody American. (Muslim-run slavery, though, is an old story in Africa as well as a horribly contemporary one.) And there were not a few elected black American representatives 40 years ago, even if mainly in Northern states. The objection I make is therefore twofold. First, the election of Obama is the effect not the cause of the changes. (One of my questioners appeared to think that our president-elect had been responsible for...

FIGHTING WORDS Barack to Reality Obama's victory didn't magically eliminate America's problems and enemies. By Christopher Hitchens Posted Monday, Nov. 10, 2008, at 11:30 AM ET Yes, yes, yes. I, too, took pleasure in standing in line and in exchanging pleasantries and greetings with the amazingly courteous staff at my polling station and the many citizens of my delightfully diverse Washington neighborhood. I, too, am still wearing my lapel sticker, with the jaunty words "I Voted." And I found it pretty easy to cast a vote that told the Republican Party, for which I recommended a vote last time, not...

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead. The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something. I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever...

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead. The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something. I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever...