Free Republic

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