Free Republic

There were two thinkers who were greatly influential in forming philosophies that would affect the future political theories that followed. The greatest thinker of the modern age was John Locke, who provided the framework that would allow for liberal democracy. A thinker who perhaps inadvertently laid down the foundation for totalitarianism was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Both Locke and Rousseau were grand thinkers, but Rousseau was an advocate of his own form of collectivism while Locke believed in individualism, the basis for a truly free society. It is sensible to begin by analyzing Locke, as he preceded Rousseau. John Locke writes in...

Bruce Charlton identifies six problems for modern Christian apologists, and proposes a solution.  His remarks are all interesting, but I want to focus on the first and most fundamental of the problems he identifies, which is that the metaphysical and moral knowledge that even pagans had in the ancient world can no longer be taken for granted: Christianity is a much bigger jump from secular modernity than from paganism.  Christianity seemed like a completion of paganism - a step or two further in the same direction and building on what was already there: souls and their survival beyond death, the...

Should American voters ask Romney and the other candidates what their philosophy of life is and what in their beliefs shapes their worldview? Also, should American voters ask the candidates about the degradation of the American culture especially among young people? I know we all have past sins, ie. Newt. However, Newt Gingrich has openly talked about his conversion to Catholicism and his reconciliation with God for his past sins. Rick Santorum openly talks about his devout Catholicism. Rick Perry is very open about his strong Christian beliefs. However, we do not hear much from Mitt Romney about his Mormon...

How you equip yourself for a zombie apocalypse depends largely on your personal belief systems. Are you going to focus solely on self-preservation? Or is restoring order to your country a transcendent objective? How willing are you to share your resources with strangers? And how discriminating will you be in shooting other human beings? Author Daniel Drezner tackles such moral dilemmas on a global level in his book Theories of International Politics and Zombies. Drezner is the real deal, by the way, a professor of international politics at Tufts University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s...

I read Ann's latest column with a heavy heart. I came away with the unmistakable feeling that she has lost faith in the philosophy and movement she has been a firebrand for until now. And I think about how it happens that a person at the age of 50 becomes the very cheerleader for the status quo that she argued against these many years. I believe it is true that as we age we develop different thoughts about things, through experience, through people we meet, through having to be forced to take a position on something we cannot imagine when...

Manassas, VA --(Ammoland.com)- To all of those “reporters” and pundits at ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CNN, the New York Times and all the other Times, the Boston Globe, the Spokane Spokesman-Review, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Arizona Republic, all of the Tribunes, Stars, and Ledgers; Let me make something perfectly clear: The NRA is not the Gun Lobby. Neither is the NSSF, nor the GOA, nor even The Firearms Coalition, nor the hundreds of grassroots and activist organizations or the thousands of local gun clubs. I am the Gun Lobby.Whenever you talk about the Gun Lobby, you are talking about me....

The 20th century will be remembered for the totalitarian monsters of various stripes who conceived, planned and executed programs of selective mass extermination of humans. I think that all Leftists, without exception, including the meekest of democratic socialists, have been implicated - knowingly or in consciously cultivated ignorance – as apologists for, or accomplices and abettors to the crimes of the totalitarians. I am stating this categorical proposition so bluntly rather late in life, although I have been convinced of its verity for as long as I can remember being able to recognize the evidence, i.e. since my teens. I...

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, P.J. O’Rourke described the mass murder as “an act of idealism.” Not idealism as we colloquially use the term to refer to the ability to place other values over one’s immediate self-interest, but rather “the concept that mankind and society could and should be perfected.” That vision of a perfected society causes O’Rourke’s idealists to ignore the human costs of the coercion required to create their ideal society. The 9/11 hijackers were driven by an older theological vision of a world-wide caliphate under the harmonious rule of Sharia. But most modern idealists derive their...

There is no Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. The Second Amendment simply tells us that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Unlike the First Amendment's prohibition against Congress making laws abridging certain rights we hold dear, the Second Amendment is an outright prohibition on all branches of our federal government from infringing on our right to defend ourselves. For a right to be infringed, it must already exist. The right to self-preservation is among the inalienable Jefferson spoke of in the Declaration of Independence. Without the right to defend life and liberty,...

'I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.' - Winston Churchill 'Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.' - P.J. O'Rourke 'Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.' - Douglas Casey  (classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown University) 'There is no distinctly Native American criminal class... save Congress.' - Mark Twain 'The ultimate result of shielding...

A difficult, delicate conversation here in our latest distillation of another critically important conservative/libertarian book. These ideas are like discovering continents; you cannot undiscover them. If you're able to figure out which book we're discussing before we mention the name of the book, you are at the top of your class.

Here are two gigantic concepts that will crack your head wide open.Neal Gabler, a journalist at the Norman Lear Center of the University of Southern California, recently published in the New York Times the opinion that our society “no longer thinks big,” that there are no more “intellectually challenging thoughts,” and, if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media.… Gabler is wrong on all counts. Not only have truly big ideas been advanced recently, but the mass media (apparently not the New York...

Manassas, VA --(Ammoland.com)- I’ve long been fascinated by Australia and its people. A visit to that country has been high on my bucket list since I was just a kid, but more and more as I read about present-day Australia I am disappointed and saddened. It seems that the days of rugged individualism and self-determination are gone from the land down under and the heroic characters of the past like Ned Kelly and Banjo Patterson have faded into the realm of myth and fairytales. It wasn’t so long ago that the reputation of Australia included the belief that one Australian...

UNITED NATIONS — A United Nations review has found that Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza is legal and appropriate but that the way its forces boarded a Turkish-based flotilla trying to break that blockade 15 months ago, killing nine passengers, was excessive and unreasonable. . . .

“What would you be willing to pay to reduce gun violence?” the San Jose Mercury News headline asks. If there was a measure on the ballot that called for increased tax rates to pay for an increased prevention of gun violence, how would you vote? If you say yes, then how much would you be willing to pay? The question is never honestly explored. Instead, it is presumed that summarizing the offerings of anti-gun “researchers” Phil Cook and Jens Ludwig authoritatively lays down the last word on the “costs” of “gun violence,” with no attempt to factor in the benefits...

"The bearing of arms is the essential medium through which the individual asserts both his social power and his participation in politics as a responsible moral being..." (Historian J.G.A. Pocock, describing the beliefs of the founders of the U.S.) There is nothing like having your finger on the trigger of a gun to reveal who you really are. Life or death in one twitch — ultimate decision, with the ultimate price for carelessness or bad choices. It is a kind of acid test, an initiation, to know that there is lethal force in your hand and all the complexities and...

Looks like were all going to be “treated� to a new series on the Discovery Channel wherein British Physicist Stephen Hawking will ponder theological and philosophical questions. A rather strange thing for a scientist to do actually.I have no doubt that Stephen Hawking is a fine, even a brilliant scientist and theoretical physicist. But science has a limit, a limit rightly imposed on itself, which explores the physical world using empirical and evidential models that do not go beyond the physically observable world. Scientists, even theoretical physicists, do well who recognize their sphere, their field. And most scientists are quite...

Marx sharply criticized those who tried to solve their problems philosophically or religiously, i.e., in thought, and advocated that they can only be solved by changing reality in practice so that the problem disappears. In other words, philosophy and religion had to be brought down to earth so that secular redemption could come through revolutionary practice, and not through thought or faith. As such, it was Marx who infamously wrote “the philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, what matters is to change it.” Due to their indifference to the material necessities of life, philosophy and religion could thus only...

As Lola and I rocked up my Mom’s waterfront idyll, I knew there was going to be trouble. The Lexus 460hl sitting in her driveway told the tale. It’s a $100k+ carcoon powered by a 438 horsepower hybrid gas – electric engine. The 20mpg luxobarge can scoot from zero to sixty in 5.5 seconds. The 460hl’s a hugely expensive, enormously powerful automobile for wealthy owners who want to believe they’re doing their bit for the environment. It is the perfect car for a liberal. Mind you, the good Doctor, his erudite wife, successful son and beautiful daughter-in-law proved to be...

For Bloom, the moral vacuum created by liberalism inside the souls of Americans was filled by demagogic radicals in the ’60s similar to the Nazi Brownshirts who in the ’20s and ’30s filled the breach created in German society by the Weimar Republic. Bloom further argued that liberal values of philosophy and reason understood as freedom of thought, had been hijacked by relativism, a pseudo-philosophy or ideology of thought, which Bloom identified as the primary aspect of modern liberal philosophy responsible for sabotaging the Socratic-Platonic worldview, logic and canonical teachings.

But I'd become really comfortable with state Rep. Scott Perry, R-Dillsburg. He's not my legislator. I've never had a chance to vote for him. But he does represent fellow York countians, and I'd come to respect the way he thought. I saw him as a hard worker. I saw him as a man with character. And I saw him as someone who had his priorities in order. Oh, and one more thing -- I saw him as a solid patriot. He was a man who not only cared about Pennsylvania, but the United States, as well. In case you have...

Conservatism is a thinking mans ideology. It requires understanding and wisdom, research and knowledge, and the ability and willingness to judge right from wrong. It requires a moral compass, a fortitude for righteousness, and above all a love of liberty. To be a true conservative the value of the individual must be nourished and a fierce independence cultivated that can withstand the petty criticisms, persecutions and mockeries of those who have yet to see the light and embrace the truth. The conservative ideology cannot be separated from logic or from common sense. To me being a political blogger and commentator...

It is clear that we are an utterly failed species. Left to our own devices, all we do is embrace the profane, the untrue, and outright evil.In only a few decades, I have seen America START as a world leader in industry; a world policy maker; and a world instructor in how to be free and a functional representative republic. I have seen America FINISH as a second-rate financial has-beenl a country ridiculed on the international stage; and a nearly-complete Police State where SWAT kills with impunity and political 'crimes' abound.Russia, too, attempted to throw off the chains of Communism,...

"Obama had nothing to do with the loan…. The President role is to appoint board members… Maybe those board members were Soros’ friends. But that’s probably beside the point… (Nothing here folks, move along, move on, moving forward as it were)

I have seen a couple of posts on here regarding Herman Cain, and heard him on Neal Boortz' show lots of times. Boortz really seems to love the guy. And I am inclined to like anyone who is pro-Fair-Tax more than someone who is for continuing the current income tax mess, which costs America far more productivity than any sales tax that replaced it ever could. But I haven't heard Cain talk about some controversial areas where I may well have concerns about his views on the Constitution. And where I have heard him talk on the issues, he's sometimes...

Three Ways of Living | The Introduction to Three Philosophies of Life | Peter Kreeft The Inexhaustibility of Wisdom Literature I have been a philosopher for all of my adult life, and the three most profound books of philosophy that I have ever read are Ecclesiastes, Job, and Song of Songs. In fact, the book that first made me a philosopher, at about age fifteen, was Ecclesiastes. Books of philosophy can be classified in many ways: ancient versus modern, Eastern versus Western, optimistic versus pessimistic, theistic versus atheistic, rationalistic versus irrationalistic, monistic versus pluralistic, and many others. But the...

It's been in the back of my mind now that there are certain dates throughout the year that The Almighty uses as lynchpins for his purposes. God does not play dice, as we've been told. This is not to say that human decisions do not cause less-than-earth-shaking events, or that random chance does not exist, or that coincidences on a grand scale don't happen, because they do. However, it is obvious that God prefers certain days to orchestrate historic events that are, shall I say, "plotline resolutions", where several building threads meet. Let's look at today in history - I'll...

Dan Riehl points out that the leadership used the military in order to get the numbers on the budget. Many Republicans wanted the military removed from the equation early on. That's also likely why Rep. Michele Bachmann is mentioning the issue and Kay Bailey Hutchinson is now sponsoring a bi-partisan bill in the Senate to remove military pay from future budget skirmishes. Many are furious with Boehner for exploiting servicemen and women and their families for a battle in DC, while so many are risking their lives overseas. Tea Party-affiliated Republican Rep. Allen West of Florida is out with a...

I am a subject in a kingdom of lies. At 57, I have grown up with decades of untruth — advanced for the purposes of purported social unity, the noble aim of egalitarianism, and the advancement of a cognitive elite in government, journalism, the arts, and the universities. Alger Hiss really was a communist operative, albeit an elegant and snooty sort of one. The Rosenbergs were tag-team spies. Noble Laureate Rigoberta Menchu did not really write her own memoir. I admire the lives of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, even as I sensed there were large areas of their...

It was the body slam heard around the world. When some Australian schoolboys decided to videotape themselves bullying 15-year old Casey Heynes, one of them got more than he bargained for. Casey, who had been pushed around and humiliated for years, responded to a punch in his face and other attempted blows by hoisting his tormentor WWE style and introducing him to the pavement. The result was a video that went viral in a way the bullies had never imagined and for a reason they certainly had never hoped: Casey has become a hero worldwide. That is, a hero to...

We'll always be able to trust the government with a monopoly on force. Cooperate when threatened, and you won't be hurt. The assumptions behind gun control laws are so blatantly and dangerously wrong that it must take some intellect to trick oneself into believing they're true. In December 2000, five friends in their twenties decided to cooperate when Jonathan and Reginald Carr barged into their Wichita home, demanding money. The victims offered no resistance, hoping that the pair would take their valuables and leave. Instead, the attackers ordered the three men into a closet and proceeded to rape the two...

It seems like the religion in the U.S. is a juggernaut that will be nigh unstoppable in the next decade or two. It's seemingly impossible to get elected without being openly and devoutly religious. George Bush claimed to receive divine commandments on how to perform his job. President Obama has made his church attendance receives plenty of attention too. Some question his sincerity, but no one questions that this is the politically smart thing to do. George Bush famously said that Islam is a religion of peace despite all the evidence to the contrary. 40% of U.S. citizens are strict...

Presidential scholar David Pietrusza reflects on the legacy of the 30th president at a symposium hosted by the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation. Mr. Pietrusza considers the influences that shaped President Coolidge’s political philosophy and why “Silent Cal” never wasted or minced words.

Liberals of this day and age, by and large, enjoy labeling themselves as "progressives", implying that anyone who does not agree with their socialist, statist world views is a "regressive" by extension. The liberal party here in the United Sates, the Democrats, describe themselves as a "big tent" party, supposedly able to encompass all views as long as their goal of defeating conservatism is not compromised. The flaws in this design are numerous, though one glaring one stands out - if Democrats are the "big tent" party, why are they also the party that has to have permission from the...

Take a moment and consider your place in the bigger scheme of things~ And while that's indeed illuminating (sorry)....  it's a  big universe with plenty of other stars out there: Jupiter only one pixel on that scale. But this behemoth Arcturus -25x the Sun's size and 110x as bright-is just 5th largest here...our own sun down to a single pixel: The monster above -Anteres- is the 15th brightest star in the sky, and is over 1000 light-years away. Feeling your place yet? Now try to wrap your mind around this: the photo below was taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and ultra-deep-field infrared shot of...

My interest at the moment is to try to understand more closely the American right. I've delved a little into the politics of a few personalities on the US right. It's not enough to write with great confidence on the topic, and I'm happy for American readers to jump in with their thoughts, but I think it's worthwhile to report on some early findings. If I had to briefly summarise I'd say: The professed political philosophy of leading personalities on the American right is often classical liberalism, i.e. it involves a belief in individual liberty, a small state, low taxes,...

While I am sure that there are some seriously good snarky answers to this - and feel free to leave them if you want - I am seriously trying to figure this one out. Dictionaries haven't helped and haven't really found a good socio-political one. I've wondered about this many times as I often think that many of the frustrations I have with politically and theologically like-minded folks are rooted in subtle differences between what it means to be a "liberal" or a "progressive." Sure, this could all be semantics and no person is one-dimensional, but in church, politics and...

Scottsdale, AZ --(Ammoland.com)- U.S. gun-owners are now entering a global battle of conflicting “norms” about possession of weapons. We believe that the American norm of civilian possession and judicious use of weapons creates the safest environment for our families and neighbors. But to the firearm-prohibitionists, achieving the international norm of civilian disarmament assures the best way to a peaceful society. John Bolton, former United Nations Ambassador, defined the “norming” process as using international organizations to create global standards or “norms.” When we look at the array of proponents championing the global norm – e.g. the UN, the vast majority of...

Edmund Burke, one of history's greatest conservatives, warned that abstractions are the enemy of responsible government. "I never govern myself, no rational man ever did govern himself, by abstractions and universals," Burke wrote. "A statesman differs from a professor in a university; the latter has only the general view of society; the former, the statesman, has a number of circumstances to combine with those general ideas." Alas for all of us and for American conservatism in particular, the new Republican majority that took control of the House on Wednesday is embarked on an experiment in government by abstractions. Many in...

1. Blogger Ezra Klein went on MSNBC and said the Constitution is a hundred years old and hard to understand. Apparently, this drew flak. 2. Then he blogged at 11:55 AM on Thursday: “…My friends on the right don’t like to hear this, but the Constitution is not a clear document. Written more than 200 years ago, when America had 13 states and very different problems, it rarely speaks directly to the questions we ask it. The Second Amendment, for instance, says nothing about keeping a gun in the home if you’ve not signed up with a ‘well-regulated militia,’ but...

Yet another study says biology may lurk in our political beliefs. Maybe! There’s another of those studies out there, that purports to show a biological difference between liberals and conservatives. People normally respond to “gaze cues,� or the direction that another person is looking, by glancing to see what caught that person’s attention. The new study, to be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, finds that liberals respond much more strongly to such cues than conservatives. The finding is the latest in a series of clues that liberals and conservatives may be subtly different...

Can God build a rock big enough that even He can’t lift it? This is a foolish question tempters and amateur atheists ask. Their intent is not to ask whether “omnipotent” is the best theological term to describe God’s power, but to tempt believers to question God’s existence. This is not an existence-of-God problem. It is really just a “trick question” of the same sort when one asks a righteous man if he has stopped beating his wife. That question contains an unproved premise and therefore cannot be answered “logically”. Another example from philosophy illustrates the real problem. Suppose...

The clash of civilizations, the collision between cultures, forecast by Samuel P. Huntington, has long since become an obvious fact in modern-day Europe, finding its clearest expression in the confrontation of Islam with the remnants of European Christianity. This collision not only is echoed in form of terrorist attacks but also in form of a bitter fight of ideals between two systems of values that could hardly be more opposed to each other, namely the archaic-totalitarian value system of Islam and the one represented by post modern European Enlightenment.

In the first five parts of this series, and particularly in Part 5, I presented a new theory of history and the role of philosophical ideas in history. This article presents the theory behind that theory, discussing the deeper epistemological issues that are raised by the rest of the series. To begin, let me briefly summarize the essence of my theory. I have argued that the standard Objectivist theory—the view that a culture is changed by explicit philosophical ideas propagating downward from the ivory tower to the specialized sciences, to art, to the man on the street—is incomplete. This "top-down"...

Today, I am a felon. Why? Because I broke a law; I willfully and purposefully broke it by taking a firearm with me to vote. Under state statute 7-30-2.4 it is prohibited for someone to take a firearm onto school grounds. The text thereof reads as follows: 1.         Unlawful carrying of a deadly weapon on school premises consists of carrying a deadly weapon on school premises except by:             a.         a peace officer;            b.         school security personnel;            c.         a student, instructor or other school-authorized personnel engaged in army, navy, marine corps or air force reserve officer training corps programs or state-authorized hunter safety training instruction;            d.         a person...

"Prospective gun owners would have to pass a mental health test before being granted a firearms licence under recommendations submitted by a NSW coroner," the AAP story on World News Australia tells us. Why? After inquiring into the self-inflicted shooting death of a man during a confrontation with police in Sydney, Deputy State Coroner Paul MacMahon found the licensed gun owner had posed a "very great danger" to many unsuspecting people...An inquest, in November 2009 and March 2010, heard police evidence that the man intended to kill numerous people at random on the day he visited Eastwood Mall. That's pretty...

To understand John Locke one has to understand what was going on internationally. He was born in an era of ascendant Islam. On the eve of Locke’s birth the Ottomans Murad IV (r. 1623-40) was the ruler of the Ottomans. As a young man Locke may have heard stories about the reign of Sultan Ibrahim (r. 1640-48). But Locke’s major years saw Mehmed IV (January 2, 1642 – January 6, 1693) reigning a largest Ottoman empire. In 1658 Greek mainland and islands fall under the control of the Ottoman Sultan. The Turks were knocking on the gages of Vienna in...

This is part one of a two part series on Moderate Muslims. Both articles are only 2 pages long. (Part two is linked.) Combined, they argue that while moderate Muslims should not be looked at as the enemy, they are not our hope for peace either. To attain peace, Islam must be met by an equally strong or stronger, better, rational philosophy.

The myth of a golden age of rational Islam plays a critical role in maintaining the somnolence of America's establishment in grasping the implacability of political jihad. Currently (see here, reviewed 9/2/10 at The National Review Online), the Mutazilites, typified by the Abbasid Muslim rulers al-Mamun (r. 813-833) and al-Mutasim (r. 833-842) are being lionized as avatars of the kind of "rationalist freethinking" which might have spared both Muslims and non-Muslims from the consequences of traditionalist Islamic irredentism. These views are a contemporary re-packaging of idealized portrayals initially put forth by Heinrich Steiner in 1865, and reiterated afterward by late...

“Ours is an age of religious cacophony, as was the Roman Empire of Christ’s time. From agnosticism to Hegelianism, from devil-worship to scientific rationalism, from theosophical cults to philosophies of process: virtually any worldview conceivable is offered to modern man in the pluralistic marketplace of ideas. Our age is indeed in ideological and societal agony, grasping at anything and everything that can conceivably offer the ecstasy of a cosmic relationship or of a comprehensive Weltanschauung [worldview].”[1] Read more: http://religiopoliticaltalk.com/2010/09/worldview-defined-and-explained/