Free Republic

Sir Roger Scruton has died and Britain has lost her greatest conservative thinker, writer, fox hunting man, philosopher and all-round-hero of the right. Like so many of the bravest and best, he was a prophet almost without honour in his own country.

Skeptics and atheists insist that belief in God is irrational.  All too many believers in God, due to the same theological illiteracy affecting the non-believers and unbelievers, lend credence to this charge by way of their inability and/or unwillingness to defend their belief in God. Thankfully, there has been no short supply of men of genius over the centuries who have shown that there is nothing at all irrational about theism.  In fact, some, like the 12th century theologian and philosopher Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), were at pains to establish that it is atheism that’s irrational.By way of the “ontological...

The man taken into custody Wednesday night after allegedly trying to walk into St. Patrick's Cathedral, in the heart of New York City, with two gasoline cans and lighter fluid had booked a one-way $2,800 flight to Italy for Thursday, police said. He was also arrested days earlier at a New Jersey church, law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation tell News 4. Marc Lamparello, 37, would've been out of the country by Thursday night, NYPD officials said in announcing formal charges against him. Police said he had purchased the ticket to Rome Wednesday morning, hours before they say he...

This week, WBC fellow Jonathan Bartlett, along with co-author Asatur Zh. Khurshudyan, published a paper showing that elementary calculus contains a longstanding flaw that has been present for over a century. The paper was published in the peer-reviewed journal Dynamics of Continuous, Discrete & Impulsive Systems, Series A: Mathematical Analysis: Mathematical Analysis (DCDIS-A, for short). The journal has been published for a quarter of a century and many major universities across the United States subscribe to it. The flaw they discovered is one of notation. Now, you may be thinking, how can notation be wrong? Well, notation can be wrong...

Perhaps American Christians cannot think clearly about homeland security, borders, and immigration for the same reason Americans cannot think clearly about anything else. As Christians we have rich, intellectually credible traditions and frameworks for ethical reflection at our fingertips, and yet, as Americans, we suffer from a historical amnesia. What we need is a historically-attuned theological framework that can lay the foundation for our debates and political deliberations. Without one, we risk acting in ways that contradict the Gospel that we profess. To jump, as we tend to, from Plato and Aristotle to Locke and Hobbes is to ignore crucial...

There are at least three areas of inquiry traditionally in the purview of philosophy that now are often claimed to be best — or only — studied scientifically: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Let us discuss each in turn. Physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow open their 2010 book The Grand Design by asking: What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? ... Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of...

It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights, will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon...

There are many things that a person can do to improve themselves. In my case, I could lose some weight, and eat better. I could be kinder to people, and stop reading the news so much. I could spend more time with friends and family, and I could spend more time in nature. I think that if I did those things, I would be a better person. It’s not just me. I look around the world and see all kinds of things that could be improved with a modest amount of effort. The key here is the word “modest”. For...

The goal of education has always been to achieve critical thinking. Needless to say, this involves a two-step process: first, students learn a great deal about a topic, whether in history, science, art, or anything else; then students learn to arrange the information in new ways, to set one fact against another, to find new insights among this knowledge. Not anymore. Today's educators are in a hurry; they don't bother with the first step. They jump directly to step two. In this scenario, students who know nothing are expected to talk intelligently about it. What absurdity.Having just heard about X,...

(snips) ---- Victor Davis Hanson says he lives in the nineteenth century—a fact that can get him into some trouble. “Let me give you an example,” he says. Hanson was in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart one day when he saw a young woman struggling to move a big screen television into her Honda. When he went over to help her, he noticed that she was holding an EBT card, a government-issued debit card for cash and food stamps. Hanson told her, “You shouldn’t be using the food card to buy the big screen TV.” She told him to...

Did 1968 win the cultural war? Fifty years ago this year, the '60s revolution sought to overturn U.S. customs, traditions, ideology and politics. The '60s radicals eventually grew older, cut their hair and joined the establishment. Most thought their revolution had fizzled out in the early 1970s without much effect, as Americans returned to "normal." But maybe the '60s, not the silent majority, won out after all. The world a half-century later looks a lot more like 1968 and what followed than what preceded it. Most of the political and cultural agenda from that turbulent period -- both the advances...

"Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference toward the unique values which created it." - Nicolás Gómez Dávila

In 1903, during America’s darkest period of hate, W. E. B. Du Bois heartbreakingly affirmed his intellectual affinity with Western civilization. “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas,” Du Bois wrote in “The Souls of Black Folk.” “I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.” Half a century earlier, Frederick Douglass had paid tribute to the 18th-century British orators whom, at age 12, he had discovered in a collection of political speeches. “Every opportunity...

An hour & 13 minute video with Dennis Prager & Ravi Zacharias, hosted by Jeff Foxworthy. A very lovely evening talking about religion.

So now it’s finally upon us: Solo: A Star Wars Story! This stand-alone installment in the Stars Wars franchise features the adventures of a young Han Solo before he met Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi at the Mos Eisley Cantina in Stars Wars: A New Hope. It will be interesting to see what veteran screenwriter of The Empire Strikes Back, Lawrence Kasdan, has imagined as Han’s backstory. Was Han always a charming, roguish smuggler, or was he once an idealistic recruit of the Empire who became disillusioned and turned into the Han Solo we’ve all come to know? The...

What, then, was “the Enlightenment”? This term was promoted, first and foremost, by the late-18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant . . . [who declared] that only reason allows human beings to emerge from their “self-incurred immaturity” by casting aside the “dogmas and formulas” of authority and tradition. For Kant, reason is universal, infallible and a priori—meaning independent of experience. As far as reason is concerned, there is one eternally valid, unassailably correct answer to every question in science, morality and politics . . . This astonishing arrogance is based on a powerful idea: that mathematics can produce universal truths by beginning...

On the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, if you can indulge me a quick soapbox about the political use and abuse of his legacy. I'm not going to argue that MLK was exclusively a man of the right. He wasn't and his legacy isn't. Most of us know of his too close for comfort associations with Communists, as well as the extent to which some of his ideals and rhetoric veered off into leftist territory, particular in his later (and less successful) years. But there is far too much that is valuable about...

As we wade through the news reports and the commentary on the Florida shooting, we can’t help but think that nearly everyone – from journalists to politicians to gun control or gun rights advocates – is missing the point. Everyone is pointing the finger at someone. It’s President Trump’s fault because he practically handed guns to mentally ill people! It’s Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s fault for not banning bump stocks. It’s the NRA’s fault – it’s always the NRA’s fault. Here’s the thing: you can blame anyone you want. You can make any argument you want about the...

Belgian doctors fear the number of French people heading over the border to seek help to end their lives could shoot up and are warning that the road to the end is paved with problems. With the number of French people considering euthanasia as a viable way to end their daily suffering on the rise, the burden is largely falling on neighbouring Belgium. While active euthanasia, by which a person deliberately causes the patient's death, remains illegal in France, the procedure became legal in Belgium 15 years ago. What's the law in France? During Francois Hollande's leadership in March 2015,...

France on Wednesday kicked off a marathon round of talks designed to inform the country’s legislation on bioethics, with the government hoping to avoid a repeat of the poisonous debate that hijacked the legalisation of same-sex marriage. The six-month consultation, involving scientists, medical practitioners and legal experts from across France, will lead to a revised bioethics law, slated for later this year. It will touch on a broad range of subjects, from legalizing euthanasia to the development of artificial intelligence. Some of the topics up for discussion represent a political minefield in France, and President Emmanuel Macron will be keen...