“Religion makes people fly planes into skyscrapers. Religion makes people baptize babies. Religion makes people go door to door to offer little pieces of paper to other people. Religion makes widows be burned alive on the pyre of their deceased husbands. Religion makes other widows mail pitiful little checks to Joel Osteen. Religion makes people build hospitals in the jungles of the Congo. Talking about what ‘religion’ does in the world is like defining ‘medicine’ as ‘pills in bottles.’ I am not sure you should take that. My aunt took a pill from a bottle once and was sick for a week.”
Which Is to Say, a Lot
“Progressives love free speech the way parasitoid wasps love caterpillars.”
Virgins and Volcanoes, p. 42
Something Jesus Brings
“If you want the fruit called religious liberty, you have to want the tree that this kind of fruit grows on. This means that if we want maximum liberty for people who don’t believe in Jesus, then we will have to . . . believe in Jesus.”
Letters To Remind Us of Whatever It Was We Decided to Write About
Letter to the Editor: I could not believe there are people out there with such a bigoted, intolerant and hateful view on life. The ONLY reason I write this is to register my abhorrence ...
And Such a Turtle Would be Hard to Miss
“Yeah, my interlocutor might say but if the Bible taught that the earth was a flat disk rocking precariously on the back of an enormous turtle, would you believe that too? The answer is that 1) it doesn’t teach that, and 2) if it did, we would have found the turtle by now, and your argument would be invalid, having failed empirically.”
Virgins and Volcanoes, p. 41
No Free Markets Without Free Men
“If someone takes human choices in the marketplace as his absolute, the end result will be a market in which the fundamental commodity will be the souls of men. But if someone takes the law of God as his direction, the end result will be a market in which a man can buy and sell his cabbages or cabinets or cars without getting permission from some functionary at the Department of Hubris.”
Larry Arnn and the Hillsdale Half Step
Introduction: I have hazarded the guess that you are not even close to being tired of dealing with the subject of Christian nationalism . . . well, neither am I. The two traditional topics ...
No Finger in the Air
“The fact is, the Bible does say that for a man to lie with another man as with a woman is an abomination (Lev. 20:13), that Israel should not suffer a witch to live (Ex. 22:18), that God flooded the entire globe good and wet for their experiments in federally funded genetic splicing (Gen. 6:4), that Christian slaves were instructed to work doubly hard for their Christian masters (1 Tim. 6:2), and that placing women in combat roles was beyond appalling (Deut. 22:5). There is a kind of Christian still out there who believes that exegesis of such passages is not done by licking a finger and holding it up in the breeze.”
Virgins and Volcanoes, p. 40
Which Would be Vigorous Negative Enthusiasm
“This is why, if someone suggests bringing an explicitly religious concern into public policy discussion, the vigor with which he is shouted down exhibits the kind of negative enthusiasm you might reserve for the advocate of releasing 10,000 plague-carrying rats into Central Park.”
So Why Did I Post This? Doesn’t Matter
