H.L. Mencken once ably described democracy as the art and science of running the zoo from the monkey house. There are placid periods where one is permitted to forget this, but every so often elections happen to us, and everything gets ripe and fruity. James Dobson took Obama to ask for his comments in a …
Not All “One True Gods” Are the One True God
“The proponents of an ‘Ecumenical Jihad,’ from President George W. Bush and Professor Forte to a Christian conservative like Peter Kreeft, share two fallacies. Their faulty understanding of Islamic theology leads them to imagine that ‘Allah’ is more or less interchangeable with the ‘God’ of other monotheists. Their incomplete understanding of the phenomenon of secular …
Pina Coladas, and Walking in the Rain
The next chapter in Dawkins is called “The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist,” and it is one of the strangest bits of business I have encountered in some time. The first part of the chapter is dedicated to proving how the Bible exhibits “sheer strangeness” and is “just plain weird” (p. 237). To …
The Tashlan Temptation
The election yesterday provided me a real sense of relief, and in several ways it was a very good night. On the positive side of the register, eleven ballot initiatives that defined marriage as consisting of one man and one woman passed, many of them by whopping margins. The Republicans gained in the House, and …