Free Republic

Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB, strongly criticized the "woke," social justice warriors in the United States and Europe, arguing that they behave just like the Bolshevik Communists did in the former Soviet Union. They are ruled by a "dogmatism bordering on absurdity," he asserted, noting that "cancel culture" is nothing more than "reverse discrimination," and teaching children that sexuality is flexible is potentially "a crime against humanity." In his Oct. 22 speech in Sochi, Russia, before members of the Valdai Discussion Club, Putin addressed some of the major issues affecting the entire world, such...

The Jehovah’s Witness New Testament An ex-Jehovah’s Witness, now Catholic, who we at Catholic Answers helped to come to Christ in his Church, gave me some wonderful gifts by way of old books, many of them first edition, published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, the publishing arm of the Jehovah’s Witnesses run by the leaders of their sect. Of note among these great gifts is a first edition copy of The New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures, the official Jehovah’s Witness translation of the New Testament, first published by the Watchtower in 1950.It is not the...

Bicycles instead of cars? Dense apartment clusters instead of single homes? Community rituals instead of churches? "Human rights" instead of religious freedom? The UN Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) which met June 3-14 [1996]in Istanbul, painted an alarming picture of the 21st century community. The American ways-free speech, individualism, travel, and Christianity-are out. A new set of economic, environmental, and social guidelines are in. Citizenship, democracy, and education have been redefined. Handpicked civil leaders will implement UN "laws", bypassing state and national representatives to work directly with the UN. And politically correct "tolerance"-meaning "the rejection of dogmatism and absolutism"...

Now, it is true, and trivial, that to assert what is false is foolish, and to assert what is false vociferously is idiotic. But in order to claim a man is dogmatically asserting a falsehood, we must have knowledge that what he is saying is false. That is, we must ourselves assert a truth: that the man’s belief is false. This is a long-winded way of saying that we must be dogmatic—in the sense of declaring a view with certainty—in cursing dogmatism. This must always have been obvious. Consider that the Bartletts and Hackings of the world would dogmatically disallow...

  "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods." —Albert Einstein  The general, historical dialogue between religion and science goes back a long way—at least to Plato, Aristotle, and Leibniz. Before the 17th century, the goals of science were wisdom, understanding the natural order, and living in harmony with it. Ever since the "quantum revolution" of about 70 years ago, various scientists have been finding the intriguing parallels between their results and certain mystical-transcendental religions. Heisenberg, Bohr, Schroedinger, Eddington, Einstein—all held a mystical, spiritual...

In all the discussion about displaying the Ten Commandments in the Alabama courthouse, has anyone asked the fundamental question: what are the Ten Commandments? What is their philosophic meaning and what kind of society do they imply? Religious conservatives claim that the Ten Commandments supplied the moral grounding for the establishment of America. But is that even possible? Let's put aside the historical question of what sources the Founding Fathers, mostly Deists, drew upon. The deeper question is: can a nation of freedom, individualism and the pursuit of happiness be based on the Ten Commandments? Let's look at the commandments....

In 1972, a renowned and insightful libertarian economist of the Austrian School and a former associate of Ayn Rand, Dr. Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), composed a purported analysis of the “cult dynamics” of Ayn Rand’s personal associations wherein he compared the early development of Objectivism to a Soviet-like hierarchy of unquestioned subordination and an essentially religious acceptance on faith of the positions upheld by a master “guru.” While Rothbard does validly pinpoint some of the foibles which lay within even so ingenious, industrious, and intellectually colossal mind as Rand’s, his exposition should by no means be interpreted as a refutation of...

TRUE AND FALSE CONSERVATISM There are few things more unstable than political labels. Policies which in one decade are called "liberal" may find themselves called "conservative" in another, and men who in one age thought of themselves as "liberals" are in another age regarded as intransigent "conservatives." Yet for all the migratory propensities of labels, there is nonetheless at the bottom of labels a certain consistency or core meaning which transcends the semantic fluctuations of the moment. That men like Edmund Burke, David Hume, Alexander Hamilton, Alexis de Tocqueville, George Santayana, Joseph Schumpeter, Michael Oakeshott and James Burnham are all...