Free Republic

Sacred underwear, baptizing holocaust victims, gods of their own planets. When some of America’s most celebrated pundits and public intellectuals talk about Mormons, these are the images that are summoned. Ironically in this “Mormon Moment”—signaled by a hit Broadway musical, polygamous housewives on TLC, and of course two Mormon presidential candidates—Mormons, long considered quintessential “outsiders” to mainstream American culture, today find themselves at the center of the American zeitgeist. Yet it is the Mormons’ supposed theological weirdness that is the centripetal attraction. As Joanna Brooks has noted in these pages, the New York Times recently featured Harold Bloom’s musings on...

Michael Ruse has gone quite a ways towards establishing a one world atheist religion—the Allunimati. Too much, too paranoid, too conspiratorial, too hyperbolic you say? Consider his words (emphasis added): …only by recognising the death of God can we possibly…behave properly to our fellow humans and perhaps save the planet… Behold—Ruse the Soter!... Considering that Dan Barker, of the Freedom From Religion Foundation declared that “Darwin has bequeathed what is good” it is rather refreshing, in a sort of way, that The Guardian is asking “What can Darwin teach us about morality?”