Free Republic

"the separateness of these two mechanisms, one for understanding the physical world and one for understanding the social world, gives rise to a duality of experience. We experience the world of material things as separate from the world of goals and desires. ...We have what the anthropologist Pascal Boyer has called a hypertrophy of social cognition. We see purpose, intention, design, even when it is not there." -- Paul Bloom, writing in The Atlantic Paul Bloom's essay "Is God an Accident?" in the latest issue of The Atlantic, suggests that humans' belief in God, Intelligent Design, and the afterlife is...

As Iran's possession of nuclear weapons looms ever closer, the threat these weapons pose to Israel has received much attention. Those who attended AFSI's {Americans For A Safe Israel) national conference on December 5 heard Professor Louis Rene Beres describe the Daniel Project, a group of privately funded experts who concluded that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a "rational" enemy (not an irrational nonstate enemy) were the single most urgent threat to Israel's survival. Iran clearly fits that bill. But the threat is not limited to Israel. In November 1990 I wrote an editorial in Outpost entitled...