Free Republic

Bible prophecy may have a bad name in the light of Harold Camping's misguided date-setting, but the biggest sign of the end may have been overlooked in all the rapture hysteria of last weekend. Once again, we've seen the U.S. hit with a series of deadly superstorms following Barack Obama's pledge to return Israel to pre-1967 borders. Just days after Obama insisted Israel must give up lands it won through military victory with its enemies, some 200 people were killed by a tornado in Joplin, Mo. There's a pattern here. We saw it in Katrina, when George Bush forced Israel's...

"The Abusive Exploitation of the Human Religious Sentiment": Michael Burleigh as Historian of "Political Religion" Michael Burleigh, a distinguished English historian, is the author of a remarkable trilogy on the "political religions" that have been the scourge of late modernity. In his authoritative The Third Reich: A New History (2000)1 Burleigh studied Nazi Germany as a form of totalitarian society. In doing so, he rehabilitated the category of "political religion" as the indispensable interpretive framework for deciphering the National Socialist enigma. That book provides a detailed account of the "moral breakdowns and transformations of an advanced industrial society," one where...