Free Republic

One of the most important books of the 20th century -- it remains a best-seller 59 years after it was first published -- is "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. Marx saw man's primary drive as economic, and Freud saw it as sex. But Frankl believed -- correctly, in my opinion -- that the greatest drive of man is meaning. One can be poor and chaste and still be happy. But one cannot be bereft of meaning and be happy -- no matter how rich or how sexually fulfilled one may be. The greatest provider of meaning for the...

The anti-Trump demonstrations we now see in the streets are not just examples of the immaturity of many modern secular liberals, who seem to think that everyone else is somehow obligated to agree with them. They’re also a symptom of the distorted influence politics now exercises over our culture. But in addition to being a symptom of our culture, the dominance of politics in every aspect of life is also a consequence of liberalism itself. The tendency of liberalism has always been to politicize everything. Thanks to liberalism, we have a politicized media that has abandoned journalistic standards in a...

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..." The First Amendment assumes that the proper sphere of government is policies, not values. And so it protects the right of political participation and prohibits a state church that would define values. The government had the right to decide to go to war with France. It did not have a right to decide what you should believe. Politics extended into the realm of policies, not beliefs. But as religious belief declined, politics replaced it as the repository of moral and ethical values. This transformation began on the left. The left...

When Christian Smith and his fellow researchers with the National Study of Youth and Religion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill took a close look at the religious beliefs held by American teenagers, they found that the faith held and described by most adolescents came down to something the researchers identified as "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." As described by Smith and his team, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism consists of beliefs like these: 1. "A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth." 2. "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair...

Primitive man worshipped nature and imbued inanimate things with human qualities. So do environmentalists. James Lovelock, one of the movement's godheads, and the godfather of the Gaia hypothesis, imbued the earth with mystical powers. The Lovelock-inspired concept of "planetary consciousness" is really a philosophical excrescence of animism, "the belief that natural objects, natural phenomena and the universe itself possess souls." Nature worship is a form of this fetishism. Primitives worshipped idols and amulets but also conferred divine honor on the sun, moon, mountains, rivers, trees and animals; air, fire and water. Environmental animists à la Lovelock believe that to...

Original American Sin September 12th, 2005 We wake up in the morning, and our evil deeds begin before we have time to curse the alarm. As we slept, our refrigerators were hard at work giving Chileans skin cancer. We turn on the air conditioner, and amphibians grow extra limbs. We breathe and contribute to global warming and killer hurricanes. We put on our clothes and cover the world with sweatshops. We put on our shoes and tie children to workbenches with the laces. We poison the soil by eating breakfast. We drive to work and drown Pacific Islanders. We go...

LOL...James Randi, the magician and debunker of paranormal hoaxes, observes on his website that ...(Currently, my local PBS-TV stations are featuring both Dr. Wayne Dyer and Dr. Gary Null in their pledging period, to take advantage of the public's taste for quackery. Both these men flaunt degrees, both deal in nonsense. Dyer makes incredibly naïve statements such as that if you just summon up enough determination, "anything is possible," and Null prescribes magnets and other medieval tools to prevent aging. He preaches eternal youth. Now, Null is less than 60 years old, but I recognize dyed hair and make-up, and...