Free Republic

People have strange notions of God.  A semi-agnostic co-worker recently remarked to me that he regards the Bible as so much hooey because the God of the Old Testament is mean and wrathful while the God of the New Testament is about love and forgiveness.  How can Christians, he wondered, be silly enough to believe in both.  It seems to me that many people, whether or not they would articulate it in such a way, view God in much the same way. They think that the God of the Old Testament created the world and was determined to run things...

Mary Wiper, the leader of the Sierra Club in New Mexico, died Sunday after being struck by lightning while hiking with friends in Breckenridge, Colo. "This accident— it's just about as random as anything nature can serve up," said Lawson LeGate, the senior Southwest region representative for the Sierra Club and Wiper's boss. Wiper, 28, and two others were struck during a thunderstorm. The other two regained consciousness but were unable to revive Wiper. Wiper took over last May as Sierra Club's associate field representative for the Southwest. She oversaw projects in New Mexico, including the Sierra Club's participation in...

THE US was attacked a little more than 1½ years ago. This assault was the product of two decades of US weakness in the face of terror and three decades of US fecklessness in the Middle East. From the barely-responded-to bombing of the marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 to the host of subsequent, little-noticed or quickly forgotten attacks in the later '80s and in the '90s, the US came to be seen as a "weak horse". That characterisation was Osama bin Laden's, and he made it with reason. Similarly, from the oil embargo of 1973 through to the destruction...