Free Republic

From the outside, with its high minarets and bulbous Mughal-style dome, the Wilmersdorf mosque, located on Brienner Street in southwest Berlin, looks much the same as it did when it was built in the 1920s. But the institution, just like the city around it, has changed. Today, the mosque is a quiet place. It mainly serves as an information center: School children sometimes visit on field trips; it hosts interfaith brunches. A small community of Muslims regularly show up for Friday prayer. It’s all a far cry from the days when the Wilmersdorf mosque was the lively center of a...

Einstein’s God by Jean F. Drew Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) — reluctant scientific revolutionary and one of the most prolific theoretical physicists who ever lived — continues to fascinate us as a world-class thinker and important public actor to this day. There has been much speculation regarding his religious views in particular over the course of many decades. Some people nowadays maintain that Einstein was an atheist. Others, a pantheist. His great biographer Abraham Pais (in Subtle Is the Lord, 1982) averred that Einstein’s God was simply the God of Baruch Spinoza ((1632–1677), one of the most influential European...

BETRAYING SPINOZA: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity By Rebecca Goldstein Schocken, 287 pages $19.95 WITH most people, if they know anything about the philosopher Benedic tus Spinoza, it's his sensational-sounding excommunication by the Amsterdam Jewish community in 1656 at age 24. But Jewish-style excommunication sounds more awesome than it was. Its impact was merely social. Until the excommunicated person changed his ways, other Jews were forbidden to communicate with him. In her fascinating and highly accessible new biography, part of the Jewish Encounters series, novelist Rebecca Goldstein brings out a much more interesting but lesser known truth about...

Don't fall off your chair, but I've recently had to admit I was wrong about something. My list of the individuals whose thoughts form the top three most lamentable cultural influences in modern times needs to be amended. This realization, in turn, raises a question about the influence exerted by a larger group of people: Jews. My top three used to be Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Charles Darwin. But after discovering novelist Rebecca Goldstein's readable, sensitive and entertaining new biography, "Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity," I've dropped Darwin from the list and replaced him with...

Attacking” President Bush November 27, 2003 “Some are attacking the president for attacking the terrorists,” says a new Republican TV ad for President Bush. In its verbal sloppiness, this message is fully worthy of the president himself. Of course nobody is “attacking” him in the same sense that he is “attacking the terrorists,” with real bullets and bombs. Various people are criticizing him, some with measured language, some with verbal abuse, but all of them are well within the limits of the “freedom” and “democracy” he says he wants to promote around the world. So why does he allow and...

Enlightenment–bashing, it would seem, is “in.” If anything could unite the discordant voices inside the cacophony of postmodern “discourse,” it must surely be the almost unanimously acknowledged thesis that the Enlightenment project has exhausted itself. What earlier intellectual historians had so smugly called the “triumph of reason” over obscurantist dogma is now looked on as in reality an imperious (and imperial) Will to Power. Reason’s claim to universality is now regarded as just a cover for Europe’s colonial outreach, the velvet glove of reasonability cloaking the iron fist of its aggressive, hegemonic domination of the rest of the globe....