Another thing to do is go to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute website and use their excellent college guide when choosing a college. From what I have seen as a prof at a non-ISI university, in addition to all that I've read on the demise of the liberal arts in America, I wouldn't even think of sending my own children to a mainstream university. The mainstream in academia is extreme leftism. It's funny...leftist professors have declared for decades that there's no timeless truth to be found through liberal learning, and now they wonder and complain as budgets for the humanities are slashed nationwide.

It's a "personal moral decision" when life truly begins? Are you serious? The science on this is indisputable. Human life truly begins at conception. This is not a matter of religious opinion or philosophical speculation, it is a biological fact. If you want to get into philosophical speculation, you may start asking about what constitutes personhood. "Are all humans also persons?" But if abortion supporters are to be excused for determining that their philosophical speculations about the nature of personhood are adequate grounds for intentionally taking innocent human lives, then we need to be prepared to excuse the Nazis for using similar reasoning against Jews, and slaveholders for using similar reasoning against blacks. Let go of...

Tack. "Taking the tack..." not "taking the tact." It's drawn from maritime terminology and means course of action. Perhaps you'd be more credible as an education reformer if you presented yourself as an educated man.

The number is inflated. Nobody stands to make $10 trillion a year. That would be the value of carbon credits traded. The exchange's revenue might be something like 1% of that, or $100 billion a year. Then take out expenses, guesstimate maybe 60-80% of revenues, and you end up with $20 billion to $40 billion in income per year. That's a more realistic guess at what the owners would stand to make. It might be considerably more or less, but it'll be much closer to this number than to $10 trillion.

Don't get me wrong, that's nothing to sneeze at. This is still scandalously corrupt and should be on the lips of every talking head in the business. But if we aren't clear about what the $10 trillion represents, we'll just sound like...

Christianity has no interest in the National Day of Prayer or any other manifestation of civic religion. Jefferson's "wall of separation" was meant to keep the government out of the Church, not the Church out of the government. Christians need to consider carefully the importance of that wall for the good of the Church.

Christianity "grew up" as a persecuted faith, it remains persecuted in many places around the world, and it has always thrived amidst persecution..."the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church". Obviously that doesn't mean Christians should seek persecution, but it does mean that avoiding persecution should not be Christians' primary concern. The Gospel, spoken and lived no matter what the governmental...

I hope you're active in pro-life causes. Knowledgeable, articulate, passionate...the kids need you.

mendicus

The argument you're presenting is essentially that of 19th-century liberalism or modernism: rightly apply human reason and find utopia. Whether the application is human freedom or Marxism or the scientific method, an ideal world will follow from human reason. Feminism was, indeed, a child of this way of thinking.

Unfortunately the results of this kind of thinking are mixed. Although I am a firm believer in the superiority of freedom to the various forms of social engineering or outright tyranny, and that freedom has been the driving force behind America's greatnesss, even freedom can only take us so far.

Thus, although freedom for women is good and right, and would indeed help the developing world to develop more quickly...

Despite all the humanist optimism of Enlightenment Liberalism, our Founders still understood this core truth of human nature. The Leftism that has gradually gripped our country over the last century or so has lost touch with this truth, thinking that society can be engineered into peace, harmony, and prosperity. The result is that we now see our most likely future in examples like Argentina, Greece, and California.

a Bruce Dickinson reference here? "I've got a fever...and the only prescription...is more capitalism!"

...provided their beliefs are not exclusivist, and provided their practices meet his standards of humbleness, joyousness, and again, non-exlusiveness. Sounds to me like Peter respects those whose religion doesn't stray far from Peter's own beliefs and comfort zone.

Thank you, Peter, for being a living example of humility and sound reasoning.