Recommended Reading

New piece by VDH.
"Sometimes the caliber of a nation is found not in why it is liked, but rather in why it is not."
If you're not reading him every week - why not?

Vietnam, 30 years later, and how it compares to Iraq today. Thanks to the gentlemen at Argghhh!!!

Jonah Goldberg argues there's a place for faith in politics.

Christian facists? Stanley Kurtz explores the latest arguments in the ongoing culture debate. Religion, labelled as "the religious right," has increasingly become the target for leftist vitriol after it emerged that conservative Christians were a key component of Bush's re-election. This criticism has been increasingly bitter since it was discovered that the new pope, Benedict XVI, was indeed Catholic, much to the dismay of a loud few. Now Harper's Weekly, as Kurtz explains, has taken on the daring task of revealing "The Christian Right's War on America."

I have heard countless times, "Look at all the wars fought over religion." Well, I don't believe that contention to be correct, since the "religious" wars fought since the coming of Christ had more to do with politicians couching their desires in religious terms than with "my God is better than your God." More importantly, the twentieth century has taught us that the absence of religion is no better. The greatest genocides in human history occurred in societies where religion was forbidden from the public square. (Reference: Nazi Germany; the Soviet Union, esp. under Stalin; China, esp. under Mao; Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge; and Communist Cuba, among others.) It is situations where the prevailing ideology holds that nothing is sacred and man is supreme, that man's true inhumanity to man manifests.

Listen, religion is only as good as its adherents. Religious teaching and posturing can be used to whip its members into a murderous frenzy - or inspire its members to extraordinary acts of courage and sacrifice. Religion is a means, not an end. Like the printing press and the Internet, it is what one does with the means, not the means one uses, that is good or evil.