And from each man, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man. [Genesis 9:5-6] In October of 2002, Washington, DC, and its suburbs were targets of terror. I know. I lived there. For three weeks, everyone wondered if stopping to pump gas in your car would be the last thing you did… Read more »
Predictably, there are apologists out there who are insisting that Nidal Hasan became “unhinged” due to post-traumatic stress, and that his religious beliefs played little or no role in his actions. When critics point out that Hasan never participated in the war personally, they say it was the result of hearing all the stories from those who had—sort of a secondhand post-traumatic stress. Let’s review what we know of his actions, since more evidence comes out daily. First, he was… Read more »
It was an ugly monstrosity separating a world of oppression from a world of liberty. Erected in 1961 to stop the flood of people leaving communist East Germany, the Berlin Wall sought to keep the people imprisoned within the communist system. The Wall became a symbol of communist tyranny—as long as it stood, it reminded the free world that we weren’t dealing with simply another point of view; we were dealing with a totalitarian entity that was a direct threat… Read more »
This is the face at which most Americans will be staring today. He’s a mass murderer who was wounded by those he attacked [initial reports said he had been killed]. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army major, went on a rampage at Ft. Hood, Texas. The last count I heard was that he had killed 12 people and wounded another 31. Now, the one salient fact in this massacre is that Hasan is a Muslim who spoke openly about the right… Read more »
In a previous post, I pointed out a second group in the nineteenth century that was bent on setting up government-controlled education for its own ideological purposes. Led by Robert Owen, this group sought to educate Americans out of their belief in private property and free enterprise. They set up the Workingmen’s Party to achieve their goal. One of the party’s adherents was Orestes Brownson. Later in life, he defected from the party and his old beliefs, and turned to… Read more »
The somewhat strange-looking man on the left is Robert Owen. He’s the next major figure in my retrospective on how education changed in America. I’ve already noted that Unitarians sought to wrest control of education from orthodox Trinitarian Christians, but although they had some success in Massachusetts, they had little support in the rest of the nation. Owen arrived in America from Britain as a believer in utopian communism. He was also a bitter foe of Christianity. Once here, he… Read more »
Unitarians wanted to remove education from the hands of the orthodox Christian churches. They sought to make all education the responsibility of the state; they were able to impose their will on Massachusetts by the 1830s. The first secretary of the state board of education was a man by the name of Mann. Horace Mann was a Unitarian who was placed in control of Massachusetts state education in 1837. He exhibited all the beliefs of the Unitarians with respect to… Read more »