The merriness of the Christmas season contrasts sharply with the anger of several prominent atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, who attack the belief in God in their recent bestsellers.
WE DON'T balk at some of the most bitter truths modern science teaches and even propagandizes: for example, that mindless subatomic particles govern all things, or that whatever is eternal is indifferent to us, if it exists at all.
LAST WEEK my column was about gay marriage. The column got a lot of response, both in letters to the editor and to me personally.
WHILE OPINION polls have consistently shown most Americans are in favor of maintaining current marriage laws, two-thirds of high school seniors and a majority of those in their twenties favor gay marriage.
WHAT IS education, and what is it good for? Education is one of those lofty things we are all supposed to be in favor of, but no one really seems to know what it is.
THE TIMES, they are not a-changin'. They've ground to a halt. A few weeks ago, undergraduates flocked to the John Paul Jones Arena to listen to Bob Dylan, the hero of those who wouldn't trust anyone over 30 -- now a senior citizen.
"THERE ain't no such thing as a free lunch." That is what economics teaches, and some might even argue that wisdom itself is nothing more than the genuine understanding and acceptance of that unglamorous principle.
JUSTICE is not man's deepest longing -- for better and worse. Yet it is the form in which our powerful and selfish desires most often disguise themselves, in operations obscure even to ourselves.
DO WE LOVE the Cavalier? The English royalists who escaped to Virginia during Cromwell's victory in the Civil War, and who were the direct ancestors of one Thomas Jefferson, would seem to be little more than an obscure mascot to us -- even more obscure than a fish that can drink three times its own weight.
How little we know what we most need to know. This is an exceptionally striking fact about the most promising new field to arise in our time, evolutionary psychology, led by Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker and our own Jonathan Haidt, author of "The Happiness Hypothesis." Its emphasis on natural selection serves as a valuable sanity check on the otherwise crushing power of political prejudice in the social sciences (I use the term loosely), especially through its politically incorrect discovery of the evolutionary basis of many sexual inequalities.
