Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"The overtaking by history of the antireligious attitude of liberal­ism is so well known that a brief indication will be sufficient. The liberal attack was directed against dogmatism and the authority of revelation. If only these influences on thinking and public life could be removed, then the free human being would order society rationally with his autonomous reason. "However, if in practice Christianity is successfully driven out of men, they become not rational liberals but ideologues. The undesirable spiritual order is replaced not by liberalism but rather by one or the other of the emotionally as-intensive ideologies." -- Eric Voegelin, Collected Works

My post the other day drew all sorts of ire from feminists who said I was "equating" women's sexual freedom with serial killing. This, of course, was nonsense: when you execute a reductio, you are not "equating" the absurd thing with your opponent's case at all. But what's more, my post had nothing to do with feminism or sexual freedom. Rather, I was struck by Carmon's claim that we each get to define our own morality. I thought this was a terrible mistake, and that there was, in fact, a much better way for her to put her own feminist claims. While I was sipping my cappuccino today, I was thinking about all the distraction the feminist issue caused from what I was actually discussing, which was moral realism. So let's look at this issue again, and take up freedom of religion, instead. Consider infant circumcision, something that is a standard practice in Judaism. Here are a range of things one might think about this: 1) The practice is, ...