Fighting for reason and liberty.

Ed Hudgins points to the importance of speaking out critically in the face of the horrors of foreign cultures, especially as these cultures are imported to America. “[I]t is imperative to discuss openly and without concern for political correctness of irrational sensitivities that obscure the truth, the moral and cultural foundations of a free society.”

Ed is right. Free Speech is a powerful tool but we must use it! We cannot remain silent about the savagery of foreign religious practices; we cannot lie and pretend there is a moral equivalence between our culture and others; we cannot silently sanction the irrational – primitive or post-modern – in our culture or in the world. We must speak out and make moral judgments.

Speaking of the primitive and post-modern threats to our Enlightenment heritage, David Kelley, has an excellent introduction to the subject and the false alternative between pre-modern faith-based philosophy and secular irrational post-modernism. Most importantly, he defends modernity – reason, science, individualism, liberty, and capitalism. “Who speaks for those values? Who provides the intellectual defense? Who carries the banner of modernity in the culture wars? Among popular writers, Ayn Rand was far and away the most articulate advocate. At the center of her Objectivist philosophy, which she explicitly aligned with the Enlightenment, was a morality of rational individualism.”