You may have noticed that I keep coming back to certain puzzles, like a dog chewing a bone.

Sometimes people argue that the Framers couldn’t possibly have meant what they said when they guaranteed the free exercise of religion with no exceptions.  The argument runs like this:

The twentieth century taught some of us that totalitarianism is evil.  What it taught some totalitarians is that their methods had to change.  Do people resist the compulsory destruction of their cherished institutions?  Very well, then compulsion must be made to look like liberty.

Mondays are reserved for letters from students.  This one is matriculating at Santa Clara University.

Question:

The two First Amendment religion clauses are often described as though they were in conflict, so that they have to be “balanced” against each other.

One of the aims of terrorists is to make their opponent lose their sense of balance and proportion.  Judging from recent events, this isn’t difficult to do.

The other day I came across yet another claim by an atheistic philosopher that God is unnecessary to ethics, that we can ground moral duties even if there is no God.

Let us set aside the question of whether this common claim is true.  For purposes of discussion, let us proceed as though it were.

The chief limitation of the human intellect is not sheer shortage of brainpower, but defect of character.  The weakness of our minds is not that we are not smart enough, but that we are not good enough.

Consider how faulty our thinking is about other people because we are too interested in ourselves;