...Slavery appears such a relatively mild business that one begins to wonder why Frederick Douglass and so many others ever tried to escape.

I'm a Catholic by background. I was raised in Goa, a part of India that was visited by Portuguese missionaries a few hundred years ago, which explains my last name.

The capitalist has this over the politician and the clergyman; he has in practice done more to raise the standard of living of the poor than all the government and church programs in history....Monsanto and the Archer Daniels Midland Company have fed more hungry people than all the...soup kitchens combined.

And who can deny that Stalin and Mao, not to mention Pol Pot and a host of others, all committed atrocities in the name of Communist ideology that was explicitly atheistic.

Somehow freedom for religious expression has become freedom from religious expression.

If the supply of virtue is insufficient in a free society like America, it is almost nonexistent in an unfree society like Iran's. The reason is that coerced virtues are not virtues at all.

In philosophy seminars, the choice is usually between good and evil. In the real world, however, the choice is often between a bad guy and a worse guy.