If you listen to the discussion of the tsunami this past week, you receive the clear impression that the meaning of this event is that there is no meaning. Humans are not the universe's main concern. We're just gnats on the crust of the earth. The earth shrugs and 140,000 gnats die; victims of forces far larger and more permanent than themselves.

--David Brooks
NY Times Op-Ed 1/1/05

Reason is the armament of ideas, the weapon employed in conflicts between viewpoints…But reason so understood has always had enemies. One is 'religion,'which claims that revelation from outside the world conveys truths undiscoverable by human enquiry. Another is 'relativism,' the view that different truths, different views, different ways of thinking, are all equally valid. 'Postmodernism' says there are authorities more powerful than reason, such as race, tradition, nature, or supernatural entities.

But still, say the champions of reason, 'reason' remains by far the best guide in the search for knowledge.

--A. C. Grayling

Bush's "faith-based initiative" drivel is just that--drivel. Basing something upon religion is the poorest idea.... especially when it comes to educating our children about sex. This "abstinence-only" thing is laughable at best, and downright dangerous to our young women at worst. I think I heard it said in this "abstinence-only" agenda that they were saying that chastity was a cure for poverty? Yeah, right! We should be teaching our children respect for each other and themselves, and should stress sexual responsibility should they decide to be sexually active. Parents should take the lead on this matter.

--Karen Wood

Love for life is not something that we can take for granted. We have to create the conditions for it, for ourselves as well as for other people. This means that it is not with coercion or weapons that we will defeat our enemies, here or abroad. It is by taking away the reasons for people to despise life to the point of taking the lives of their fellow human beings, of being willing to give up their own life at the push a button. The war against crime is a perpetual failure, and so is the war against terror. We can overcome crime and terror only by realizing that people don't go around stealing and killing if they have something to live for, if, in other words, we make it possible for them as well as for us to love life.

--Massimo Pigliucci