Andrew Sullivan Quotes
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If religion is about truth, why is it so afraid of error?
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It is not an opinion that 'enhanced interrogation techniques' are torture. It is a legal fact. And it is also a legal fact that the president is a war criminal.
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I like the pluralism of modernity; it doesn't threaten me or my faith. And if one's faith is dependent on being reinforced in every aspect of other people's lives, then it is a rather insecure faith, don't you think?
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The one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.
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If the enemy tortures, it defines their moral evil and all intelligence gleaned from such coercion is self-evidently false propaganda. If we do it, it isn't wrong, and it leads to good intelligence.Got that? And these people have the gall to describe their ideological opponents as moral relativists.
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What modernity requires is not that you cease living according to your faith, but that you accept that others may differ and that therefore politics requires a form of discourse that is reasonable and accessible to believer and non-believer alike. This religious restraint in politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal democracy.
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When you fuse Christianity with power, it isn't long before Christians start imposing the cross on others rather than taking it up for themselves.
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When Bush says that Abu Ghraib was the work of a few, he forgot to mention that he was one of them.
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Any president can start a war, and use the chaos of disorder that such a war creates as an indefinite argument for prolonging it. It's a war that keeps on giving. Failure means it's even more necessary to keep failing.
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First silence. Then denial. Then support of the insupportable. Then vilification of the dissenters. The pattern is as old as time.
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Today's age of politicized and intolerant Christianism seems to me to be one of those moments when Christianity has estranged itself most thoroughly from the priorities and spirit of its founder. But this will pass. Christianity will survive Christianism. Some true followers of Jesus will recover their faith from Caesar's grip at some point.
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A true conservative - who is, above all, an anti-ideologue - will often be attacked for alleged inconsistency, for changing positions, for promising change but not a radical break with the past, for pursuing two objectives - like liberty and authority, or change and continuity - that seem to all ideologues as completely contradictory.