Free The Animal

In Slate. There are two kinds of deliberate and premeditated deceit, commonly known as suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. (Neither of them is covered by the additionally lying claim of having “misspoken.”) The first involves what seems to be most obvious in the present case: the putting forward of a bogus or misleading account of events. But the second, and often the more serious, means that the liar in question has also attempted to bury or to obscure something that actually is true. Let us examine how Sen. Clinton has managed to commit both of these offenses to veracity and decency and how in doing so she has rivaled, if not indeed surpassed, the disbarred and perjured hack who is her husband and tutor. The whole thing, if you please.

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His aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies — belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human kind — and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtue: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful. — John Stuart Mill on his father I have never, ever read such an apt and thorough description of my own judgment of religion (as moral evil and great enemy). I came upon this in chapter two of God is not Great by Christohper Hitchens, which, incidentally, I’m reading on my new Sony Reader which is just fabulous. For years I’ve said that paper books won’t have real competition until they come up with a display…

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Christopher Hitchens: “It’s an inescapable one. Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins and astrology ends and astronomy begins.” All together with a pretty touching moment at the end…

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