Michelle Malkin writes:

Shhhhhhh, we're told. Don't protest the Ground Zero mosque. Don't burn a Koran. It'll imperil the troops. It'll inflame tensions. The "Muslim world" will "explode" if it does not get its way, warns sharia-peddling imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Pardon my national security-threatening impudence, but when is the "Muslim world" not ready to "explode"?

Comment: Violence, even if couched in appeals to tolerance, is the logical endgame of any "faith" (religious, political, scientific, or philosophical) that has carved out for itself an enclave that is untouchable by reason, evidence, and the need to correspond to life in the real world.

Such "faith" is the application of coercion, up to and including physical violence, by other means. Such "faith," as a mere "value statement," is anti-mind, anti-freedom, anti-Man, and anti-God.

It is either the self-inflicted violence of irrational commitment or the other-inflicted violence of hand-grenades and jets into skyscrapers. And politicians, including U.S. presidents, who buy into such a faith will find themselves setting up a machinery of oppression to protect their power from facts, questions, checks and balances, and other legitimate protections against abuse.

In contrast is the openness to verification, and therefore the humanity, of the Founding vision as expressed in the Declaration and safeguarded in the Constitution.  It is a vision of human beings as individuals called to think and act on the basis of that which is true to reality, not as a blind leap, but as a commitment of the whole person on the basis sufficient, verifiable information.

This provides an adequate philosophic basis for both intellectual and political freedom. Apart from it is the kind of personal, intellectual, and cultural fragmentation, and therefore, weakness, Nancy Pearcey has written about in the just-published Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning.

Consistent with the Declaration worldview, this humane vision is rooted ultimately not in "religious" "values," blind matter, impersonal nature, nor in an absolute eternal nothingness that burps alien human beings into existence by chance, but in a knowable Creator who thinks, acts, and feels, and who acts into verifiable history so that free-thinking individuals can evaluate competing truth-claims (in religion, politics, science, or philosophy) for their fidelity to reason and fact and for their ability to explain the phenomena under question.

Tolerance apart from truth is slavery.

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