Full disclosure: James Comey is a friend. I won't pretend to neutrality about him. He is a highly honorable and decent person, and I have no doubt that he made the many judgments for which people loathe him in good faith.
It used to be that what was going to be written on my tombstone was 'Benjamin Wittes, former 'Washington Post' editorial writer,' or 'Benjamin Wittes, who wasn't even a lawyer.' Now it's just, like, 'Benjamin Wittes, who's a friend of Jim Comey's.'
The search for the Torah codes is rooted in the unfathomable theological premise that the Torah - itself a set of five books of limited length - contains literally all truth.
We should stop thinking of Snowden, to the extent that we ever were, as a hero. We should stop thinking of him as a whistleblower.
I'm a rationalist and a skeptic, someone who safely separates faith from reason.
Once upon a time, science, philosophy, and theology were disciplines largely undifferentiated from one another, and proving the existence of God was a fairly commonplace intellectual exercise. But as the scientific method became increasingly refined, particularly through the nineteenth century, science and religion grew apart.
