Free Republic

Cancer weakened, but did not soften Christopher Hitchens. He did not repent or forgive or ask for pity. As if granted diplomatic immunity, his mind’s eye looked plainly upon the attack and counterattack of disease and treatments that robbed him of his hair, his stamina, his speaking voice and eventually his life. “I love the imagery of struggle,” he wrote about his illness in an August 2010 essay in Vanity Fair. “I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient.” Hitchens, a...

Did you know that the English-speaking world is in the midst of an Atheistic revival? It is fueled by a small but widely celebrated group of authors and thinkers who call themselves “the Brights”, and who lecture, debate and write best-selling books which have a wide following among young college and University students. These are not your father’s atheists either. They are articulate, impassioned, and effective at the use of the media, and the internet. The “new Atheists” believe that the old atheists were too tolerant of religion, and not aggressive enough in their attacks upon it. To them, religion...

An Italian scientist says he has reproduced the Shroud of Turin, a feat that he says proves definitively that the linen some Christians revere as Jesus Christ's burial cloth is a medieval fake. The shroud, measuring 14 feet, 4 inches by 3 feet, 7 inches bears the image, eerily reversed like a photographic negative, of a crucified man some believers say is Christ. "We have shown that is possible to reproduce something which has the same characteristics as the Shroud," Luigi Garlaschelli, who is due to illustrate the results at a conference on the para-normal this weekend in northern Italy,...

The fastest-growing faith in America is no faith at all. And now some atheists think they need a church. It seems unlikely that many of the 850 or so people at the Society for Ethical Culture on a recent Saturday night believed that God was still extant. But evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and possibly the most famous atheist in the world, was not taking any chances. He gave a PowerPoint presentation driving home that religion does not meet any of the standards of basic scientific inquiry, before casually flicking away a few of His last...

The ACLU is at it again. With an outrageous boldness that only they could muster, the ACLU has set their sights on Christmas ... In their never-ending quest to completely eradicate all things religious from public life, the ACLU's latest lawsuit is an all-out frontal attack on the freedom of speech. Let me ask you - when did a children's Christmas program become illegal? When did the nativity story and Christmas songs become unconstitutional? Because this is the dangerous charge the ACLU has leveled. A children's Christmas program has been deemed unconstitutional by the ACLU. I have assembled a senior...

... Third, complexity does not imply “design.” One of Adam Smith’s most powerful insights, developed further by Friedrich Hayek, is that incredible complexity can emerge in society without a designer or planner, through “spontaneous order.” Hayek showed how in a free market the complex processes of producing and distributing goods and services to millions of individuals do not require socialist planners. Rather, individuals pursuing their own self-interest in a system governed by a few basic rules—property rights, voluntary exchange by contract—have produced all the vast riches of the Western world.Many creationists who are on the political Right understand the logic...

That's it, I've had enough, I can't take anymore of the "ACLU" and their humanistic philosophies. What is the American Civil Liberties Union anyway? Why are they getting away with what they are doing? It is not a government organization, and does not represent the majority of the people. Even so, many of our elected officials and judges listen, and give in, to their ridiculous, whiney demands. Why? The United States of America is the greatest country ever to be founded. I love this Country and I am still proud to be an American, although, in my opinion, it is...

What do Shinui and a large swath of American Jewry have in common? Answer: An obsessive fear of anything connected to religion, and contempt for people of faith. American Jews live in terror of religious Christians - the kind who tell their elected representatives that America will be judged by its treatment of Israel. (Well-heeled Presbyterians, who have, like most Jews, reduced religion to "good deeds," such as boycotting Israel, trouble them far less.) Every litany of the evils of George W. Bush includes his religiosity. An August 12 op-ed by Eli Valley of the Steinhardt Foundation's Jewish Life Network...

EXCERPTED FROM a public-school history textbook sometime in the future: . . . so the Pilgrims came to America, motivated by a religious vision. As the Mayflower Compact put it, they undertook their voyage “for the glory of (deity reference deleted), and advancement of the Christian faith.” They agreed to “solemnly and mutually in the presence of (deity reference deleted), and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic” Later, the Great Awakening in the first half of the 18th century was, in the words of historian Paul Johnson, a “proto-revolutionary event” helping to create an...

My new polling place stands inside the American Civil Liberties Union offices. It offers plenty of convenient parking. From my car, I walk a few short steps along a corridor covered with posters -- one attacking Mel Gibson's movie about Jesus, another saying the government should take better care of the elderly. Others proclaim the virtues of civil liberties and invite me to join the organization. The corridor ends in a large hall where I cast my ballot, unaffected by any of the propaganda I just read. Just kidding. My polling place has, in fact, moved, but not to any...