Free Republic

Did you miss it? Last month the country celebrated national Blasphemy Day! According to NPR.com, atheists marked Blasphemy Day last month at gatherings around the world, celebrating the freedom to denigrate and insult religion. Activities included de-baptizing people with hair dryers and an art exhibit in Washington, D.C., which showed, among other titles, Jesus Paints His Nails, in which "an effeminate Jesus after the crucifixion [applies] polish to the nails that attach his hands to the cross." The atheist group Center for Inquiry hosted the exhibit. Addressing a capacity crowd at the University of Toronto, columnist Christopher Hitchens elicited enthusiastic...

A “triumphalistic, self-righteous atheism” inspired by the work of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is winning a following among American young people, leading to “atheist clubs” in high schools, according to Cardinal Francis George of Chicago. The cardinal, who is President of the US Catholic Bishops’ Conference, says that unbelief among young people is more than a question of stopping going to church: it is part of a fashionable “new atheism” which is every bit as intolerant as Christian fundamentalism. He told John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter: “In Chicago, we now have atheist clubs in high schools. We...

Agnostic attorney Clarence Darrow once said, "I don‘t believe in God, because I don’t believe in Mother Goose." Now those controversial words and others are being used in part of a new push to promote the thinking of atheists and agnostics. Dozens of new ads will target the people of San Francisco. The campaign is the brainchild of the Midwest-based Freedom from Religion Foundation, which represents some 14,000 nonbelievers across the country. The association has been working since 1978 to keep church and state separate. The ads are already popping up on city buses. The group ordered 75 exterior signs...

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible's satanic agents of the Apocalypse. Honest. This isn't a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God. Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their "common faith" (Christianity) and told him: "Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. ... The biblical prophecies...

As we watch the horrors in Iran, it makes us wonder if anything like that could happen in America. In Iran, the mullahs control everything and feel justified in any injustice they commit because of a belief in the rightness of their own actions. Is there anyone like that here? In an answer to that question, Frank Schaeffer wrote a column for the Huffington Post entitled “The Real Lesson of Iran — Beware America’s Republican Mullahs.” Reading it and the comments to it, I came to a realization: people who think the religious right are just like Iranian mullahs are...

Do you believe in God? Really? And you're willing to admit it in public? Oops. Sorry, for a moment I slipped back into the arrogant Atheism of my youth. Before my parents had children, they decided to raise their kids in a secular home. We had gifts at Christmas time and chocolate covered matzoh during Passover, but there was no religion and certainly no God. When I was in grade school, God was just a kind of nondescript character who popped up in Little House on the Prairie books from time to time. He seemed like a decent enough fellow,...

This provocative twist on the Bible’s opening line was plastered on the side of 25 Chicago buses this week as part of an advertising crusade by the Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign. The ads have been cruising between downtown and the city’s North and South sides, including the No. 56 Milwaukee route, since the beginning of the week and will run through June. "The intent of the campaign is to stimulate discussion of religion and its place in our society," said Charlie Sitzes, a spokesman for the Indiana group who with help from the American Humanist Association has collected more than...

A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out o of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all. Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey. Northern New England surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region, with Vermont reporting the highest share of those claiming no religion, at 34 percent. Still, the study...

Why is religion taboo in American schools? Christian attorney John Whitehead addresses that question. "God has become THE four-letter word in most public schools in the United States," says Whitehead, founder of The Rutherford Institute. And he explains in a commentary why that has come to pass: "An elite segment of society that views God as irrelevant has come to predominate." (View video commentary) Whitehead gained his legal insights into the phenomenon through the many cases of religious discrimination that have crossed his desk. "What's happened is [that] the elitists -- the people who run American society, from the public...

Thursday, 30 October 2008 A four year old who knows she needs a saviour! O wretched little girl she is, who will deliver her from her body of death. First thing in the morning my 4 year old daughter normally says to me, "I am going to be a good girl today mummy". When she says this she really means it, and I can see how she longs to finish even just one day in her life without doing anything wrong. However my daughter knows as well as I do that within at the least an hour of saying she...

Religion-Free Group Says to 'Praise Darwin' by Christine Dao* How much sense does this make? An organization that bills itself as a promoter of “freedom from religion” posted billboards bearing the words “Praise Darwin: Evolve Beyond Belief” in several U.S. cities to coincide with the British naturalist’s 200th birthday. Cities where the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) placed the advertisements include Dayton, Tennessee, and Dover, Pennsylvania—homes of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” and the highly politicized 2005 Dover Trial, respectively. The Wisconsin-based foundation, which put up a Grinch-like sign next to a nativity scene in the Washington State Capitol during...

On Darwin Day, Myths Parade as Fact CBNNews.com - Scientist Charles Darwin is credited as the founder of the theory of evolution. He was born 200 years ago on February 12, 2009. Abraham Lincoln was born on the same day, but millions think Darwin was the more heroic. John West is author of Darwin Day in America. He said, "It's almost like Christmas for atheists. They sing holiday songs, sometimes mocking Christmas songs, in honor of Darwin." Click the player to watch the report from CBN News Science & Medical Reporter Gailon Totheroh. There are events like biological arguments against...

The right-wing crusade against the liberal "war on Christmas" is great for rallying the troops. Too bad the war doesn't exist. In 1959, the recently formed John Birch Society issued an urgent alert: Christmas was under attack. In a JBS pamphlet titled "There Goes Christmas?!" a writer named Hubert Kregeloh warned, "One of the techniques now being applied by the Reds to weaken the pillar of religion in our country is the drive to take Christ out of Christmas -- to denude the event of its religious meaning." The central front in this perfidious assault was American department stores, where...

"The nation’s elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent and often subversive. They organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow answers and rigid structures that are designed to produce certain answers." ~ Chris Hedges This is an excellent piece about the state of higher education in America, the elites who run it, and what it's producing. Hedges, a self-proclaimed atheist who holds a seminary degree from Harvard, brilliantly diagnoses the elitist attitude in higher education and its rotten fruit. . .

An anti-religion placard posted alongside Christmas displays drew a thief, a preacher, a part-time elf and a security detail to the state Capitol on Friday as a weeklong uproar over religious speech hit a bizarre peak. It all started Monday, when the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation unveiled a winter solstice sign in the grand marble hallways around the Capitol Rotunda in Olympia. The sign’s atheistic message – reading in part that “Religion is but myth and superstition” – drew top billing on conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly’s TV show. Several days of angry messages to Democratic Gov. Chris Gregoire followed,...

OLYMPIA, Wash. - A controversial anti-religion placard was reported missing from the state Capitol Friday - then later found - and now the sign's sponsor wants the State Patrol to provide special protection for it when it is returned. The uproar came as several other groups clamored for permission to post their own holiday displays at the state Capitol. The anti-religion sign, posted by the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wis., was reported missing Friday morning then was turned over to a Seattle radio station by an unidentified man at about 10 a.m. Annie Laurie Gaylor, a spokesman for...

(CNN) -- An atheist sign criticizing Christianity that was erected alongside a Nativity scene was taken from the Legislative Building in Olympia, Washington, on Friday and later found in a ditch. An employee from country radio station KMPS-FM in Seattle told CNN the sign was dropped off at the station by someone who found it in a ditch.

OLYMPIA, Wash. -- An atheist group has unveiled an anti-religion placard in the state Capitol, joining a Christian Nativity scene and "holiday tree" on display during December. The atheists' sign was installed Monday by Washington members of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a national group based in Madison, Wis. With a nod to the winter solstice - the year's shortest day, occurring in late December - the placard reads, in part, "There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."

Rancho Cucamonga, CA (AP) -- Atheists and agnostics now have a San Bernardino County billboard embracing Godlessness. The "Imagine No Religion" billboard in Rancho Cucamonga was put up by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which advocates separation of church and state. The 12,000-member Madison, Wis.-based group now has billboards in nine states that include such messages as "Reasons Greetings" and "Beware of Dogma."

The national advocacy group In God We Trust today blasted the atheist American Humanist Association for its ad campaign mocking the Christmas holiday and American's who believe in God. The ad campaign asks, "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake," and will be targeted at New York and Washington commuters. "These ads are a deliberate attack on American traditions, beliefs and customs by a United Nation's affiliated group that espouses a radical anti-American agenda and is funded by an zealot who believes that the U.S. is a backwards nation full of imbeciles," says In God We...

An angry Kay Hagan said today she was “appalled at the vile tactics” behind the “Godless American” television ad that Republican rival Elizabeth Dole began running against her last night. Hagan called it politics of the worst kind and “so unbecoming of a woman like Elizabeth Dole. “How dare she attack my Christian faith,” Hagan told reporters during a noon conference call. Hagan spoke as she was traveling to the General Baptist Convention in Fayetteville. Earlier in the day, she held a press conference at First Presbyterian Church, where she is an elder, has taught Sunday School and has accompanied...

London buses may soon be plastered with ads proclaiming “There’s probably no God,” if a British atheist group has its way. The slogan is the brainchild of the British Humanist Association (BHA), an atheist organization that seeks to promote a world without religion where people are “free to live good lives on the basis of reason, experience and shared human values.” Among the campaign’s supporters is well-known atheist activist Richard Dawkins, who promised to match BHA’s goal of raising $9,000 for the ads, according to BBC. But the group has now raised $59,000 on its own. “Religion is accustomed to...

We are constantly reminded about the destructive consequences of religion -- intolerance, hatred, division, inquisitions, persecutions of "heretics," holy wars. Though far from the whole story, they are, nevertheless, true. There have been many awful consequences of religion. What one almost never hears described are the deleterious consequences of secularism -- the terrible developments that have accompanied the breakdown of traditional religion and belief in God. For every thousand students who learn about the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials, maybe two learn to associate Gulag, Auschwitz, The Cultural Revolution and the Cambodian genocide with secular regimes and ideologies....

The Democratic National Convention's Aug. 24 interfaith service in Denver is supposed to be about unity. But to a Washington, D.C., coalition that supports nontheistic views, it's about division. The Secular Coalition Group, a lobbying organization for church-and-state separation, is pushing to get an atheist on the speaker list, and contends the service is divisive because it alienates nonreligious Democrats at a time when the party needs to unite to support the presumptive nominee, Sen. Barack Obama. "We can all hold different beliefs," said the group's executive director, Lori Lipman Brown, "but we can still come together as patriotic Americans."...

The atheist Freedom from Religion Foundation has taken its anti-faith message to Denver, the site of the Democratic National Convention. Their "Imagine No Religion" sign demands Denver residents and Democratic Party officials preparing for the convention to envision an America without people who believe in God. In response, Bishop Council Nedd, chairman of the In God We Trust has asked Senator Barack Obama to condemn the sign's message. The Freedom from Religion Foundation President, Dan Barker, has called Christianity "and enemy to humanity" and "the antithesis of freedom." In his letter to Senator Obama Nedd states, "By placing their billboard...

Hi everyone, I'm just wondering if anyone had this experience before. I wrote a column about the proof of the existence of a Divine Creator (see http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2029192/posts ) and am now getting google stalked by an Atheist Group in Austin, in addition to phone calls and emails. I'm not going to stop saying/writing what I believe or stop speaking out against these tactics, but was wondering if anyone here had experience and knows what to do about google, etc. I know some of us may disagree on the issues, but I don't think there's much debate about these tactics. The...

"Don't believe in God?" a bright blue billboard with images of puffy white clouds asks. "You are not alone."The 20-by-60-foot sign alongside I-95 was designed by a group of area atheists as an invitation to join the Greater Philadelphia Coalition of Reason, or PhillyCoR, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports."If you don't ... [h]undreds of thousands of your neighbors in the Delaware Valley feel the same as you do," the organization's website declares.Steve Rade, president of Wireless Accessories, Inc., gave the $22,500 to fund the billboard May 1, and he plans to keep it there until the end of August."Our mission is...

One man’s personal experience of state school anti-Christian intolerance in the USA The year was 1996. I had just moved to Arizona with my family, and though as a musician I had some income, it was not enough. So I worked as a substitute elementary school teacher. At the beginning of the day the students would recite the American Pledge of Allegiance. In many schools, students would then recite this well-known excerpt from America’s Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable...

The assault on America's religious beliefs is not a new one. It is derived from a practice which Damon Linker, the author of Theocons: Secular America Under Siege referenced in his December 2007 article for The New Republic titled, "Atheism's Wrong Turn, Mindless argument found in godless books." He stated that far from being what modern journalists incorrectly label the "new atheism," the campaign to "act as missionaries for unbelief" is centuries old. Advertisement The American version of this mission to demonize religion is founded on a distorted interpretation of the establishment and free-exercise clauses of the First Amendment. Those...

"An age of science is necessarily an age of material­ism," wrote Hugh Elliot early in the last century. "Ours is a scientific age, and it may be said with truth that we are all materialists now."[1]One does not have to look far to discover the con­tinued accuracy of Elliot's assessment. Scientific materialism--the claim that everything in the uni­verse can be fully explained by science as the prod­ucts of unintelligent matter and energy--has become the operating assumption for much of American politics and culture. We are repeatedly told today that our behaviors, our emotions, even our moral and religious longings...

In the house I grew up in, there was no god but Science, and the PBS Nova programming was his prophet. There was a little-g god, as we attended church every week, but we were just there for the dose of morality and the teachings of Jesus. So what if we did not believe in concepts like heaven or hell, probably not the devil, and now that you mention it, that idea of an omnipotent creator? Going to church wouldn’t do us any harm. There is no fire and brimstone with Methodists — just a few hymns, a quiet sermon,...

I watched the movie "The Great Debaters" last night, and it helped me to understand why atheists are such bad debaters. The movie portrays four students from a little black college in Texas, and shows how, under the tutelage of their pugnacious coach, they went on to defeat Almighty Harvard. Denzel Washington, who plays the coach, says early in the movie that debate is a kind of bloodsport. It's great virtue is that it puts rival ideas up against each other, as argued by people who passionately espouse those ideas, and then it lets the truth emerge through a kind...

Connecticut atheists, taking advantage of a town's policy of allowing holiday-season displays in its public park, have erected a 10-foot tall sign in celebration of the winter solstice that includes a message blaming the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on religious believers. The 3-sided sign was erected in the Town of Vernon's Central Park on Dec. 1 by the Connecticut Valley Atheists. The two sides facing Main Street feature a pre-attack image of the Twin Towers with the sun shining between them and the message, "Imagine no religion," drawn from the John Lennon anthem, "Imagine." Use of the image...

Is "The Golden Compass" a sinister piece of anti-religious propaganda, designed to convert impressionable young viewers into atheist heathens?

When some of the world's leading religious scholars gather in San Diego this weekend, pasta will be on the intellectual menu. They'll be talking about a satirical pseudo-deity called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whose growing pop culture fame gets laughs but also raises serious questions about the essence of religion.

The God that whined Barbara Kay, National Post Published: Wednesday, July 25, 2007 Back in the day, the many atheists I knew went about their unbelieving lives in a quietly sardonic, but non-combative way: They'd abandoned organized religion, but sought no quarrel with those who stayed. They explained their non-belief to their children, but let them join the boy scouts. Everything old is new again, but ? different. Yesterday's live-and-let-live atheism has morphed into today's truculent "atheism with attitude," where God is not only dead, but --postmodern glee having replaced Nietszchean gloom regarding His demise -- with good riddance...