Free Republic

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...