Free Republic

A fascinating Pew report finds that most Americans have changed religious affiliation at least once and that within this dramatic religious churn, Roman Catholicism is the biggest loser. Four times as many Catholics are leaving the faith as are joining it, the study finds. And yet an upbeat E-mail from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops landed in my inbox today, with this important first sentence: "A Pew Forum poll on Americans and their religious affiliation finds Catholics have one of the highest retention rates, 68 percent, among Christian churches when it comes to carrying the Catholic faith into adulthood."...

For example, Dr Eugenie Scott of the staunchly anticreationist National Center for Science Education (NCSE) revealed their agenda when she said: “ … I would describe myself as a humanist or a nontheist. I have found that the most effective allies for evolution are people of the faith community. One clergyman with a backward collar is worth two biologists at a school board meeting any day! … What we [such clergy and atheists] have in common is that we want to see evolution taught in the public schools … .”4

What would you say about a politician who refused to tolerate sensible security measures just a few weeks after a major assassination attempt came within a hair's breadth of killing her, using a baby wrapped in a bomb? That bomb in Karachi killed an estimated 140 people, including the child. Bhutto only survived because by some miracle --- or by some intuition of danger --- she bent down behind the metal shielding of her open truck a few seconds before the bomb went off. *snip* The US government could have offered her improved security ---- and probably did. Her own...

I COULD not have upset the soft-left, soft-green middle classes more if I had crept in their kitchens and snuck genetically modified tomatoes in their paninis. Why did I make the film The Great Global Warming Swindle? The head of science programs at Britain's Channel 4, Hamish Mykura (who has a PhD in environmental science), asked me to. He suspected the global warming alarm was not based on solid science... So what was our conclusion, after months of research that involved talking to hundreds of scientists and wading through mountains of science papers? It's all codswallop. The notion of man-made...

Recognizing the True Church by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. There are two basic positions in the medley of world religions outside the Catholic Church. One group of religious bodies professes lineal descent from the society that Jesus Christ established during His stay on earth. These are all the churches of Christendom separated from the unity of Rome. Another and larger group has either no historical dependence on the teaching of Christ, or, as in Mohammedanism, the relation is negligible. And these are the countless Oriental and African cults whose origin is generally pre-Christian and in some cases, like the...

Recognizing the True Church by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. There are two basic positions in the medley of world religions outside the Catholic Church. One group of religious bodies professes lineal descent from the society that Jesus Christ established during His stay on earth. These are all the churches of Christendom separated from the unity of Rome. Another and larger group has either no historical dependence on the teaching of Christ, or, as in Mohammedanism, the relation is negligible. And these are the countless Oriental and African cults whose origin is generally pre-Christian and in some cases, like the...

FDIC warns of housing bubble:- NEW YORK | June 20, 2005 8:22:17 PM IST The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is warning the U.S. housing market is in danger of a serious disruption because some markets are ultra-pricey. FDIC data indicate the nation's most overheated local housing markets now make up such a large share of the total U.S. market, a sharp fall in their values could stall or slow national economic growth, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. The agency found the 22 major metropolitan markets with the fastest-growing house prices account for 35 percent of the value of the...

What the stars foretell for Bush, Kerry Arun Venugopal in New York | October 25, 2004 08:58 IST Last Updated: October 25, 2004 18:48 IST Sick of the nonstop political chatter on ABC, Fox News and CNN? Fed up with meaningless polls that show George W Bush winning soccer moms in South Dakota today and John Kerry taking Jewish trout fishermen tomorrow? Perhaps it's time you turned to the stars. In a ritual that occurs every four years, astrologers across America are doing their best to predict the outcome of the upcoming presidential election, offering colorful charts and exhaustive, if...

First, read what the "stars" say about Bush, according to the pre-emiment women's website, Village.com Bush: Former Texas Governor and President for the new millennium George W. Bush followed in his father's footsteps with his 2000 bid for the United States presidency -- and he now seeks to solidify his family's political dynasty via re-election in 2004. Dubya's known for his malapropisms and his hawkish international policy; what do the stars have to say about the leader of the free world? Birth Details: July 6, 1946 7:26 AM New Haven, Connecticut Bush was born under a Cancer Sun. Cancer is...

Scientists Claim To Tap The Free Energy Of Space by Richard Walters ("For the People" magazine) Physicist Bruce DePalma has a 100 kilowatt generator, which he invented, sitting in his garage. It could power his whole house, but if he turns it on, the government may confiscate it. Harvard educated DePalma, who taught physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 15 years, claims that his electrical generator can provide cheap, inexhaustible, self sustaining and non polluting source of energy, using principles that flout conventional physics and are still not fully understood. His N machine, as it is called, is...

In April 1999, when I was on a lecture tour for my book Why People Believe Weird Things, the psychologist Robert Sternberg attended my presentation at Yale University. His response to the lecture was both enlightening and troubling. It is certainly entertaining to hear about other people's weird beliefs, Sternberg reflected, because we are confident that we would never be so foolish. But why do smart people fall for such things? Sternberg's challenge led to a second edition of my book, with a new chapter expounding on my answer to his question: Smart people believe weird things because they are...

A disturbing story in the March 1 issue of Pravda suggests that the U. S. Government is working on the discovery of a mysterious point over the South Pole that may be a passageway backward in time. According to the article, some American and British scientists working in Antarctica on January 27, 1995, noticed a spinning gray fog in the sky over the pole. U. S. physicist Mariann McLein said at first they believed it to be some kind of sandstorm. But after a while they noticed that the fog did not change its form and did not move so...