Free Republic

[Catholic Caucus] Vatican again turns off lights for ‘Earth Hour’ to promote ‘respect for Our Mother Earth’Father Enzo Fortunato, the communicators director of St. Peter’s Basilica, linked the move to Pope Francis’ encyclical on ‘climate change,’ Laudato Si’."The Vatican once again turned off its external lights for an hour this weekend to “raise awareness of respect for Our Mother Earth.”In a statement issued to journalists accredited to the Holy See late Saturday afternoon, Father Enzo Fortunato – the recently appointed director of communications for St. Peter’s Basilica – announced the darkening of the basilica that evening: On the occasion of...

Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov once said, “Modern people believe this: man descended from apes. Therefore, let us love one another.” Of course, Solovyov made his statement in a mocking fashion. Despite attempts from secular philosophers and ethicists who try to assert that an evolutionary-based altruism instinct or other such thing impels us to do good to others, Solovyov is right – you can’t link traditional evolutionary teaching and objective morality together. And yet, perhaps more than ever in the history of humanity, there is widespread belief in the equal treatment of others; that we should be working for the betterment...

Back in January, at a meeting held at the Royal Society in London, a team of scientists and investors announced the largest prize ever offered to solve a scientific mystery. Organized by engineer and business consultant Perry Marshall, the whopping prize of $10 million (ten times the Nobel Prize payout) will be given to any person or team who can “arrange for a digital communication system to emerge or self-evolve without…explicitly designing the system.” The point of the contest is to learn where the genetic code came from and how it became the basis for all life. The winning experiment,...

I grew up on the Jersey shore. (No, it wasn’t like the TV show.) Every summer morning I’d see several men combing the beach with metal detectors looking for jewelry and change lost the day before. One lost diamond earring or ring could pay for the metal detector several times over. But as useful and successful as metal detectors are, they can’t be used to find everything. Metal detectors won’t help you find wood, plastic, rubber, or other nonmetallic objects. Now, suppose metal-detector man, after just combing the beach, says to you, “I know there’s no plastic or rubber on...

“Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22). “And the fifth angel sounded the trumpet, and I saw a star fall from heaven upon the earth, and there was given to him the key of the bottomless pit." (Rev. 9:1) In his Concise Commentary Matthew Henry identifies falling stars as tepid, indecisive, weak or apostate clergy who, "Having ceased to be a minister of Christ, he who is represented by this star becomes the minister of the devil; and lets loose the...

Darwin’s bulldog—Thomas H. Huxley --snip-- Huxley, although an unbeliever, was thoroughly familiar with the gospel, and had little time for Christians who compromised their position by supporting the anti-biblical belief of evolutionary naturalism. He wrote: ...

No sooner has Sam Harris established his reputation for intolerance and harassment of religious faith than he has now begun to lash out at those scientists who do show tolerance and respect toward religious folk. He is passionate that, as he titles it, "Scientists should unite against threat from religion." Imagine! The crime of not excluding people from scientific discourse because they are Christians, or even Muslims! Sam won’t stand for it, and in his recent editorial to that massive organ of scientific literature Nature he blasts the scientists for — of all things — being too nice. Nature’s great...

The Nature of Naturalism by David F. Coppedge* The arrogance of anti-creationists stems largely from their pride in offering natural explanations for the world instead of supernatural explanations. No matter how much evidence can be shown for God's action in nature, secular scientists always rule it out of bounds from the outset, because they argue that any appeal to the supernatural is forbidden in science. It is time to challenge this claim, because it is flawed at its core. The natural/ supernatural distinction breaks down under scrutiny...

Those who are concerned about the materialistic indoctrination rammed down people's throats under the guise of science should pause to consider this article from 1911. As you can see, this ideology, which these days calls itself "science", actually has a name of its own: Monism. These are excerpts from Mechanistic Conception of Life, an address delivered at the First International Congress of Monists (Hamburg, 1911). Reprinted in Mechanistic Conception of Life: Biological Essays, University of Chicago Press, 1912. The Mechanistic Conception of Life Jacques Loeb, M.D, Ph.D, Sc.D, Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.It is the object of this paper to...

It appears that the naturalistic evolutionists have not changed since 9/11. In most cases when they talk about morality, (1) every moral condition is to be explained by amoral natural processes, including terrorism; (2) they presuppose values that are difficult to account for in Darwinian terms, and (3) morality notwithstanding, they preach that creation and intelligent design are to be sternly opposed – as if they are evil...

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They...

Is The Design of Modern Science Defective?: A review of Science's Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism [Editor's Note: This post was written by a Discovery Institute legal intern, Guillermo Dekat. Mr. Dekat is a law student at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas. He holds a bachelor's degree in biology from the Air Force Academy.] A review of Science's Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism By: Cornelius G. Hunter (Brazos Press, 2007) In law, one who sells a product in a defective condition unreasonably dangerous to the user is held strictly liable for the...

Barack Obama is the latest Democratic candidate to offer a plan that would bring us closer to universal health care coverage, along socialized British or Canadian lines. Almost all the developed nations have turned to such models of government-directed medicine, while the United States has thus far resisted. Could this be because our country remains the most Bible-believing in the world? Let’s consider the possibility. On the topic of health, Scripture overturns familiar assumptions. Why do people get sick in the first place? The usual medical answers focus on purely material causes: unhealthy lifestyles, uncongenial microbes, unlucky genes. From such...

Intelligent Design Scientists Will Showcase Evidence Challenging Evolution at Knoxville Conference KNOXVILLE – What is intelligent design and what scientific evidence supports it? Why is it so controversial? How does it differ from Darwin’s theory of evolution? Is there a purpose to the universe? What new scientific facts are turning evolutionary theories upside down? This one-day conference will answer these and other intriguing questions. The emerging scientific theory of intelligent design is a hot topic at universities and research institutions around the world, and is now the focus of a day-long conference called Darwin vs. Design, coming to the Knoxville...

Q: A member of the RCIA program was told by another member of the parish that if they were going to become Catholic they needed to terminate their involvement with the Masonic lodge before they could join. Is this still the case in the United States? -- T.N., Howard City, Michigan A: This question is more canonical than liturgical. The Church's position with respect to membership of Masonic lodges, even though canon law no longer explicitly mentions the Masons, has not substantially changed. The new code states in Canon 1374: "A person who joins an association which plots against the...

They are eerie sensations, more common than one might think: A man describes feeling a shadowy figure standing behind him, then turning around to find no one there. A woman feels herself leaving her body and floating in space, looking down on her corporeal self. Such experiences are often attributed by those who have them to paranormal forces. But according to recent work by neuroscientists, they can be induced by delivering mild electric current to specific spots in the brain. In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus resulted in a sensation that...

August 23, 2006 A recent New York Times story described an experiment involving two colonies of rats: The first were bred for tameness. The second colony, "bred from exactly the same stock," was wired to be aggressive. The results were described as the "sweetest cartoon animal" and "the most evil super-villain." Whereas the tame rats poked their noses through the cage to be petted, the others "hurl themselves screaming toward their bars."The researchers' goal in breeding lovable and villainous rats was to understand how human beings domesticated previously wild animals like horses and cattle. They hypothesize that the characteristic that...

Don't fall off your chair, but I've recently had to admit I was wrong about something. My list of the individuals whose thoughts form the top three most lamentable cultural influences in modern times needs to be amended. This realization, in turn, raises a question about the influence exerted by a larger group of people: Jews. My top three used to be Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Charles Darwin. But after discovering novelist Rebecca Goldstein's readable, sensitive and entertaining new biography, "Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity," I've dropped Darwin from the list and replaced him with...

I've just come back from a week in Australia, and have been pouring over my regular sources of 'What's going on in the world', and came across the article entitled: Mayor, Officials Swept Out of Office for Their Support of Illegal Aliens, by Jim Kouri, CPP. I thought it very interesting, but it was not until I read a joke that arrived in an email, that I saw another 'moral of the story'. The Joke: The Lone Ranger and Tonto went camping in the desert. After they got their tent all set up, both men fell sound asleep. Some hours...

How Humans Differ from Animals by Kenneth Richard Samples For many people the distinction between human beings and animals has become increasingly blurred. Exposure to the secular, naturalistic worldview--especially in academia--can leave one wondering whether the differences are simply a matter of degree. In this view, mankind leaped to the top of the evolutionary heap by chance events. However, philosophers have identified many ways in which human beings differ dramatically from animals. Unique human qualities and traits set man apart from the animals by kind, not just degree. From a Christian worldview perspective, and specifically in light of the imago...