Free Republic

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...

Creationists (I mean, Intelligent Designers) often cite the dictum by IDer William Dembski that non-intelligent processes cannot produce new information. From this they conclude that biological evolution is impossible. But what to do when a researcher shows bacteria evolving new capabilities?

A movie adaptation of Dan Brown’s book, Angels and Demons, is now in production; it is the prequel to the film, “The Da Vinci Code.” There are reports today that the Vatican has banned those associated with “Angels and Demons” from shooting in Catholic churches in Rome or in the Vatican itself. This is important because there are scenes in the movie that are supposed to take place in the Vatican and in two churches in Rome. “Angels and Demons” stars Tom Hanks in his role as Robert Langdon, the symbologist. This time he is trying to unravel a plot...

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...

An Ohio county public library has closed its meeting rooms to the public rather than allow them to be used by a Christian group. George and Cathy Vandergriff wanted to host a Crown Financial Ministries "Financial Freedom" workshop in a public meeting room at the Clermont County, Ohio, public library. Tim Chandler, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), says the couple was told that, because the class would be quoting from the Bible, they could not hold it at the library. "The Supreme Court said, more than 25 years ago, that once you've opened up meeting space, you...

London, Jun 7, 2008 / 09:32 pm (CNA).- A Catholic adoption agency in Britain has ended its service of placing children in new homes because a new anti-discrimination law forbids the agency from turning away homosexual couples. A Minister of Parliament has said the new law “smacks of a secular attack on the Catholic Church.” The Equality Act, which will come into effect on January 1, outlaws discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in the provision of goods and services. Then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has since converted to Catholicism, wanted Catholic adoption agencies to be exempted from the...

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...

MG: Are you under any illusions as to what will will happen to you, if the Iranian regime discovers your identity? Will they accuse you of blasphemy and hang you from that giant crane? Rotten Gods: I wish. I mean I wish Iran was a democratic country and I was free to express my opinion without fear of terror, sudden death, or death penalty in public. In blasphemy cases, sharia law strictly orders to hang, behead, or throw convicted from height e.g. mountain.

Open the pages of a liberal magazine or peruse the liberal blogosphere, and you’re bound to come across denunciations of the religious right, if not religion itself. The “reality-based community,” as self-satisfied liberal bloggers call themselves, was a term created in direct response to the “faith-based community,” what the Bush administration called recipients of money from its Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Given the religious right’s use of “faith” to justify hoaxes such as “intelligent design” and the ruinous attempt to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals, the left had good reason to criticize, and sometimes mock, the absurdities that are...

New film takes Da Vinci Code conspiracy theories and shaky evidence to new heightsJoseph Brean, National PostWhen Ben Hammott discovered the apparent tomb of a Knight Templar at the bottom of a hole in a cave in the countryside of southern France, he thought he had discovered the final resting place of Mary Magdalene, and so he did what any amateur treasure hunter in this age of the Da Vinci Code would have done. He returned with a Hollywood director, lowered a pole into the tomb with "some sticky stuff on the end," removed the shroud from the body, plucked...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - "Basic Instinct" director Paul Verhoeven has written a book that contradicts biblical teaching by suggesting that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier who raped Mary. An Amsterdam publishing house said Wednesday it will publish the Dutch filmmaker's biography of Jesus, "Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait," in September. Verhoeven is best known as the director of blockbuster films including "Basic Instinct" and "RoboCop," but he is also a member of "Jesus Seminar," a group of scholars and authors that seeks to establish historical facts about Jesus. Marianna Sterk of the publishing house J.M. Meulenhoff...

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...

A Baltimore couple has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Islamic investment bank that owns the Church's Chicken fast-food chain, alleging their franchise failed because the bank's strict adherence to the religious code of Shari'ah prohibited the couple from selling pork. Marcus and Denise Beasley, who are black, claimed they were treated differently by the bank, now known as Atlanta-based Arcapita Inc., than non-black franchisees who were allowed to continue serving breakfast dishes containing pork after the chain was acquired by the bank in December 2004. The couple did not benefit from the grandfather policy allowing the sale...

Muhammad Al-Munajid: Some of these heretics say: "Islam is not the private property of anyone." So what do they want? They say: "No sect has a monopoly on Islam." So what do they want? They say: "We want to issue rulings." Someone who is ignorant, who does not know any Arabic, or who has no knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence wants to issue rulings?! They say: "We reinterpret the texts." There is a very dangerous conspiracy against the religion of Islam in newspapers and in what these people say. A journalist, or one of those lowlifes, wants to... These people are...

ADF attorneys represent a Christian photographer being tried under state antidiscrimination laws for declining to photograph a same-sex “commitment ceremony.” “Christians shouldn’t be penalized for abiding by their beliefs. The state cannot force unwilling people to promote a message they disagree with and thereby violate their conscience,” said Lorence. “The state’s prosecution violates our client’s First Amendment rights. The government cannot make people choose between their faith and their job.” A same-sex couple asked Elaine Huguenin, co-owner with her husband of Elane Photography, to photograph a “commitment ceremony” that the two women wanted to hold. Huguenin declined because her Christian...

The leader of Britain's Catholics claimed yesterday that "Judaeo-Christian values" were the only thing binding British society together, on the eve of a lecture series on the place of faith in British public life.Speaking to the Guardian, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor hit out at representatives of an "aggressive secularism" that he believes is gaining ground in the UK, defended the Catholic Church's combative intervention last week in the debate over "hybrid" embryos, and argued that Christian leaders should hold a privileged position over the representatives of other faiths when it came to their input into public policy.The cardinal's comments are likely...

Religion's evolution tests tolerance Europe's largest mosque was built in Rome – right in the wheelhouse of Christendom. If the Vatican looked askance at this religious arriviste three kilometres from St. Peter's Basilica, it made no comment. That sumptuous mosque, opened in 1995, cost $50 million to build, a cost borne by 23 Muslim donor nations, though the bulk of funding – $35 million – was contributed by Saudi Arabia. A country which, by the way, allows no Christian churches on its soil, even with an ever-expanding influx of Christian migrant workers from such places as the Philippines and Indonesia....

No churches should be permitted in Saudi Arabia, unless Pope Benedict XVI recognised the prophet Mohammed... "It would be possible to launch official negotiations to construct a church in Saudi Arabia only after the Pope and all the Christian churches recognise the prophet Mohammed." "If they don't recognise him as a prophet, how can we have a church in the Saudi kingdom?" Ashiqi's comments came after a declaration launched by the papal nuncio of the Persian Gulf, the archbishop Mounged El-Hachem, at the opening of the first Catholic church in Qatar last week. El-Hachem estimated three to four million Christians...

The recent criticism of hate speech on campus is entirely appropriate. But we ought to make one exception to this rule: the “religious right,” a retrograde coterie of unattractive common folk who seek to impose their irrational beliefs on the rest of us. These fundamentalists lie awake at night, plotting the imposition of the truths they have received by revelation from God. God has decreed the necessity of prohibiting abortion and gay marriage, lest the land be scourged by His wrath, so the unquestioning hordes of Jesus-freaks flood the polls on election day. The few who are at Yale (here...

Salafi Imam: We Must BELIEVE Arabs are “Master Race” February 19, 2008 In part five of my series Why Blackamerican Muslims Don’t Stand For Justice, I mentioned the racist beliefs held and taught by one of the major leaders of the 1990’s Salafi Movement, Imam Abu Usamah Ath-Thahabi (a Blackamerican), that the Arabs are superior to the non-Arabs (or in other words: the Arabs are the “Master Race”) My purpose here is to show the insidious nature of this movement in promoting the RACIAL superiority of Arabs. And while the Salafis happen to be the only ones brazen (or...

EMMITSBURG, Md. — Police have arrested two men they say vandalized the Grotto of Lourdes at Mount St. Mary’s University. Police estimated the damage at about $1,500. The Frederick County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release that Timothy A. Hines, 20, of Silver Spring, Md.; and Jesse R. Huston, 20, of Derwood, Md., were arrested early Sunday. Both are charged with malicious destruction of property over $500, malicious destruction of property under $500, trespassing and defacing religious property, police said. Police said the men entered the Grotto of Lourdes and allegedly damaged a large cross and several glass jars...

In concluding her Jan. 30 column about homosexuality and the Catholic Church ("It's not a mortal sin to work for justice"), Mary Jean Smith writes: "The archbishop and others are wrong on this issue. I am not guilty of mortal sin. It is not a sin to love my daughter and work for justice on her behalf." Here is what Archbishop John Nienstedt actually said: "Those who actively encourage or promote homosexual acts or such activity within a homosexual lifestyle formally cooperate in a grave evil and, if they do so knowingly and willingly, are guilty of mortal sin," he...

Dutch Catholics have re-branded the Lent fast as the "Christian Ramadan" in an attempt to appeal to young people who are more likely to know about Islam than Christianity. The Catholic charity Vastenaktie, which collects for the Third World across the Netherlands during the Lent period, is concerned that the Christian festival has become less important for the Dutch over the last generation. "The image of the Catholic Lent must be polished. The fact that we use a Muslim term is related to the fact that Ramadan is a better-known concept among young people than Lent," said Vastenaktie Director, Martin...

Senior religious leaders attack multiculturalism and sharia law today, warning that they are "disastrous", socially divisive and are destroying Britain's culture and values. Lord Carey and Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor rebut the call of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, for Islamic law to be recognised in Britain. Lord Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, said: "His acceptance of some Muslim laws within British law would be disastrous for the nation. He has overstated the case for accommodating Islamic legal codes. "His conclusion that Britain will eventually have to concede some place in law for aspects of sharia is a...

"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...

<p>The Wheaton College student newspaper, The Record, reports today that the influential evangelical college’s president, provost, and chaplain have removed their names from a letter to Muslim leaders that has attracted criticism in some quarters.</p> <p>“Loving God and Neighbor Together” was published in the November 18, 2007, New York Times as a response to an October statement from 138 Muslim scholars and clerics calling for interfaith cooperation. Wheaton College president Duane Litfin and provost Stanton Jones were among the signatories, along with pastors Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, National Association of Evangelicals president Leith Anderson, Youth With a Mission chairman Lynn Green, Frontiers mission founder Greg Livingstone, theologians Miroslav Volf and John Stott, and Christianity Today Media Group editor-in-chief David Neff.</p>

AS MEMORIAL PROCEEDS, GROUP PROPOGATES VIOLENT HATRED AGAINST JEWS AND CHRISTIANS (Coral Springs, FL) Today, Congressman Keith Ellison (D) will be the main speaker at a memorial for the deceased leader of the Minnesota chapter of the Muslim American Society (MAS-Minnesota), Hesham Hussein. Hussein was killed in an auto accident in Saudi Arabia, on Saturday, January 26th. While Congressman Ellison speaks, the organization Hussein led will be using the internet to propagate violent hatred against Jews and Christians. Statements such as “In view of the degenerate moral condition of the Jews and the Christians, the Believers have been warned not...

Marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Sunday, the UN put on display an exhibit paying tribute to the Righteous of Albania who risked all to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. The exhibit arrived at the UN from Yad Vashem, where it was on display for two months. While the Righteous of any nation indeed should be acknowledged and commemorated, the problem with the exhibit is its underlying agenda. Jews, along with the Albanian Righteous of WWII, are being used by the Albanians of today to advance a racially supremacist end game in the Balkans, where world wars start—and cost...

Revealing how the liberals don't want separation of church and state when it comes to their politics. http://www.thebulletin.us:80/site/news.cfm?newsid=19250142&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=623508&rfi=6

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,...

Listen to Huckabee say that the first amendment gives us freedom of religion AND freedom FROM religion. Sorry Huck, but freedom FROM religion isn't a right. If it was it would be a right to suppress the free exercise of other people's religion.

Which math-phobic among us has not beseeched God for help with another colon-clenching algebra or calculus exam? Had we heeded the words of the German mathematician Leopold Kronecker, perhaps we would have realized we've been talking to the wrong person: "God made the integers; all else is the work of man." Pythagoras, who gave us his eponymous theorem on right-angled triangles, headed a cult of number worshippers who believed God was a mathematician. "All is number," they would intone. The 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza echoed the Platonic idea that mathematical law and the harmony of nature are aspects of...

How liberals and atheists have misinformed people about the Founding Father's religiuos beliefs. http://www.thebulletin.us/site/news.cfm?newsid=19238913&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=623508&rfi=6

SYDNEY (AFP) - Australian church leaders have condemned a play shortly to open in Sydney depicting Jesus as a gay man who is seduced by Judas, a report said Sunday. The play, named Corpus Christi, is due to open next month as part of the city's annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Sydney's Sun-Herald newspaper reported. A senior Sydney churchman called the play "historical nonsense". "It is deliberately, not innocently, offensive and they're obviously having a laugh about it," Robert Forsyth, Anglican bishop of South Sydney, was quoted saying. Apart from the relations between Jesus and Judas, the play also...

DALLAS (AP) — A Texas museum that teaches creationism is counting on the auction of a prehistoric mastodon skull to stave off extinction. The founder and curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, which rejects evolution and claims that man and dinosaurs coexisted, said it will close unless the Volkswagen-sized skull finds a generous bidder. "If it sells, well, then we can come another day," Joe Taylor said. "This is very important to our continuing." Heritage Auction Galleries says the skull is estimated to be 40,000 years old, and projects it will fetch upward of $160,000. The artifact discovered in...

Gainesville, FL (AHN) - Dr. Jack Kevorkian surprised a crowd of over 5,000 people at the University of Florida (UF) Tuesday night when he unleashed an attack on the "made up mythology of religion," and said that while in medical school he never took the Hippocratic Oath. Kevorkian, 79, spent his time in Gainesville meeting with the UF ACCENT Speakers Bureau and speaking with students at a question-and-answer session ahead of his sold-out speech at the Stephen C. O'Connell Center, Tuesday evening. Throughout the day though, Kevorkian's theme remained focused on the often overlooked 9th Amendment and the "terrible crisis"...

Today's religious map of the Middle East traces to the unification of the Arabian tribes under the banner of Islam in the 7th century, and their subsequent conquest of much of the known world. Muhammad's genius was in finding a way to unite the myriad of fissiparous, feuding Bedouin tribes of northern Arabia into a cohesive polity. Just as he had provided a constitution of rules under which the people of Medina could live together, so he provided a constitution for all Arabs, but this one had the imprimatur not just of Muhammad, but of God. Submission -- Islam --...

New Sudan vision is a dream within reach Thursday 10 May 2007 03:00 By Jacob K. Lupai May 9, 2007 — New Sudan was a concept born out of a critical analysis of its opposite, the Old Sudan. The New Sudan concept became a vision with the honest desire to transform the Old Sudan into a secular nation of prosperity where race and religion will have no bearing on one’s citizenship. Arab racism, Islamic bigotry and discriminatory practices are the most divisive issues in the Sudan because they are the major factors in the marginalisation of the majority non-Arab Sudanese...

The Philippine government is drafting a constitutional amendment that would authorize the establishment of a federal homeland for Muslims in the south of the country. The proposed amendment is part of a complex peace process between the government and a major Muslim rebel group. Douglas Bakshian reports from Manila. Last November, an important agreement was reached between the Philippine government and the rebel Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). The two sides agreed on the size of a proposed homeland for the country's Muslims in the south of the country. This definition of what is called "the territory" is part of...

Two men who authorities said dabbled in devil worship have been arrested in a rash of church arsons and vandalism in rural east Alabama, including scrawling on a Sunday school classroom wall: "Teach children to worship Satan!!" Geoffrey Parquette and James Clark, both 21, were arrested Sunday and entered not guilty pleas Monday. Friends at least since high school, the two from the Smiths community in Lee County were arrested after a stolen cross was found in Parquette's home and his grandmother alerted authorities, according to church members briefed by investigators. "These guys called themselves professed spiritual satanists," said Russell...

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...

#1 | Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith Letters Mother Teresa wrote to her confessors describe the agony of not being able to sense her beloved God for half a century. "The silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see," she wrote. These revelations raise the question of whether her spiritual "dryness" made her a greater saint or some kind of self-deceiver. #2 | Faith Stalks the Campaign Trail! Hillary tells Rick Warren about her White House prayer group! Mitt explains how he's a Mormon! Huckabee is an actual preacher! #3 | The Rev. Jerry...

The “In God We Trust” inscription, currently on the edge of the presidential $1 coin, apparently will return to the obverse (front) or reverse (back) of the coin, thanks to a bill recently passed by Congress. Photo Terms of Use WASHINGTON (BP)--Presidential one dollar coins are the only U.S. coins currently being issued by the United States Mint that have the inscription "In God We Trust" along the edge, but public pressure soon may send the motto back to the front or back of the coins. Legislation introduced by Sens. Sam Brownback, R.-Kan., and Robert Byrd, D.-W.Va., that would...

(CNSNews.com) - With Dec. 25 only days away, a central image in the celebration of Christmas - the manger scene featuring replicas of Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus - has become the focus of attacks by vandals and leaders of "the secular Left," Christian groups charged on Wednesday. While the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights was erecting a nativity scene in New York City's Central Park, the group issued a news release condemning three dozen instances in which manger scenes were vandalized or stolen from Antioch, Calif., to Leesburg, Va., this Christmas season. "In perhaps the sickest...

Hypocrisy, Thy Name is “Arab”Wednesday, December 19th, 2007Arabs have been unanimous in rejecting the idea of Israel being a “Jewish state.” Their reasons are that, by definition, a Jewish state would be discriminatory against Arabs and Muslims.If you define “Jewish” in purely religious terms, that would mean that any state that defines itself as “Islamic” is, by definition, equally guilty of this discrimination. If you define “Jewish” in ethnic or national terms, then any state that defines itself as “Arab” would be equally guilty of the racism that Israel is being accused of. Time to check out the official hypocrisy...

Media watchdog website Honest Reporting has awarded their annual Dishonest Reporter Awards. Some of these stories you know and some you don't--probably because they were ignored by the media. Some were even covered here at NewsBusters. The "winners" included Christiane Amanpour for “God's Warriors,” the BBC for covering up an internal investigation into its Mid East reporting, US government funded Al-Hurra TV's former 'director Larry Register for dhimmitude, a UNC Daily Tar Heel article about breaking up with a boyfriend because of Israel and of course Charles Enderlin and the Mohammad Al Dura Fautography that launched the Second Intifida. See...

One presidential hopeful is a preacher, another proudly Mormon, and most openly tout their Christianity. In an arena where faith can make or break a politician, the one in 10 Americans who profess no religion feel left in the cold. "They're very disconcerted," said Darren Sherkat, an atheist sociology professor specializing in religion at Southern Illinois University. "They're horrified by both the Democratic and Republican rhetoric surrounding religion -- that people who are not religious ... are immoral, that they're not qualified to serve in public office," he said.

YouTube video via Drudge- Ron Paul quote this morning on Fox and Friends- "When fascism comes it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. "

According to the Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia, the Spanish football club Barcelona is altering its famous badge in some Arab countries in order to avoid offending Muslims. The badge is especially altered in Saudi Arabia or Algeria, where the Barcelona shirts are being sold without the red cross of Saint George, the patron saint of the Catalan region which Barca claims to represent, the La Vanguardia newspaper found in a private investigation. The badge, which was created in 1906, features a single vertical red line in Saudi Arabia and Algeria, due to the fact that there, the red cross represents...

Pembroke Pines - The Pembroke Lakes Mall appears to have the standard holiday decorations. There's a photo booth with a Rudolph-the-red-nosed-reindeer theme by the food court; presents are wedged between palm trees; poinsettias rise from flower pots and combine into the shape of a Christmas tree. And next to a pair of benches in front of Dillard's, on a white-and-blue pedestal, stands a 5-foot-tall menorah. But for Len Torres, 79, of Plantation, who campaigns every holiday season to get Broward malls to include nativity scenes, that Jewish religious symbol makes Pembroke Lakes' refusal to set up a creche feel like...