Free Republic

Secular groups applauded Rep. Pete Stark for publicly acknowledging he does not believe in a supreme being. The declaration, they said, makes the California Democrat the highest-ranking elected official - and first congressman - to publicly claim to be an atheist. The American Humanist Association took out an ad in the Washington Post on Tuesday, congratulating Stark's stance. "With Stark's courageous public announcement of his nontheism, it is our hope that he will become an inspiration for others who have hidden their conclusions for far too long," the group's executive director, Roy Speckhardt, said in a statement. Stark's beliefs garnered...

-27-2007 Former ACLU Official Charged With Child-Porn Possession The former president of the Virginia American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been arrested and charged with possession of child pornography, ABC News reported. A criminal complaint against Charles Rust-Tierney said federal investigators found evidence of multiple subscriptions to child-porn sites on his computer. In addition, court papers noted that confiscated CD-ROMs contained graphic images of rape against prepubescent girls. Rust-Tierney opposed restrictions on Internet access in Virginia public libraries, arguing that people should be trusted to act responsibly. "The default should be maximum, unrestricted access to the valuable resources of the...

Alert: Americans who honor the U.S. Constitution’s strict separation of church and state are now genuinely alarmed. Agnostics and atheists, as well as observant people of every faith, fear — sensibly — that the religious right is gaining historic political power, via an ultraconservative movement with highly placed friends. But many of us feel helpless. We haven’t read the Founding Documents since school (if then). We lack arguing tools, “verbal karate” evidence we can cite in defending a secular United States. For instance, such extremists claim — and, too often, we ourselves assume — that U.S. law has religious...

October 02, 2006, 6:02 a.m. Traitors to the EnlightenmentEurope turns its back on Socrates, Locke, et al. By Victor Davis Hanson The first Western Enlightenment of the Greek fifth-century B.C. sought to explain natural phenomena through reason rather than superstition alone. Ethics were to be discussed in the realm of logic as well as religion. Much of what Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and the Sophists thought may today seem self-evident, if not at times nonsensical. But that century was the beginning of the uniquely Western attempt to bring to the human experience empiricism, self-criticism, irony, and tolerance in thinking. The...

This is a video of a brave Arab woman speaking passionately against violent Muslims on Al-Jazeera TV. I'm surprised they allowed her to speak and I wonder if she is still alive today.

Blessing of school may have done more harm to students than good Saturday, September 09, 2006 I write regarding the Aug. 27 blessing of Woodward Park Middle School and the Aug. 31 editorial "No harm done." Even if I grant that the 180 people who took part in this blessing were legally exercising their free-speech rights and that no unconstitutional mixing of church and state occurred, I am far from convinced that no harm was done. Can you cite any empirical studies proving that such blessing ceremonies are safe and effective? If you can’t, is it possible that students who...

U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris told a religious journal that separation of church and state is "a lie" and God and the nation's founding fathers did not intend the country be "a nation of secular laws." The Florida Republican candidate for U.S. Senate also said that if Christians are not elected, politicians will "legislate sin," including abortion and gay marriage. Harris made the comments - which she clarified Saturday - in the Florida Baptist Witness, the weekly journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention, which interviewed political candidates and asked them about religion and their positions on issues. Separation of church...

Secularists today have a catch phrase that they use like a club against religion in America. That club is named "The Separation of Church and State." So many Americans have heard the phrase that they think it is one actually written right into the Constitution of the United States. Those who are more learned on the subject realize it is not. In fact, those who are learned on the subject know that it wasn't mentioned in any law, or even in the halls of Congress, until long after the Constitution was written. In fact, there was not much attention paid...

Shai Zarhi and Itamar Lapid want to take the renaissance of secular interest in Judaism to an unprecedented level: Now that secular study centers (batei midrash), rituals and prayers have been developed, Zarhi and Lapid, both from the Midrasha at the kibbutz movement's Seminar Oranim (the secular beit midrash that helped pioneer the phenomenon), are talking about fashioning a secular halakha, or Jewish legal code - a detailed code that, like religious halakha, will include a punctilious formulation of dos and don'ts, according to secular principles. Lapid, to be precise, refers to an "Israeli halakha," because in his vision, religious...

Call for help: High-risk teenagers, mostly new immigrants, use swastikas, racial slurs to convey their emotions; draw pictures of wounded ultra-Orthodox man saying ‘Hail Hitler’ and another calling for 'death to Jews.' Educators: Using Nazi symbols became most effective way of protest for them The repeated cases of swastikas spray-painted in synagogues and in public places, which naturally caused a storm all around Israel, do not surprise education experts who work with new immigrant high-risk teens. Nazi symbols and anti-Semite slurs have become the main and most effective means of protest against the injustice they feel they are subject to...

Explaining Jews, Part I By Dennis Prager FrontPageMagazine.com | January 4, 2006 Years ago, on a flight to Louisville, KY, the woman seated next to me asked what brought me from Los Angeles to Louisville. "I will be giving a lecture," I responded. "To whom?" the personable middle-aged woman asked. "To the Jewish community," I responded. She then proceeded to engage me in a discussion about Jews, and it became apparent that she believed Jews wielded great influence in society. So I decided to ask her a question: "There are almost 300 million Americans. How many of them do you...

Persecution and martyrdom of Christians under 20th century totalitarianism - mainly of Russian Orthodox Christians under Bolshevism - is by far the greatest crime in all of recorded history. It is several times greater than the Holocaust in terms of innocent lives brutally destroyed. It has killed more Christians in a few decades than all other causes put together in all ages, with Islam a distant second as the cause of their death and suffering. And yet it still remains a largely unknown, often minimized, or scandalously glossed over crime. According to the respected and reliable OUP World Christian...

Orthodox and traditional Jews comprise a majority of Israel's Jewish population according to a Central Bureau of Statistics study published Sunday. According to the study, which was carried out from 2002 to 2004, 8% of Israeli Jews defined themselves as hareidi-religious, 9% as Orthodox and 39% as traditional – leaving secular Jews as a minority of 44%. The rate of those identifying as secular is much higher among native Israelis of European and North American origin (63%) than those from Asian origin (33%) or Sephardic and North African origin (25%). When the questions used terms of religiosity instead of denominational...

At some future date, an intrepid scientist will announce that he has made a discovery: there is a correlation between heroin and liberal outrage. Apparently, when a leftist goes off on a tirade against conservatives, religion, or Evil America, it triggers an opiate release in the brain that causes a blissed-out high. Thus, as the addict must hunt down smack, the liberal must have a constant supply of outrages to feed his jones. If none are available -- if, indeed, our modern age is criminally short of witch hunts, McCarthyism, religious intolerance and racism -- then one must be made...

1. You have to be against capital punishment, but support abortion on demand. 2. You have to believe that businesses create oppression and governments create prosperity. 3. You have to believe that guns in the hands of law-abiding Americans are more of a threat than U.S. nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Chinese and North Korean communists. 4. You have to believe that there was no art before Federal funding. 5. You have to believe that global temperatures are less affected by cyclical documented changes in the earth's climate and more affected by soccer moms driving SUV's. 6. You...

If viewers happened to be tuned into CSPAN several weeks ago, they were in for quite a spectacle. CSPAN was re-airing a conference that took place in May of 2005 with the ominous title, “Examining the Real Agenda of the Far Religious Right.” Sponsored by the New York Open Center, the conference was anything but open-minded. Instead, participants launched into a litany of complaints against the so-called Christian Right that bordered on bigotry. I half expected it to end with a pitchfork armed mob breaking down the doors of a local church. Perusing the Open Center’s website, one will find...

God, Darwinism, Intelligent Design and Secular Humanists. My humble opinion: The Theory of Evolution is just that - A Theory. The Theory of Intelligent Design is just that - A Theory. Both theories have some facts that support them - and other facts that don't support them. It used to be that places of higher learning taught students to think for themselves based on scientific facts and evidence. But what "facts" support intelligent design? 1. Evolution doesn't explain anything on how it all began. As a theory, it is grossly incomplete. At least intelligent design has a theory on the...

About those "secular" menorahs    TERRY MATTINGLY When it comes to decorating tabernacles and temples, the God of Israel cares about the fine details. Consider these Exodus instructions: "Thou shalt make a candlestick of pure gold: of beaten work shall the candlestick be made: his shaft, and his branches, his bowls, his knops, and his flowers, shall be of the same. And six branches shall come out of the sides of it; three branches of the candlestick out of the one side, and three branches of the candlestick out of the other side." Counting the center candlestick, this created a...

The War Against The Light By GEORGE A. KENDALL    We elderly and semi-elderly people can still remember a time when nothing was less controversial than the words “Merry Christmas.” If you said them in July, of course, you might be regarded as more than a little eccentric, perhaps in need of professional help of some kind, but even then people would have been puzzled, not offended. In my childhood, in the 1940s and 1950s, I used to go about town, at Christmastime, and wish everyone I saw a Merry Christmas, without having an anxiety attack over the possibility that...

Tehran, 16 Dec. (AKI) - The wife of Iranian journalist, Akbar Ganji, who is imprisoned in a Tehran jail has said that her husband has again received death threats in prison. "A representative of the chief prosecutor visited my husband in jail, and issued a new death threat saying that he will only leave the cell wearing a 'kaftan' [the traditional white blanket that is used to wrap those who die in Islamic countries]," said Massoumeh Shafii, the wife of the dissident journalist. She said she was told this by prison officials - who over the last four weeks have...