Free Republic

PENSACOLA, Fla. – Investigators asked the public to be on the lookout Friday for a red van they believe carried three men involved in the deaths of a Florida Panhandle couple who were shot in their rural home while eight of their children slept. Surveillance cameras showed the van at the home of Byrd and Melanie Billings in Beulah, a rural area west of Pensacola near the Alabama border, Escambia County Sheriff David Morgan said. The children were unharmed. The sheriff's office released an enhanced but still grainy photograph of a red, 15-passenger van dating to the late 70s or...

A hospital takes up a mystical healing technique In what the British press has characterized as a "ground-breaking" move, the Middlesex Hospital in London has appointed a "healer," whose salary is paid by the country's National Health Service (NHS), to treat young leukemia patients suffering from the side effects of chemotherapy. Several times a week, in 30 minute private sessions with each of several young patients in the hospital's pediatric oncology ward, Graham King, 57, places his hands on different parts of their bodies and "channels" all-healing "cosmic energy" into them. This is troubling because, by funding this and other...

Public wants church’s to cease being ‘silent’ and ‘lukewarm’ in face of moral collapse London – With Christian moral values and legal protections under assault on all sides, it is commonly said that the reason pews are emptying is that traditional religion is not relevant. A new survey of thousands of churchgoers in the UK says the opposite however, and indicates that the emptying of the churches has been caused mainly by preaching and pastoral care that has been emptied of moral or doctrinal Christian content. The survey addressed questions about why church attendance was falling so dramatically in the...

Jayson Blair, the diminutive ex-journalist who shook up the mighty New York Times when his serial plagiarism was revealed last year, has all but evaporated from public view. Now seeing a psychiatrist and a psychologist and working out of a basement office in his parents' home in Centreville, Va., he says he has found God and thinks he has a calling other than journalism — although he's not sure what it is yet. The one thing that hasn't changed is his compulsive reading habit. And on his bedside table these days is Seth Mnookin's chronicle of the Times debacle, "Hard...

THE EUROPEAN KINGDOM OF THE ANTICHRIST This month, in Rome, the Inter-Governmental Conference on the EU Constitution convenes. Governments are being pressed to complete their work and close the Conference by December of this year. The goal is to have the new Constituted signed by all 25-member states of the enlarged Union on Europe Day – 9 May, 2004. This new, single Treaty will surpass every past treaty from Rome to Nice. Its main proposals will include: A PRESIDENT OF EUROPE The Chair of the European Council A MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS Who will sit on the Commission but be...

The teaching of religious education in schools should be renamed spiritual education, with children being taught more about atheism and less about the life of Jesus and the 10 Commandments, according to the Government's favourite think-tank. The lessons should be widened to include "non-religious belief systems", a report by the Institute For Public Policy Research says. It calls for equal weight to be given to agnosticism and humanism as is given to Christianity. Children should also be taught about cults such as the Baha'i, made famous by the government scientist Dr David Kelly, paganism and even environmentalism.The report, What Is...

THE government’s first attempt to tell schools how they should teach religious education will spark controversy by recommending that children should be taught atheism as well as Christianity. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), which regulates what is taught in schools, is drawing up new guidelines on the teaching of religious education. It intends to recommend a wider curriculum, including the teaching of agnosticism, humanism and atheism alongside Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. “It is very much the intention that young people in the context of religious education should be studying non- religious beliefs,” a spokesman for the QCA said. “There...