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Some atheists say that if God exists, He should show Himself to everyone so they can believe in Him and not go to Hell. Should a good God do this? I've heard atheists say that the best thing God could do would be to reveal Himself openly so that everyone could believe in Him, do what He wants, and not go to Hell. Since God does not do this, we know that either He does not exist or He is not good.When this comes up with your atheist friends, try exploring the question of what would happen if God were...

Alliance Defending Freedom and the Massachusetts Family Institute have filed a friend-of-the-court brief in response to a lawsuit from atheist students and parents who want to stop the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools – even though they are not required to participate. "The Pledge of Allegiance shouldn't be banned merely because someone who is not even required to recite it feels offended," said MFI Executive Vice President Andrew Beckwith. "The Pledge unites Americans. The court should uphold the lower court's ruling and refuse to divide Americans by silencing a voluntary exercise of patriotism just because a...

An attempt was recently made to vandalize a war memorial at an Oregon park at the center of a church and state controversy with an improvised explosive device. An unknown individual detonated the IED near the memorial, located at Mingus Park in the City of Coos Bay, sometime late night between last Thursday and last Friday.... Read more at http://www.christianpost.com/news/vandal-attempts-to-blow-up-oregon-memorial-embroiled-in-church-state-controversy-103128/#l4eKDdzkvpFj6zWq.99

A new study says the world is more religious now than it was four decades ago, and this trend will continue to 2020 and perhaps beyond even as the global share of the nonreligious is likely to witness a sustained decrease. The percentage of the world that is religious continues to increase, according to the study titled "Christianity In Its Global Context, 1970-2010," conducted by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. In 1970, nearly 80 percent of the world's population was religious, and by 2010 this had grown to around 88...

The Wild Goose Festival — named after the Celtic imagery for the Holy Spirit—draws in aging Protestant Mainliners and disenchanted ex-evangelicals. The festival highlights what its apologists call “emergence Christianity,” but Wild Goose certainly does not shy away from liberal politics. [SNIP] Featured speaker Frank Schaeffer (outspoken critic of his father Francis’ legacy) was more direct: “Certainty is the enemy of the truth.” Indeed, many wild goslings boasted they were “seekers who haven’t found the answers,” but were “looking for companions on each of our respective faith journeys.” Wild Goose “elder” Vincent Harding addressed the opening invocation to “Mother-Father God,...

A Question for Atheists: The Book of God's Existence Atheists maintain that rejection of faith is superior to practicing faith. However, despite this commonly held view, one may at least force an atheist to admit he/she is capable of practicing faith. Simply ask this question: Suppose there exists a book simply titled "The Book of God's Existence" which, using formal logic and reasoning, proves the existence of God. However, if one who does not already believe in God reads this book that person is doomed to eternal damnation. Many prominent and vocal atheists have read the book intending to prove...

From Breitbart: MILITARY CENSORS CHRISTIAN CHAPLAIN, ATHEISTS CALL FOR PUNISHMENTA Christian chaplain in the military is being officially censored for engaging in free speech, and anti-Christian activists are demanding he be punished. Lt. Col. Kenneth Reyes is a Christian chaplain currently serving in the U.S. Air Force. He is stationed at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska. As an ordained clergyman whose duties are to provide religious instruction and spiritual counseling, he has a page on the base’s website called “Chaplain’s Corner.”Reyes recently wrote an essay entitled, “No Atheists in Foxholes: Chaplains Gave All in World War II.” This common saying...

From the Daily Mail:Revealed: Buzz Aldrin took Holy Communion on the MOON (but NASA kept it secret)Former astronaut Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin may have been the second man to walk on the moon, but he was the first – and only – person to celebrate Holy Communion on it. Inside the lunar module just hours before following Neil Armstrong onto the heavenly body in 1969, Aldrin celebrated the Christian sacrament with wafers and a bottle of wine – a fact the U.S. government reportedly refused to make public at the time. The Apollo 11 astronaut’s plan to broadcast the religious...

She is a political analyst, blogger, columnist and commentator. She is a Democrat who regularly contributes to USA Today, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal among other publications. She formerly served under the Clinton administration from 1993-1998 and was appointed Deputy Assistant U.S Trade Representative for Public Affairs. In an interview with Focus on the Family, she shares how she converted from atheism to Christianity. She said: “I was not looking to be a Christian. The last thing in the world I wanted to be was a Christian. I had grown up as an Episcopalian,...

It began when the Pope paid his bill. The day after Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was named the leader of the world's billion Catholics, he asked his driver to go back to the hotel in the Vatican where he'd been staying during the Congress of Cardinals, to pay his bill. The payment was completely symbolic of course. That hotel belongs to the Church, and the Church belongs to him. The Pope paid "because he was concerned about giving a good example of what priests and bishops should do." Paying a bill is a small but vital gesture — it...

A LABOUR politician has defended his beliefs in extra-terrestrial life - after claiming to have fathered a child with an alien. Married father-of-three Simon Parkes, who represents Stakesby on Whitby Town Council, said his wife had rowed with him after revealing he had a child called Zarka with an alien he refers to as the Cat Queen. The 53-year-old driving instructor said he has sexual relations with the alien about four times a year. “What will happen is that we will hold hands and I will say ‘I’m ready’ and then the technology I don’t understand will take us up...

It's something most Christian parents worry about: You send your kids off to college and when they come back, you find they've lost their faith. The prospect of this happening is why many parents nudge their kids towards Christian colleges, or at least schools with a strong Christian presence on campus. But in many ways, the damage has been done long before our children set foot on campus. That's the message from a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly. My friend Larry Taunton of the Fixed Point Foundation set out to find out why so many young Christians lose their...

Rabbis, priests, bishops in Britain I love the remark made by one Oxford don about another: ‘On the surface, he’s profound, but deep down, he’s superficial.’ That sentence has more than once come to mind when reading the new atheists. Future intellectual historians will look back with wonder at the strange phenomenon of seemingly intelligent secularists in the 21st century believing that if they could show that the first chapters of Genesis are not literally true, that the universe is more than 6,000 years old and there might be other explanations for rainbows than as a sign of God’s...

The mainstream American right has remained almost entirely silent about the recent suicide of the French historian, Dominique Venner. The reasons for this, I do not know—perhaps it is a squeamishness about the symbolism of his final act, or a lack of understanding of it. Perhaps it is a refusal to see what the people of France already see, and are rising up against.Venner shot himself on the altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame on May 21st, 2013. The image of this act ought to make us pause in awe. The American left immediately dismissed him as a...

Last week, in Nice, France, I was privileged to participate along with 30 scholars, mostly scientists and mathematicians, in a conference on the question of whether the universe was designed, or at least fine-tuned, to make life, especially intelligent life. Participants — from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia, among other American and European universities — included believers in God, agonistics, and atheists. It was clear that the scientific consensus was that, at the very least, the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned to allow for the possibility of life. It appears that we live in a “Goldilocks universe,” in which both...

The untold story of the Communist destruction of the Our Lady of Consolation Trappist Abbey at Yangjiaping in 1947Part 1, Accusations“He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him.” John 1:10I have just returned from another year in China where I have witnessed the Church grow. I have seen churches struggle to accommodate the crowds who come for Holy Mass, and I have listened to countless stories of Christian suffering under China’s Communist rule. Over the years I have traveled with, worshipped with, and prayed with Chinese Catholics. Priests have...

A direct descendant of Charles Darwin has become a Catholic apologist. Laura Keynes, a great-great-great-granddaughter of the English naturalist, has joined Catholic Voices, the project set up to speak up for the Church in the media She writes in this week’s Catholic Herald about how she returned to her childhood Catholic faith after a period of agnosticism. The daughter of an atheist father and a mother who had converted to Catholicism but later became a Buddhist, she was baptised Catholic. But she says she drifted into agnosticism in her teens and “away from any contact with the Church”. When she...

MOSCOW, June 13 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) – Physics and theology are hard to combine –and an attempt to open a theology department at a prestigious Russian nuclear physics institute has stirred up a storm of protest and verbal sparring between scientists and clerics, highlighting Russia’s increasingly tense religious-secular divide. The new department is due to open in the fall at Moscow’s National Research Nuclear University (MEPhI), ranked the third best institution of higher learning in Russia, according to a 2012 survey by the business weekly Expert. But the plan has numerous ardent critics, who call it an infringement on...

This is according to Fr. Lee Eun-hyung, General Secretary of the Catholic "Committee for the Reconciliation of the Korean People", who spoke to Aid to the Church in Need“We suspect that after the long period of persecution there are still about 10,000 people who will remember in their hearts their Catholic faith.” But “I find it difficult to believe that there is an organised underground Church in North Korea,” Fr. Lee Eun-hyung, the General Secretary of the Catholic "Committee for the Reconciliation of the Korean People", said in an interview with Aid to the Church in Need (the foundation that...

Starting today till Friday, a Vietnamese delegation led by Deputy Foreign Minister Bùi Thanh Sơn will meet Under-Secretary for Relations with States Mgr Antonio Camilleri. In recent months, the Communist state has cracked down on human rights activists, Catholics included.Hanoi (AsiaNews) - The fourth meeting of the Joint Vietnam-Holy See Working Group began this morning in Rome as part of ongoing talks between the Vatican and Hanoi to establish full diplomatic relations between the two sides. The Vietnamese delegation is led by Deputy Foreign Minister Bùi Thanh Sơn, who will meet Under-Secretary for Relations with States Mgr Antonio Camilleri, who...