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Poway Unified School District wins case against high school teacherA teacher in the Poway Unified School District has been ordered by the U.S. Court of Appeals to remove two large banners that referred to "God" and the "Creator" from his classroom walls. Brad Johnson, a teacher at Westview High School, had been directed by the district to remove two large banners which read “IN GOD WE TRUST,” “ONE NATION UNDER GOD,” “GOD BLESS AMERICA,” “GOD SHED HIS GRACE ON THEE” and “All men are created equal, they are endowed by their CREATOR.” The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals announced their...

Odd how many Americans can agree with Christopher Hitchens on many issues, i.e. his rage at Henry Kissinger. I sympathize totally with such disgust. The Hitchens contempt for the Tea Party, however, is the grandest dividing line, largely due to the tea Party’s fervent belief in God and its faith in Sarah Palin whom Hitchens repeatedly heaps fear and loathing on. Hitchens, however, warns the world to not patronize Sarah Palin! He points out that his favorite film on American Presidential politics is Gore Vidal’s The Best Man. With an almost bottomless irony of ironies, he further adds that at...

Does Bill Keller, Editor of the New York Times have any idea why his editorial “Asking Candidates Tougher Questions about Faith,” contains the very essence of bigotry? He writes “We have an unusually large number of candidates, including putative front-runners, who belong to churches that are mysterious or suspect to many Americans.” He then proceeds to specifically, and quite intolerantly, single out Roman Catholicism and Mormonism. Regarding Mormons, Keller glibly asserts that he didn’t care if Mitt Romney “wore Mormon undergarments beneath his Gap skinny jeans.” Continuing with his laundry list of Mormon beliefs that he doesn’t care about, he...

A community college in New York has been presented with a demand letter from the American Center for Law and Justice to halt a professor's classroom practices that allegedly have damaged at least one student – so far. The letter from the ACLJ targets Suffolk County Community College and will be the prelude to a federal lawsuit if the issue isn't resolved, the organization said. At issue is a professor's demand that students "change their own personal viewpoints or state that they are unsure of whether their own personal beliefs are correct" on religious issues, according to the letter. That...

In the darkest hour of despair, when all hope seemed lost, the communal leader called together his counsel of the faithful and uttered ritual sayings. Sounds like something out of the eighth century, doesn't it? Just this past week, however, Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue, facing a massive and seemingly unrelenting drought, declared that "The only solution is rain, and the only place we get that from is from a higher power." He then sent out responses to leaders of several faiths to take part in a prayer service. The potential establishment clause violations inherent in state sponsored prayer are disturbing....

Last week was Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, the brainchild of David Horowitz, conservative political gadfly and self-effacing founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Friends of mine and other writers I admire spoke on college campuses around the country, garnering impressive media coverage. The week was a big success, if measured by how much awareness of Islamic villainy was heightened. A lot of people, not including me, feel that there can hardly be such a thing as too much awareness. Estimations of the Islamic threat run exceedingly high, not least in my own party. On this point I find myself uneasily...

AUKLAND, NZ, August 30, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - British Actor Ian McKellen who has used the mega-stardom he achieved playing Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings films to promote homosexuality, has admitted to ripping out pages of hotel bibles that refer to homosexuality. In an August 10 interview on New Zealand's TV1 Close Up program McKellen was confronted by the interviewer questioning the truth of the rumour "He's the one, that when he stays in hotels rips the part of the bible out that criticizes homosexuality." "Yes it is true," responded McKellen in even tones.  "Its Leviticus 18:22 that...

For several weeks CNN has been hyping their miniseries God’s Warriors as an “unprecedented six-hour television event.” The series dedicates two hours each to “God’s Jewish Warriors,” “God’s Muslim Warriors,” and “God’s Christian Warriors.” Prior to the first airing, CNN invited several bloggers to preview a few clips from the series and to submit a question for Christiane Amanpour to be answered during a special webcast. The three clips provided by CNN each highlighted one of the “fundamentalist” branches of the three Abrahamic faiths: the segment on Jews focused on theocratic Israeli settlers, including the man who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin;...

A civil rights organization has joined forces with a Christian student group at Brown University in an attempt to find out why the school has banned the Christians from meeting on its campus. "A university that respects its students cannot capriciously suspend student groups," said Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. "Suspension of any student group is a serious matter and should be accompanied by a serious explanation. Yet Brown has consistently skirted questions about the suspension, calling into question both the university's motives and the legitimacy of the punishment." FIRE said the members...

Martin wants to point out that if it weren't for the icky evangelicals, we'd still have Allen as Senator in Va.

FAITH UNDER FIRE Ten Commandments stunner: Feds lying at Supreme Court Government tells modern visitors it's Bill of Rights being honored Every argument before the U.S. Supreme Court and every opinion the judges deliver comes in the presence of the Ten Commandments, God's law given to Moses on a fire-scorched mountain, and now represented for the United States in the very artwork embedded in the high court structure. In today's world of revisionist history, the proof comes through the work of a California pastor who visited the Supreme Court building recently when he was in Washington and was surprised that...

Tampa, Fla. — When Mark Dillon has a management problem, he heads straight to the Bible. The president of closely held Tampa Bay Steel Corp. changed how the metals distributor pays its bills with help from the Book of Proverbs. He turned to the Book of Matthew for advice on dealing with a delinquent customer. Agonizing over a pre-Christmas layoff, he took comfort from Jesus' admonition to “do to others what you would have them do to you.” “I thought: 'Do unto others,'” recalls Dillon. “If I was going to be laid off, I'd rather know before I spent all...

And part of the job of a writer in 2006, so it seems, is to comment on evangelicals or ?conservative Christians? more generally, the way that many writers in the late ?60s and early ?70s ? novelists, poets, cultural critics, anyone whose opinions regularly appeared in print ? felt obliged to weigh in on blackness, often with embarrassing results. In their fictional guise, evangelicals and their kin ? fundamentalists, Pentecostals and all manner of weird cultists calling fervently on the name of Jesus ? are usually side characters, rarely protagonists, except, of course, in the alternative universe of so-called Christian...

Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the Earth, more than half the American population believes that the entire cosmos was created 6,000 years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue. Those with the power to elect presidents and congressmen?and many who themselves get elected?believe that dinosaurs lived two by two upon Noah's Ark, that light from distant galaxies was created en route to the Earth and that the first members of our species were fashioned out of dirt and divine breath, in...

Home The God Delusion: David Quinn & Richard Dawkins debate    THE RYAN TUBRIDY SHOW Now, this morning, we are asking, what’s wrong with religion? That’s just one of the questions raised in a new book called, The God Delusion. We’re going to talk to its author — the man who’s been dubbed the world’s most famous, out of the closet, living atheist — Richard Dawkins. Ryan Tubridy Richard Dawkins David Quinn Ryan Tubridy: Richard, good morning to you Richard Dawkins: Good morning. Tubridy: It’s nice to talk to you again. We spoke before once on the similar subject...

In the United States, atheists are becoming an ostracized minority. But now evolutionary biologists are trying to turn the tables: According to their argument, religion is the source of evil. Morals and selflessness are not God-given - they are the result of evolution. When Richard Dawkins, a zoologist at Oxford University, steps up to the altar he seems visibly pleased to see the pews in the church fully occupied. In the best Queen's English, he reads from his book: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a...

THE MIDTERM elections are fast approaching, and their outcome could well be determined by the "moral values" of conservative Christians. While this possibility is regularly bemoaned by liberals, the link between religion and morality in our public life is almost never questioned. One of the most common justifications one hears for religious faith, from all points on the political spectrum, is that it provides a necessary framework for moral behavior. Most Americans appear to believe that without faith in God, we would have no durable reasons to treat one another well. [...] The problem, however, is that much of what...

(AgapePress) - "For Christ and Humanity." That's the motto of Olivet College in Michigan, where a Christian student says he was punished by one of his professors for making a reference to God in the classroom. Olivet College freshman Jeremiah Bannister, an aspiring journalist, claims he was recently the target of anti-Christian bigotry and grade retaliation in his "Writing and Rhetoric" class. Bannister says Professor Austin Jackson, a Sunni Muslim, took exception to an essay he and another student had written opposing affirmative action and slavery reparations. The freshman shares that when he was asked by the professor to voice...

If the Christian base of the GOP gets its way, "All government employees — federal, state and local — would be required to participate in weekly Bible classes in the workplace, as well as compulsory daily prayer sessions." We would all have to carry religious identity cards that "would provide Christocrats with preferential treatment in many areas of life, including home ownership, student loans, employment and education." Non-Christians would be indulged as second-class citizens, "but younger members . . . would be strongly encouraged to formally convert to the dominant evangelical Christianity." Homosexual sex would be illegalized, while "known homosexuals...

The New York Times has put an ironic twist on the 8th Commandment: “Thou shalt not steal.” It’s accused churches nationwide of fleecing taxpayers and local governments using the First Amendment. The Times devoted more than 17,000 words and a four-day series indicting religious groups for what it argued was essentially cheating taxpayers across the country. The pro-government, pro-regulation treatise by business reporter Diana B. Henriques was titled "In God's Name." Churches “enjoy an abundance of exemptions from regulations and taxes” and the result is “religious organizations of all faiths stand in a position that American businesses – and the...