Free Republic

Christian kids are typically sent to Sunday school for lessons on the Bible and morals. For nonbelievers, there's atheist Sunday school. With an estimated 14 percent of Americans professing to have no religion, according to the Institute for Humanist Studies, some are choosing to send their children to classes that teach ethics without religious belief. Bri Kneisley sent her 10-year-old son, Damian, to Camp Quest Ohio this past summer after a neighbor had shown him the Bible. "Damian was quite certain this guy was right and was telling him this amazing truth that I had never shared," said Kneisley, who...

The National Park Service has banished God from a key display of America's Christian heritage in Washington, and a California pastor who regularly leads teams of visitors to see markers of the nation's religious history wants Him restored. The reference is an engraving of "LAUS DEO," which is Latin for "Praise be to God," and is on the east side of the 100-ounce aluminum cap of the Washington Monument. Since the actual inscription on the cap, which on the other three sides provides other information, is unviewable atop the 555-foot stone column, the National Park Service has created a replica,...

A group of young Muslim apostates launches a campaign today, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America, to make it easier to renounce Islam. The provocative move reflects a growing rift between traditionalists and a younger generation raised on a diet of Dutch tolerance. The Committee for Ex-Muslims promises to campaign for freedom of religion but has already upset the Islamic and political Establishments for stirring tensions among the million-strong Muslim community in the Netherlands. Ehsan Jami, the committee’s founder, who rejected Islam after the attack on the twin towers in 2001, has become the most talked-about public figure...

As the deadline nears to decide what image will grace the back of Oklahoma's state quarter, several Oklahomans have taken exception with what won't be on the proposed coins. Four of the five final designs for the Oklahoma quarter include visual references to Ponca City's Pioneer Woman, a 30-foot-tall bronze statue depicting a stoic young mother, her son's hand firmly grasped in her left hand, a Bible in her right hand. However, on all four quarter designs, the Pioneer Woman's Bible is not included. Guidelines posted on the U.S. Mint's Web site say "inappropriate" designs for the quarters include logos...

See for example this thread first. A chapel with nary a cross? At this college, that's not a loss! "Returned on request" (Muslims won't feel oppressed) Makes you wonder just who is the boss!

Amber Mangum was a frequent reader during lunch breaks at her Prince George's County middle school, silently soaking up the adventures of Harry Potter and other tales in the spare minutes before afternoon classes. The habit was never viewed as a problem -- not, a lawsuit alleges, until the book she was reading was the Bible. A vice principal at Dwight D. Eisenhower Middle School in Laurel last month ordered Amber, then 12, to stop reading the Bible or face punishment, according to a lawsuit filed Friday by Amber's mother. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, alleges...

(AgapePress) - The United States Supreme Court may hear a case involving a school district's censorship of an art poster that a kindergartener drew for a school assignment -- a drawing that was partly suppressed by school officials because it contained the child's depiction of Jesus.The case involves Antonio Peck, who was a kindergarten student in the late 1990s at Baldwinsville Elementary School in Syracuse, New York. The boy's teacher told members of the class to draw posters illustrating their understanding of the environment. Antonio's poster featured children holding hands and encircling the globe and people picking up trash and...

WASHINGTON (BP)--Indiana’s John Hostettler is trying for the fifth consecutive Congress to prevent the American Civil Liberties Union from receiving government funds when it succeeds at legal challenges to public expressions of religion. This year, the Republican representative has more hope than before thanks to the American Legion. The country’s largest veterans organization, with about three million members, has aggressively thrown its influence behind Hostettler’s bill, and the persistent congressman is encouraged at his proposal’s prospects. Hostettler’s measure, the Public Expression of Religion Act (PERA), H.R. 2679, is designed to close what he considers a loophole in federal law that...

RICHMOND -- A federal judge has ruled that a southeastern Virginia school district didn't violate a teacher's free-speech rights by removing Christian-themed postings from his classroom walls. U.S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith rejected arguments that York County school officials deprived William Lee of his First Amendment rights when they ordered the removal of postings that included articles about President Bush's religious faith and John Ashcroft's prayer meetings with his staffers when he was attorney general. "This case is not about what free-speech rights Lee has as an individual expressing himself on private property," Judge Smith wrote in her opinion...

Biologists are beginning to solve the riddles on which intelligent-design advocates have relied To advocates of intelligent design, the human sperm's tiny tail bears potent evidence that Charles Darwin was wrong--it is, they say, a molecular machine so complex that only God could have produced it. But biologists now are starting to piece together how such intricate bits of biochemistry evolved. Although the basic research was not meant as a response to intelligent design, it is unraveling the very riddles that proponents said could not be solved. In contrast, intelligent design advocates admit they still lack any way of using...

Competing Designs Tuesday's ruling by a federal judge in Pennsylvania, disparaging intelligent design as a religion-based and therefore false science, raises an important question: If ID is bogus because many of its theorists have religious beliefs to which the controversial critique of Darwinism lends support, then what should we say about Darwinism itself? After all, many proponents of Darwinian evolution have philosophical beliefs to which Darwin lends support. "We conclude that the religious nature of Intelligent Design would be readily apparent to an objective observer, adult or child," wrote Judge John E. Jones III in his decision, Kitzmiller v. Dover,...

Tuesday's ruling by a federal judge in Pennsylvania, disparaging intelligent design as a religion-based and therefore false science, raises an important question: If ID is bogus because many of its theorists have religious beliefs to which the controversial critique of Darwinism lends support, then what should we say about Darwinism itself? After all, many proponents of Darwinian evolution have philosophical beliefs to which Darwin lends support."We conclude that the religious nature of Intelligent Design would be readily apparent to an objective observer, adult or child," wrote Judge John E. Jones III in his decision, Kitzmiller v. Dover, which rules that...

ACLU, atheist in 16-year battle to remove it The San Diego City Council voted this week to allow voters to decide the fate of the historic Mt. Soledad Cross overlooking the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla. The vote represented the newest chapter in a long line of legal battles to remove the cross, led by ACLU attorney James McElroy, who represents an atheist seeking to remove the Christian symbol from public lands.

FAIZABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) -- A group of Afghan Muslim clerics have threatened to call for a holy war against the United States in three days unless it hands over military interrogators reported to have desecrated the Quran. The warning on Sunday came after 16 Afghans were killed and more than 100 hurt last week in the worst anti-U.S. protests across the country since U.S. forces invaded in 2001 to oust the Taliban for sheltering Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network. The clerics in the northeastern province of Badakhshan said they wanted U.S. President George W. Bush to handle...

“In fact, the breadth and extent of the anti-evolutionary movement that has spread almost unnoticed across the country should force American politicians to think twice about how their public expressions of religious belief are beginning to affect education and science. The deeply religious nature of the United States should not be allowed to stand in the way of the thirst for knowledge or the pursuit of science. Once it does, it won’t be long before the American scientific community—which already has trouble finding enough young Americans to fill its graduate schools—ceases to lead the world.” That is the editorial voice...

. FReeper help needed: To help promote FReeper AnnaZ's BRAND NEW SaveOurSeal.net video, I need some ONLINE images of the Taliban blowing up those Buddha statues. Some time VERY SOON, AnnaZ will be releasing a BRAND NEW short video,which will open with VIDEO images of their destruction by Muslim fanatics.This new video will be about the ACLU fanatics who recently forced Los Angeles County to remove a tiny cross from their official County Seal, and how this ANTI-religious fervor is much more DANGEROUS, and much more WIDESPREAD than some might think. I would like to use something like THESE images,...

This was not the mother’s first trip to her child’s classroom, where parents regularly volunteered to lead story time. Because it coincided with the holiday season, she thought the ideal story to tell would be the original Christmas story that began nearly 2,000 years ago. But she remembered the memo. Sent weeks earlier, it was a stern reminder by the school principal that children in public schools could not celebrate Christmas. The sensitive kindergarten teacher added in her own handwriting, “It’s that old ‘separation of church and state’ thing.”

Saturday after Thanksgiving is the traditional day to purchase stamps for my annual Christmas card mailing... [snip] So, shortly before noon on that most recent post-turkey day, I sauntered into a neighborhood "U.S. Postal Store," [snip] and headed for the stamps-only section. I quickly found a packed wall of display racks offering a panoply of first-class postage devoted to the various elements of the year-end holiday season, specifically: 1) Christmas, featuring colorful, contemporary designs of Santa Claus with an array of inanimate, secular Yule symbols; 2) Kwanzaa, with not just one but two stamps promoting a totally fabricated "harvest holiday"...

CHRISTMAS IS NOT THE TARGET: Much has been written and discussed in talk radio and on the internet this holiday season as to why certain decisions are being made when it comes to certain symbols of Christmas. I have seen or heard stories along these lines on all of the following topics just in the past 24 hours... 1. TARGET vs. Salvation Army 2. Macys banning "Merry Christmas" 3. Bloomingdales banning "Merry Christmas" 4. The Denver Parade of Lights banning "Christmas" floats 5. Maplewood Schools in New Jersey banning all Christmas and Hannukah music from its Winter Concert. 6. Bloomberg proclaiming the NYC no longer...

Just in time for Christmas, America's two largest news magazines devote this week's cover stories to debunking the story of Jesus' birth. Among the conclusions in Time and Newsweek: Jesus was born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem; there is little evidence of three kings following a star, and the story of the virgin birth may have been borrowed. "The Nativity saga is neither fully fanciful nor fully factual but a layered narrative of early tradition and enduring theology," Newsweek writes in examining the Sunday-school version of the birth of Christ. This may be unwelcome "news" to most Americans. A Newsweek poll...