Free Republic

During the last 41 years, the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran has led Iranians and the peoples of other nations in the region to war, destruction, poverty, and unemployment, such that the Iranians’ livelihood is now diminishing at a very fast rate. Negative economic growth, staggering liquidity growth, rising inflation, the rial’s devaluation, rising unemployment, closure of production units, water scarcity, environmental degradation, forest fires, government corruption, embezzlement, looting, and plundering of the nation’s wealth has caused the destruction and shattering of people’s lives. The people in the Middle East region also must face hardship every day from...

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who has been warning people about Pope Francis for years now, makes a startling charge that the pope is a deceiver, a liar, and actively engaged in multiple cover-ups on a variety of levels. Vigano goes so far as to say that Pope Francis is turning the Roman Catholic Church into the synagogue of Satan, and guess what? He’s right. We have previously told you how Vigano exposed the ‘Gay Mafia‘ in the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the ‘homosexual network‘ that exists there and that Pope Francis works to keep hidden. Archbishop Carlo Maria...

While you have been out playing church, and downloading all the tracks from satanist Kanye West’s ‘Jesus Is King‘ album, the leader of the world’s largest religion, Pope Francis, has been brazenly bold and open about furthering his plans for the One World Religion of Chrislam. On November 18, Pope Francis stated that the only thing standing in his way of seeing his “Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together” covenant being realized are those nasty, scourge fundamentalist Bible believers who keep exposing him. I took it as a compliment. "In today’s precarious world, dialogue among religions is not...

ROME — Pope Francis blasted religious fundamentalism Monday, telling an Argentinian interreligious dialogue group that fundamentalism is a “plague.” “Beware of the fundamentalist groups: everyone has his own. In Argentina too there is a little fundamentalist corner,” the pope told his hearers. “And let us try, with fraternity, to go forward. Fundamentalism is a scourge and all religions have some kind of fundamentalist first cousin there, which forms a group.

But that chain of authority is often not so clear in the church world, especially amongst non-denominational evangelicals. If a man or woman steps up behind a pulpit and speaks to us authoritatively on matters of theology, why do we automatically accept this authority? Is it because we like what we hear? Or do we validate the authority because the pastor’s interpretation of the Bible jives with our own understanding? But who are we to even make that judgement? Why is our interpretation of the Bible any better than the person sitting next to us on the pew? And if...

As such, the bill expands upon Egypt’s current blasphemy law which penalizes speaking or writing about the Prophet, Allah and the first Caliphas For the past two weeks in Cairo, a resistance movement has been gaining momentum against a recent transgression by Al-Azhar Institute to insert newly constructed taxpayer-funded “fatwa” (edict) kiosks into every subway stop in the city. The trial began in one of the busiest subway stations—overcrowded and overwhelmed with chaos—where The Islamic Research Center under the auspices of Al-Azhar Sunni Institute placed its first kiosk. Acting outside the law that requires permits to construct and install kiosks,...

Eyerusalem Solomon of Tacoma Park, Maryland, prays for Pope John Paul II in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception March 31, 2005 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Scientists found that damage in a certain part of the brain is linked to an increase in religious fundamentalism. In particular, lesions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex reduced cognitive flexibility - the ability to challenge our beliefs based on new evidence.The researchers, led by Jordan Grafman of Northwestern University, utilized data gathered from Vietnam War veterans as part of the Vietnam Head Injury Study. They compared...

The push to reclaim Mosul and Raqqa is just like a successful radiation treatment, it is shrinking the Islamic State’s caliphate that was once advancing unabated across Iraq and Syria. Even though their land mass and fighters are dwindling, their sympathizers and their fundamentalist ideology has spread across the world like a cancer. Islamic extremists in Europe, for instance, have plans to conquer the continent with fundamental Islam to join a future caliphate. They will not, however, wield the sword; pillaging, raping and killing infidels everywhere they go, planting their black flags on every hilltop. Mind you, this is the militant...

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE, November 30, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) -- On the plane returning from his journey to Africa today Pope Francis made his clearest remarks in condemnation of 'fundamentalist' Catholics. "Fundamentalism is a sickness that is in all religions," Francis said, as reported by the National Catholic Reporter's Vatican correspondent, Joshua McElwee, and similarly by other journalists on the plane. "We Catholics have some -- and not some, many -- who believe in the absolute truth and go ahead dirtying the other with calumny, with disinformation, and doing evil." "They do evil," said the pope. "I say this because it...

. . . From across the border, another piece of news reached us regarding a rape victim in India who was required to provide irrefutable evidence of her ‘purity’. This proof was not a DNA testing, (not) astonishingly enough; rather the requisite was the rape victim balancing a monstrous 40 kilogram rock on her head. Passing this sanctity test, the woman would be at leisure to continue her former life with her husband – failing it, I shudder to think what would follow. Supposed to be her ‘agnipariksha’ (ordeal), the test was mandatory so as to know if the woman’s...

The Christian LifeAnd How It Is To Be Lived   "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20). "But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me"...

The subject here is naval history and the naval history to come. This is particularly relevant, given the subjects I've been immersed in over the last year—the so-called war on terrorism and the attacks of 9/11, what went wrong, and what we should do to fix it. I have learned that what these two institutions—the U.S. Naval Institute and the U.S. Naval Academy—stand for are at the center of what we face as a nation going forward. The Naval Institute is one of the great intellectual institutions in this country. I first joined when I was an undergraduate in college,...

As sparring partners go, a Hollywood actress and an evolutionary biologist would not appear to be a natural fit. However, Oscar-winner Angelina Jolie, 39, and controversial scientist Professor Richard Dawkins, 73, have found themselves inadvertently at loggerheads over whether children should be allowed to read fairytales. Miss Jolie, who plays an evil fairy godmother in her latest film Maleficent – a spin on the classic story of Sleeping Beauty – said fairytales play an important role in how she raises her six children, using ‘a little magic’ to impart important moral lessons. The other day, one of the kids lost...

All the beliefs that divide Catholics from fundamentalists are derived from the teaching authority of the Church.Because Catholics believe in the Church, they believe a fuller, more complex and mysterious set of things than the narrowed down fundamentalist. Thus, the Church is the essential point of divergence. In the fundamentalist view, the Catholic Church exalts itself over the Bible, adding to God’s Word: It is man arrogating to himself the right to speak in God’s name. But for Catholics, the fundamentalist puts the Bible in place of the Church as his “paper pope.” Instead of a living teacher (the Church)...

*This video will be deleted by Youtube soon. :( Sign says: "Warning: Masturbators, Thieves, Liars, Drunkards, Fornicators, Homosexuals: Judgement Day."

During a past ministry trip to Hungary, I heard a painfully familiar story. Through a translator, a tearful young woman living near Budapest explained that her Christian husband was angrily demanding her absolute submission. This included, among other things, that she clean their house according to his strict standards and that she engage in sexual acts with him that made her feel uncomfortable and dirty. This lady was not demanding her rights or trying to be disrespectful. She was a godly, humble woman who obviously wanted to please the Lord. But she had been beaten to a pulp emotionally, and...

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...

With Representative Michele Bachmann's victory in the Ames, Iowa straw poll, and Texas Governor Rick Perry's triumphal entrance into the GOP presidential primary, there's been a sudden spike of attention drawn to the extremist religious beliefs both candidates have been associated with - up to and including their belief in Christian dominionism. (In the Texas Observer, the New Yorker, and the Daily Beast, for example.) The responses of denial from both the religious right itself and from the centrist Beltway press have been so incongruous as to be laughable - if only the subject matter weren't so deadly serious. Those...

One. If religion is pure negativity, prohibition and denial, then its opposite - science, reason and truth - must be proselytised in a similar vein as ultimate, self-sufficient values. What seems at first the progressive and critical attitude of a latter-day humanism becomes a language of moral absolutes, an absurd pretence to certainty, a kind of fearful scholasticism that wants to rebut, dismiss, elide and ignore the heterogeneous motivations of spirituality. “Against the New Atheism,” by Ned Curthoys (Overland, September 1, 2008) Two. New Atheism is a modern movement that not only publicly rejects the existence of all gods, but...

Few hot-button, “fighting words” are tossed around with wilder abandon in journalism today than the historical term “fundamentalist.” The powers that be at the Associated Press know this label is loaded and, thus, for several decades the wire service’s style manual has offered this guidance for reporters, editors and broadcast producers around the world.“fundamentalist: The word gained usage in an early 20th century fundamentalist-modernist controversy within Protestantism. … However, fundamentalist has to a large extent taken on pejorative connotations except when applied to groups that stress strict, literal interpretations of Scripture and separation from other Christians. “In general, do not...