Free Republic

The following media outlets cited Kelley’s atheism: ABC (“Good Morning America”) Boston Globe CNN CNN Wire Fox News Los Angeles Times New York Times TMZ Washington Times The following did a profile of Kelley’s background but said nothing about his hateful brand of atheism: Associated Press CBS cbsnews.com NBC PBS USA Today Time.com Washington Post The following left-wing Internet sites covered Kelley’s background but did not report his militant atheism: Alternet Daily Beast Daily Kos Huffington Post Mother Jones Salon Slate Think Progress

Ex-facility official says Kelley made death threats and tried to buy weaponsHOUSTON - Channel 2 Investigates obtained law enforcement documents revealing Devin Kelley escaped from a behavioral center in New Mexico a little more than five years before Sunday’s deadly rampage in Sutherland Springs. The incident report, filed by the El Paso Police Department, states Kelley was picked up at a bus terminal in downtown El Paso before midnight on the evening of June 7, 2012. The report states two officers were dispatched to the terminal to look into a missing-person report. READ: Incident report on Devin Kelley When they...

The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history.Armed Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd—now St. Petersburg—100 years ago this week and arrested ministers of Russia’s provisional government. They set in motion a chain of events that would kill millions and inflict a near-fatal wound on Western civilization. The revolutionaries’ capture of train stations, post offices and telegraphs took place as the city slept and resembled a changing of the guard. But when residents of the Russian capital awoke, they found they were living in a different universe.Although the Bolsheviks called for the abolition...

The Texas church shooter who mercilessly shot dead 26 people and injured 24 others was an 'outcast' who 'preached his atheism' online. Former classmates say Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, who stormed First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs in Texas and opened fire on Sunday, was 'creepy', 'crazy' and 'weird'. Patrick Boyce, who attended New Braunfels High School with the killer, told DailyMail.com: 'He had a kid or two, fairly normal, but kinda quiet and lately seemed depressed. 'He was the first atheist I met. He went Air Force after high school, got discharged but I don't know why. 'I was...

In my previous article, I originally defined atheism as “the rejection of the possibility that ‘God’ exists” because that is how I’ve understood the word from the time I spent studying theodicy (God and the problem of evil). But many “atheist” commenters disagreed with this definition because their self-designation was based on belief statements that didn’t align with my knowledge statement. This article explains the differences between the viewpoints and the logic behind them. Atheism is commonly called the belief that there aren’t any gods or the lack of belief in gods. But in a more accurate, philosophical sense, it...

The Russian revolution had started earlier in February. The tsar had already abdicated. And a provisional bourgeois government had begun to establish itself. But it was the occupation of government buildings in Petrograd, on 25 October 1917, by the Red Guards of the Bolsheviks that marks the beginning of the Communist era proper. And it was from this date that an experiment wholly unprecedented in world history began: the systematic, state-sponsored attempt to eliminate religion. “Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy. It is not a side effect, but the central pivot,” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Lenin...

The red, white and blue has flown outside LaPoynor High School in LaRue, Texas for as far back as anyone can remember. But instead of 50 stars on a blue field, this flag bears a cross - a symbol of the Christian faith.The Christian flag flies alongside the Texas flag and Old Glory. And that's a big problem for a bunch of out-of-town atheist agitators -- a mighty big problem.The Freedom From Religion Foundation, a Wisconsin-based group of atheists, agnostics and freethinkers, sent a letter to the local school district demanding the flag be removed."It is unconstitutional for the school to...

America more and more resembles a cross between the Vatican and Disney World. Church-state separation activists regularly mount attacks on Christian influences in our culture, and embrace the Enlightenment doctrine of Descartes, “I think, therefore I am,” while defenders of God bow before “I am that I am.” The media circus bolsters Darwinism against creation beliefs with hundreds of irreverent covers of popular magazines asking, “Is God dead?,” and drive home their point with models of dysfunctional homes, relating statistics about drug abuse, divorce, abortion and depression. “The world isn’t safe anymore,” is frequently heard. A prominent atheist gloats that...

The number of atheists in Ireland has shot up by nearly three quarters whilst the number of Catholics has dived, according to the latest census figures. In 2011, a total of 277,237 ticked the ‘no religion’ box on the census form, but five years later, 481,388 did so. That means that atheism is now the second largest belief system in the Irish Republic, accounting for 10.1% of the population. The news was welcomed by the pressure group Atheist Ireland, which said, “We are increasingly optimistic that a secular Ireland is inevitable, free of religious privilege and religious discrimination against any...

Turning to the future, Brown said technological change and the development of artificial intelligence would transform the concept of the divine. "We will start to find our spiritual experiences through our interconnections with each other," he said, forecasting the emergence of "some form of global consciousness that we perceive and that becomes our divine". "Our need for that exterior god, that sits up there and judges us ... will diminish and eventually disappear."

Atheism, the rejection of the possibility that “God” exists, has become the dominant thought amongst intellectuals in the past century and has been around longer than most people think. For over 2000 years, it was based on philosophical arguments that can roughly be summed up as the atheist saying, “I don’t know how ‘X’ came to be, but you can’t prove it came from God.” This mindset has been highly effective because it places the burden of proof on the theist to prove the positive of God’s existence, which, superficially, is impossible to do – because no evidence exists that...

To Shawn Teamann, posting a sign of the Ten Commandments in the front yard of his North Huntingdon home is an affirmation of his faith and his stance against what he sees as an erosion of religious freedom in America. “It's just standing up for what you believe in. We feel religious freedom is being taken away,” said Teamann, a member of the Immaculate Conception Church of Irwin. Immaculate Conception has joined with the two Roman Catholic churches in North Huntingdon — St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and St. Agnes — in distributing about 1,000 signs to members of the three...

Modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) are not just incrementally superior to any other hominid or animal; we’re qualitatively different, both as the only known technologically-intelligent species and by virtue of dozens of unique abilities. It is not a claim but a demonstrable fact that anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) are vastly superior to every other form of life and, for whatever reason, all the genetic mutations that make us unique and confer over 40 traits and behaviors that result in evolutionary advantages over every other animal, occurred within a short period of time, within just one genus, and nowhere...

It has become axiomatic that life naturally evolved out of nonliving materials billions of years ago. Given enough time and the chemical opportunity, living cells self-assemble. However, the experts on the development of complex molecules from simpler ones, the synthetic chemists, do not know how this process actually occurs. There are no known pathways to create the components that make up a living cell from nonliving matter. They have no idea how amino acids (the building blocks of proteins and enzymes), nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA and RNA), saccharides (also called carbohydrates or sugars, the scaffolding for DNA and...

An national atheist organization wrote that the Christian Bible “encourages violence and racism” in an Monday letter intended to bully Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin. “It should be no surprise that this hate-filled book has spawned hateful ideologies and groups to perpetuate those ideologies,” the letter read. “The Ku Klux Klan is and has always been, a Christian group. Klansmen began burning crosses ‘to spread the light of Jesus into the countryside.’ Hitler was a Roman Catholic and his soldiers wore a religious slogan on their buckle belts (Gott mit uns [God with us]).” The Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF)...

It’s official: Atheists now occupy a lower place than Muslims in the “progressive stack,” meaning that in the Sacred Church of Equality, Muslims are now considered holier than atheists. If you doubt my assertion, riddle me this: When was the last time you heard a Muslim accused of “infidelophobia”? Superstar atheist Richard Dawkins recently had an upcoming radio appearance canceled by a listener-funded radio station in Berkeley, CA, a city whose primary purpose these days is to ban things considered sinful to progressives. In justifying their ritualistic shunning of Dawkins, KPFA 94.1 FM in Berkeley cited “hurtful” comments from Dawkins...

Religious people's minds are dominated by emotion and not analytical thinking which makes them cling to their views - even when evidence proves them wrong - a study claims. Such 'Emotional resonance' can make individuals hold on to their faith. Meanwhile, militant atheists are completely negative about religion because they have analytical brains, according to researchers.

June 8, 2017 Are Atheists Generally Smarter Than Religious People? by Dr Jerry Bergman In a recent article at Live Science, Laura Geggel asks, “Why Are Atheists Generally Smarter Than Religious People?” She claims that “For more than a millennium, scholars have noticed a curious correlation: Atheists tend to be more intelligent than religious people.”[i] How they could know this, since IQ tests and other means of measuring intelligence were only developed at the start of the last century, was not answered. Another problem is many kinds of intelligence exist, such as doing well on paper and pencil tests, or...

THE proportion of Scots who say they have no religion has reached a new high, a survey shows. The latest Scottish Social Attitudes survey found that nearly six in 10 (58%) describe themselves as having no religion, up from 40% in 1999. The survey, carried out by ScotCen, revealed that those aged 18-34 were the least likely to be religious, at 74% compared to 34% of those over 65. The Church of Scotland has been hardest hit by the drop in religious affiliation, with just 18% saying they belong to the Kirk compared to 35% in 1999. The proportion of...

There are good reasons not to confine the discussion to academic journals. In the latest issue of National Review, John McWhorter has a challenging and thought-provoking essay about the topic of race and IQ — specifically, about whether that topic should even be up for discussion in liberal-arts classrooms and in the media, as opposed to in scientific journals. He suggests not, as there is nothing to gain from discussing it. I read McWhorter’s essay with special interest because I have violated the norm he proposes. I have written about race and IQ on numerous occasions — and for a...