Free Republic

Salon Magazine has called Norway one of the “eight best countries to be an atheist,” along with Sweden, Denmark, Japan and the Czech Republic, suggesting that Norway’s “socially just government” has effectively taken the place of God for many Norwegians. In 2012, Norway eliminated Lutheranism as the official state church. “The Evangelical Lutheran religion will no longer be the state’s official religion,” parliament wrote in a statement, which meant that the church would receive public financing “on par with other religious and belief-based societies.” Norway’s decline in religiosity has been constant. A year ago the number of Norwegian atheists equaled...

Times reporter Michelle Goldberg notes the “well-documented resurgence of occultism among millennials.” In investigating this, she visited a “fashionable occult boutique” in Brooklyn, attending a presentation on witchcraft by an individual called Dakota Bracciale: Bracciale, who uses the gender-neutral pronouns they and them, grew up in an evangelical household — somewhere “between ‘Jesus Camp’ and snake handlers” — and said that the new atheism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens had a profound effect on their generation. But atheism wasn’t enough, said Bracciale: “It left this huge vacuum, and that vacuum had to be filled with something.” This is a...

Recently a man burst into a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and shot and killed 26 parishioners (including an unborn child). The killer’s former high school classmates described him as a militant atheist. “He was always talking about how people who believe in God we’re stupid and trying to preach his atheism,” wrote former classmate Nina Rose Nava in a Facebook post, according to the Daily Mail. “I legit just deleted him off my fb cause I couldn’t stand his post.” Which raises this question: To what extent was the killer’s rampage inspired by his atheist beliefs? Obviously, I am...

“Christmas for Atheists? You don’t need to be a Pagan or Christian to celebrate peace, joy, and sharing in December. The Atheist Christmas Coloring Book is a fun and creative way for freethinking families to learn about the rational roots of Christmas in pictures and verse. “

It’s astounding how many defenses of the state’s position in Masterpiece Cakeshop depend on misrepresentation and misconceptions. Last week I wrote about the most common misrepresentation — that Jack Phillips discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation when he refused to design a custom cake for a same-sex-wedding celebration. After all, he served all customers — regardless of race, sex, or sexual orientation. He just consistently refused to design cakes that advanced messages he disagreed with. No person of any identity has the legal authority to compel an artist to use his talents to advance a cause the artist...

Moscow, November 22, Interfax - Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia is alarmed by the rise of atheism in the West. "What we are seeing today, particularly in Western countries, is far more dreadful than what happened to religion in the Soviet Union: the rapid atheization, the expulsion of God from human life, disregard for the divine, the moral law," the patriarch said at a meeting with Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby in Moscow. There was a time when atheism was being planted in the Soviet Union, but "the weakness of that atheization consisted in the fact that it...

KUALA LUMPUR ― A Malaysian deputy minister on Thursday (Nov 23) claimed that atheism is a “very dangerous” ideology that goes against the country’s Federal Constitution. Mr Asyraf Wajdi Dusuki, a deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, said the ideology also goes against Malaysia’s Rukunegara that prescribes “Believe in God” as one of its tenets. The Rukunegara is a set of national principles formulated after the May 13 racial riots in 1969 to uphold Malaysia’s diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds. Mr Asyraf alleged that the freedom of religion in the Federal Constitution — which guarantees the freedom to worship...

Jessika Edwards told CNN that she and Devin Kelley worked together at Hollomon Air Force Base in New Mexico from 2010 to 2012. Kelley was released from the military on a bad-conduct discharge in 2014 after serving time for assaulting his wife and stepson. Edwards said that when the two made contact on Facebook in 2014, Kelley said he had been purchasing dogs through Craigslist and then using them for “target practice.” While in the Air Force, she said, Kelley was preoccupied with mass murders and made jokes about killing people. ..." In 2014, the same year he allegedly made...

A prominent advocate for the irreligious says there are at least 30 "closeted" members of Congress who don't believe in God, and that he hopes a California congressman's Thursday admission of disbelief will encourage others to come forward. The advocate, an advisory board member of the Secular Coalition for America, has for more than a decade plied private admissions of atheism from members of Congress with the promise of confidentiality, and said Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., is in good company. Huffman said in an interview published Thursday that “I suppose you could say I don’t believe in God,” though he's...

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...