Free Republic

Sometimes my natural skepticism asserts itself, but I cannot walk away. My father-in-law is one of the fairest, most patient, and most virtuous people that I know. He’s always available to help out, his capacity for forgiveness is immense, and when he’s unavailable it’s usually because he’s caring for or teaching people in his community. He’s intellectual honest, and he’s a profoundly decent human being. He’s also an atheist. He’s part of the reason why I have respect for people in the atheist community, and why when I write about atheism I usually have positive things to say. I don’t...

An atheist activist group is demanding an apology from a university chancellor over the contents of a video that he reportedly recently shared with students and staff members. American Atheists president David Silverman wrote a letter to Dr. Jack Hawkins, chancellor of Troy University in Troy, Alabama, on December 31, on behalf of a concerned student at the school who took issue with the video, which was reportedly included in the chancellor’s end-of-year email to students. The short clip featured comments from Clay Christensen, a noted professor at Harvard Business School, who discussed his views on religion and morality in American society. Christensen, a Mormon, said...

An Atheist Bus Campaign has arrived in New York. The ads, which say “You don’t have to believe in God to be a moral and ethical person,” underscored by the URL for the New York City Atheists Inc. Web site, will appear on about 20 city buses. Ken Bronstein, the president of New York City Atheists, a New York affiliate of American Atheists, planned the commercials. He said the posters will only run on Manhattan bus lines, and some members of his organization had already noticed them. The ads will remain on buses for about a month and will be...

DHP Review: Religulous Posted by Dirty Harry on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 While more entertaining and better paced, director Larry Charles‘ Religulous can’t help but remind of Morgan Spurlock’s dreadful Where In The World Is Osama bin Laden?, especially at the end where both films are undone by their attempts to close on serious points the preceding 90 minutes of antics simply can’t sustain. It’s surprising Charles let this one get away from him. After all, he also directed Borat, and one of the few saving graces of that humiliation-fest was that it never lost sight of the fact that...

The World Is Watching by Jennifer Fulwiler 8/21/08 It was only a few years ago that I began exploring Christianity after a life of atheism. I'll never forget the time I was up late at night, feeling lost and slightly depressed as I searched around the Internet for arguments in favor of God's existence, and I stumbled across a series of heated debates between atheists and Christians. I eagerly followed their back-and-forth comments well into the night, and witnessing this debate would end up marking a turning point in my life. It was one of the events that kick-started the...

A defense of lemmings is required. Sir Elton John's words, reprinted in the American-Statesman on Nov. 12, were still fresh in my mind as I sat in the church pew: "Organized religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into really hateful lemmings, and it's not really compassionate." The Gospel reading that day was about the widow who gave her last two coins to charity. The priest reminded us to follow her example, and then he turned the pulpit over to two missionaries. Those two lemmings have followed Christ right into poor villages in Guatemala and Mexico. They have built...

...........A federal judge who outlawed the teaching of "intelligent design" in Dover science classes told graduates at Dickinson College that the nation's founders saw religion as the result of personal inquiry, not church doctrine. U.S. District Judge John E. Jones gave the commencement address Sunday to 500 graduates at Dickinson College, his alma mater............... "The founders believed that true religion was not something handed down by a church or contained in a Bible, but was to be found through free, rational inquiry," said Jones, who was thrust into the national spotlight by last years court fight over the teaching of...

This is old, but a good article on myths and urban legends: I always approach an article like this one with a great deal of fear and apprehension. This journal has one basic premise on which it operates, and that is that science and faith do not and cannot conflict. If, in fact, "God created the heavens and the earth," and if God revealed Himself to us through His word the Bible, they have to agree. If they disagree, it is either because we have bad science or bad theology or both. The lesson of history is that there have...

BEIJING (Reuters) - China, which bans its Catholics from recognising the Pope, has turned down a Vatican invitation to four Chinese bishops to go to Rome, saying it showed no respect.  Beijing has not had diplomatic ties with the Vatican since 1951, two years after the Communist takeover in China, and insists that relations cannot be resumed unless Rome severs links with self-ruled Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own.  The four bishops invited to Rome were on a list of prelates from around the world that the Pope had named to be members of next month's synod, the Vatican...

Dear Dr. Johnson! Samuel Johnson, that is: eighteenth-century London's "literary dictator," most famous today for conversations he may not have even realized James Boswell was recording for a projected biography. Johnson also wrote poetry, of which only one couplet remains famous: How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! In this age of total government, these words remind us that government once played a far smaller part in men's lives than it now does. Under the rule of King George III, Americans paid only a few pennies per year in...

A Faith Near to Heaven A century and a half ago, French priests brought Catholicism to the Tibetan plateau. There it has endured, despite war, Maoism and rival religions. by HENRY CHU Times Staff Writer June 11 2002 CIZHONG, China -- They arrive on foot each Sunday, some walking as long as an hour. They come through the doorway in silence, then kneel, heads bowed, hands folded. Their prayers to Jesus echo off the cold stone walls; pictures of the Blessed Virgin gaze down from the church's pillars; the altar shimmers in the candlelight. It's a tableau of piety and...