Free Republic

While President Obama attempted to eviscerate a wholly righteous anger in the hearts and minds of the American people earlier this week--he took to chastisement as his verbal bludgeon of choice. But that anger, is an anger that is directed at the Islamic State for more or less living up to the basic tenets of their holy book. Those who do not share a reverence for it, rightfully point out this hypocrisy with concern for the welfare of our own children. The President's choice of venues to express these sentiments was also quite odd. The National Prayer Breakfast was once...

For a little more than 100 years weÂ’ve had standardized IQ tests, and over those 100 years there has been a consistent, linear increase in IQ scores, on the order of 3 points per decade. According to IQ tests, we are getting smarter. Also over the last 100 years, rates of belief in God and religious participation have been decreasing. The decrease in religiosity has been less linear than the rise in IQ, but discounting periods of increased religiosity corresponding to major crises like WWI, the Great Depression and WWII, overall there has been a roughly corresponding decrease in...

Joshua DuBois, former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, appeared yesterday on MSNBC’s “UP with Steve Kornacki,” during which he defended President Obama’s profoundly insulting anti-Christian remarks at last Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast in the Nation’s Capital. The president admonished Christians not to think their faith somehow different than the faith that has produced ISIL (and al Qaeda and Boko Haram and Abu Sayyaf and Hamas and Hezbollah and all too many other Islamic terrorist groups). “Remember,” spake Obama, “during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” And...

Two days ago's Question Time on BBC1 was one of the worst I've ever seen, beating its own record of mendacious and appalling programmes. The panellist George Galloway described fascism as a "Christian phenomenon", whereas it's a well-established historical fact that Nazism was neo-pagan, tried to destroy Christianity in Germany and persecuted Christian clergy and churches. The very symbol of the SS, the SS bolts or Runic "SS" (), consisted of runes, signs popular in Germanic neopaganism. Nazism wanted to replace Christianity with a "völkisch" (folkish or racial) cult, a moral doctrine derived from the pre-Christian, pagan Germanic heritage....

"Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ." These words from the President of the United States, during remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, have caused an uproar in religious circles -- and rightly so -- in spite of the administration's attempts to downplay the nature of his words. You don't have to be a longtime critic of the president to see that his deflecting attention away from modern-day evil during a rare occasion to...

AFP PHOTO / JIJI PRESS On June 8, 1972, a plane bombed the village of Trang Bang in South Vietnam, after the pilot mistook a group of civilians for enemy troops. The bombs contained Napalm, a highly flammable substance which killed and badly burned the people on the ground. The famous black and white photo of children fleeing the burning village won the Pulitzer Prize and was chosen as the "World Press Photo of the Year" in 1972. It became the symbol of the horrors of the Vietnam war, and of every war’s cruelty to children and civilians. The...

Atheist Richard Dawkins has declared, "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. ... DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music." But Dawkins doesn't act like he actually believes that. He recently affirmed a woman has the right to choose an abortion and asserted that it would be "immoral" to give birth to a baby with Down syndrome. According to Dawkins, the "right to choose" is a good thing and...

The number one issue at President Obama’s private meeting with Muslim leaders on Wednesday was the rise of Islamophobia in America, not the threat of Islamic terrorism, according to sources in the room with the president. Comedian Dean Obeidallah wrote that he attended the event and found the main topic to be discrimination against Muslims by their fellow Americans. “In fact, it was clearly the No. 1 issue raised: The alarming rise in anti-Muslim bigotry in America,” Obeidallah wrote for the Daily Beast. “My point was that while bigotry from certain Republicans is nothing new, I’m alarmed about the Democratic...

There is a difference, Mr. President, between Christian extremism and Muslim extremism. Christian extremism was in the 1400s. Muslim extremism was Wednesday. One is a dark era in the history books, the other is a threat to modernity as we know it. At the National Prayer Breakfast yesterday, after bowing to the Dalai Lama, President Obama – apologist in chief for Islam – talked about protecting the reputation of the Muslim world. Then he minimized the evil of militant Islam by bringing up the Spanish Inquisition and even Jim Crow, citing them as counterbalancing examples of Christian terrorism. In his...

President Obama has never been one to go easy on America. As a new president, he dismissed the idea of American exceptionalism, noting that Greeks think their country is special, too. He labeled the Bush-era interrogation practices, euphemistically called “harsh” for years, as torture. America, he has suggested, has much to answer given its history in Latin America and the Middle East. His latest challenge came Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast. At a time of global anxiety over Islamist terrorism, Obama noted pointedly that his fellow Christians, who make up a vast majority of Americans, should perhaps not be...

If you were to engage in a debate about religious violence with your average high school senior, you might encounter the claim that the modern scourge of religiously-inspired barbarity attributable to those who consider themselves Muslims is no historical anomaly. They might contend that the Christian world engaged in its own form of fundamentalism at the turn of the first millennium when the medieval European world embarked on a campaign to liberate the Middle Eastern territories conquered by Muslim armies. Having erected a dubious moral equivalency, your interlocutor is likely to then insist that it is hypocritical for Westerners to...

Walker's views disturb Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation."It is frightening that the highest executive in our state suffers from the delusion that God dictates his every move," she says. "Consider the personal and historic devastation inflicted by fanatics who think they are acting in the name of their deity."The dogmatic unwillingness of Wis. Gov. Scott Walker to negotiate or to compromise with Democrats or unions has surprised many people in the state. One explanation for his attitude may be found in his religious convictions. In a talk to the Christian Businessmen's Committee in Madison on...

Barack Obama lashed out at Christians today at the Annual Prayer Breakfast. The President used his warped version of the Crusades to bash Christians. He also blamed slavery and Jim Crow laws on Christians? Seriously? The president: “Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place. Remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. And our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.” Slavery ended here...

At the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama reminded attendees that violence rooted in religion isn’t exclusive to Islam, but has been carried out by Christians as well. ~snip~ “Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

Hundreds of thousands of German Christians are formally renouncing their faith and leaving the church in order to escape a controversial change in the tax laws. Up to 200,000 Germans are believed to have filed official declarations last year renouncing their membership of the Protestant church, the highest number in almost two decades. A similar number are thought to have left the Catholic Church. Church members in Germany are required by law to pay tax to fund church activities, which is collected by the government. Under German law, anyone who was baptised as a child is automatically a member of...

Egyptian Christians have seen notable gains under the government of President Abd al-Sisi, the spokesman for the country’s bishops tells the AsiaNews service. Father Rafic Greiche pointed to three new building permits for Catholic churches. He reported that permits for Christian churches were never granted during the rule of former President Hosni Mubarak, nor under the government that followed him, which was dominated by Islamic fundamentalists. Some applications for permits to build churches date back more than a decade, Father Greiche said.

Full Title:Christian Woman Takes Over Podium at Muslim Event: “Islam Will Never Dominate the United States and by the Grace of God, it Will Never Dominate Texas.” A Christian woman took over the podium at the 11th annual Texas Muslim Capitol Day event on Thursday and declared, “”Islam will never dominate the United States and by the grace of God, it will never dominate Texas.” That January 30,2015 was Texas Muslim Capital Day in Austin doesn't make for an encouraging sign. You already know this bold and brave woman from an earlier stand she took at the National Cathedral in...

The Italian government in the state of Northern Lombardy has made a new law: no new mosques will be allowed to be built. According to the report: Milan, January 22 – A regional government commission in the northern Lombardy region on Thursday approved a bill that would limit the opening of new, non-Catholic places of worship. The so-called anti-mosque bill submitted by the regionalist, anti-immigrant and anti-euro Northern League party of Governor Roberto Maroni would also impose security cameras in places of worship. The bill has sparked opposition from the center left and from civil liberties advocates. The bill specifically...

The "C-word" is, of course, Christ. Anita Dittman survived Hitler and the Nazis. Born Jewish, she became a Christian during the Holocaust. And it's that part of her story which is verboten in public schools today. WND: Jews met their death, gave her cause to reflect once again on life under the Nazis. Her message is different now, she says, much different than when she first went public in 1978 with her experience as a Holocaust survivor. Could it happen here? “When I started speaking in 1978-79, people would ask me, ‘Do you think it could happen here in this...

A small, but elite group of Americans demonstrate signs of anti-Christian hostility, sociologists David Williamson and George Yancey claim in their new book, So Many Christians, So Few Lions: Is There Christianophobia in the United States? In an email interview with The Christian Post, Yancey, professor of sociology at the University of North Texas, explained that Christians are fortunate in one sense, because those with anti-Christian hostility are small in number; but in another sense, they should be concerned, because those with "Christianophobia" tend to be powerful elites with influence in certain important areas, such as higher education. The data...