Free Republic

“Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!”That was the first line in my Soviet textbooks when I was a little girl growing up in the USSR. Does that line sound familiar? Maybe too familiar. Think back to the Bible. Depending on the translation, the line reads something like this: Christ died, Christ is risen, Christ shall come again. The similarity is intentional. Communists came to power over Christians in Soviet Russia. They knew that they needed to replace the Christian beliefs with something familiar to the people, to ease the transition. So they replaced Jesus with Lenin. It is thus not...

What is happening in China? Why is Chinese leader Xi Jinping, raging against religion, including Buddhism, Islam, and especially Christianity? Psalm 2 poses the question rhetorically, in the context of what has proven to be a historic phenomenon: Why are the nations in an uproar (a rage) And the peoples devising a vain thing? The kings of the earth take their stand And the rulers take counsel together Against the Lord and against His Anointed, saying ‘Let us tear their fetters apart And cast away their cords from us!’ From Nero to Lenin and Stalin, Hitler, the Kims of North...

The ugly specter of religious bigotry reared its disgusting head during Senate confirmation of the nomination of Brian Buescher for a federal judgeship. The Constitution’s Article VI, Clause 3 clearly specifies that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States,” but that must be news to Senators Mazie Hirono and Kamala Harris. Ed Condon of the Catholic News Agency reports:  A judicial nominee faced questions from Senators this month about whether membership in the Knights of Columbus might impede his ability to judge federal cases fairly. The...

George Opudo used to drive for Uber. Picking up and dropping off customers at Union Station in Washington, just steps away from the U.S. Capitol, he’d look at homeless people and think: “That’d never be me.” But in September 2017, Opudo lost his car, his job, and all of his worldly possessions. With no place to go and no food to eat, Opudo was homeless. “I was so hungry, I didn’t know what to do,” Opudo told The Daily Signal. Walking around Union Station, he asked a woman where he could find some food. “She said, ‘Go down to the...

A city has banned all public celebrations of Christmas to avoid "spreading Christianity" and ordered the removal of all festive displays, decorations, and references from public view to keep the streets "clean." Residents in Langfang, a city near Beijing, China will no longer be able to carry out any related religious activities, in what is the latest attempt to clamp down on Christians in the region.

A new study from Lifeway Research reveals that “most Americans want more religious meaning to the Christmas season.” Sixty-five percent of those surveyed said, “Christmas should be more about Jesus.”While that might sound like good news for Christians, the number of Americans who want to “keep Christ in Christmas” - while still a majority - is quickly declining. Just four years ago, 79% of Americans (14% more than this year) agreed that “Christmas should be more about Jesus.”The new survey also confirms another interesting fact about the cultural shift taking place in America. According to the data, the number of...

God’s Name Will Not be Mentioned By Philip Cottraux I personally think there’s no such thing as an atheist. Deep down inside, everyone knows there’s a God. Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness (Romans 2:15). The reality is they don’t believe He doesn’t exist; they hate Him. The war against everything related to God, the intense hatred of all religion, and the burning desire to scrub any mention of His name from society betrays their true feelings. The murky reference to “separation of church and state” is a thinly-veiled false...

MOSCOW, Russia - The Russian Orthodox church on Friday called on Pope Francis, the United Nations, the leaders of Germany and France, and other spiritual leaders to protect believers in Ukraine in the face of pressure on Moscow-affiliated clerics. Ukraine’s Orthodox clerics will gather for a meeting Saturday that is expected to form a new, independent Ukrainian church, and Ukrainian authorities have ramped up pressure on priests to support the move. The Ukrainian church has been part of the Russian church for centuries, while enjoying broad autonomy, but Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has pushed for the creation of an independent...

A strange thread runs through the most prominent women associated with Jesus: they are all women of, shall we say, ill repute. Most of their notorious reputations spring from sexual scandals. What does this say about Christ? An awful lot. If your habit is to skip over the genealogies in the first chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, you may have missed a treasure buried in this list of forty fathers who comprise Jesus’s ancestry (if we count Joseph), stretching as far back as Abraham. The hidden treasure is the five women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Jesus’s mother, Mary. Why are...

Weakening of the family generally occurs in an environment of weakening of religion. As France is gripped by civil disorder, many commentators identify, quite correctly, as the culprit the outsized burden that France's bloated welfare state places on its citizens. According a recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the highest tax burden in the industrialized world is in France — 46.1 percent of GDP. In the United States, it is 27 percent, which includes taxes paid at all levels of government — federal, state and local. Welfare state spending in France is 32 percent of GDP,...

Do you tend to avoid studying books of the Bible like Revelation and Ezekiel? Does it feel like words such as rapture and apocalypse fly right over your head? It’s common to dismiss these and other topics related to Bible prophecy as irrelevant or too complicated.Bible Gateway interviewed Todd Hampson (@thampson) about his book, The Non-Prophet’s Guide™ to the End Times: Bible Prophecy for Everyone (Harvest House Publishers, 2018).Explain the title of the book and its format.Todd Hampson: The Non-Prophet’s Guide™ to the End Times features a comical character known as the Non-Prophet. He always gets prophecy wrong and doesn’t...

St. Edmond Catholic Church parishioners are calling out Rehoboth officials for allowing the installation of a well-known nativity scene at the Bandstand and then, less than 48 hours later, forcing them to take it down. “We have a Christmas tree there, why can’t we have a creche up?” said St. Edmond parishioner Patty Derrick during an interview Dec. 6.

Well, it’s time for a good Christmas rant. This requires a rant, because every year, we see the same ignorant silliness. (Sorry, but it’s just true.) Supposedly, Christmas is secretly pagan, secretly syncretist, secretly a co-opting of pagan stuff and ignorantly claiming it to be Christian. But the truth about these things is so available that it’s literally staring out at you even from Wikipedia. Well, if you are one of the people who says this stuff, I’ve got a lot of problems with you people. Let the airing of grievances begin. (And it’s not even Festivus yet!)

Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Tom Perez on Wednesday complained that voters are influenced by what they hear in church on Sundays. Perez claimed that Republicans have an advantage because “people buy” what they hear at church.

Hi everyone! It's Wednesday night Bible study!For this week's Why the New Testament was Written video, we're talking about why Paul wrote the second letter to Timothy. I consider it to be the saddest book of the New Testament, as Paul's farewell letter to the church and to the world in general. This is part 15 of the series (should be three more to go...next week is II Peter, then Jude, then finally Revelation).Why Paul Wrote II TimothyVideo clocks in at 9:29.

Former Los Angeles Dodgers general manager and vice president Kevin Malone is a passionate man. It may well have been his passion that led to a confrontation with a fan in San Diego in 2001 that later resulted in his resignation from the senior circuit ballclub and proved to be the last moments of his 17-year Major League Baseball career. But in the years following Malone’s departure from baseball, God pointed his passionate heart toward a new area of interest, one that he wasn’t really fully aware of until he went on a trip to Thailand with his pastor at...

Why David was Spared but Uzziah Wasn’t By Philip Cottraux As Jesus and His disciples were traveling, they plucked ears of corn to eat. This happened to occur on the Sabbath, giving the Pharisees yet another reason to criticize Him. Mark 2:24: And the Pharisees said unto him, Behold, why do they on the Sabbath day that which is not lawful? While remembering to keep the Sabbath was important, nothing in the Torah specifically banned hungry people from picking crops; but this shows the state of Jewish leadership at the time; over the years, they had added man-made rules to...

Over the last decade, America has moved drastically to the left. Not only are more people on the left than ever before, the left is further left than it’s ever been. This radical brand of progressivism has come to be known as “leftism”—an extreme yet increasingly dominant segment of the political spectrum.At the same time, America has grown more secular. According to Pew, “religious nones” are rapidly growing in number. These “nones” are most concentrated among millennials: 36% of millennials are religiously unaffiliated. Millennials happen to also be America’s most politically progressive generation.This probably isn’t a coincidence, especially since the same...

Full Title: Producer: My Christian Film Got Rated ‘R.’ It Has No Nudity, Sex, Bad Language, Gore, Drugs. The Motion Picture Association of America adds its name to a list of increasingly brazen leftist media powerhouses who discriminate against conservative voices in the public square. Facebook: Graphic images of a woman smashing and eating a baby do not violate “community standards” but quoting a Bible verse on homosexuality does. Twitter: Conservative voices and alternative news sources frequently find themselves muzzled while profane rants against them are celebrated. Google: Discriminatory algorithms ensure that articles praising the Second Amendment, President Trump, traditional...

Brazil's New Top Diplomat: Climate Change is a Marxist Hoax By Michael W. Chapman | November 28, 2018 | 3:23 PM EST Brazil's new, incoming foreign minister, Ernesto Araujo. (YouTube) Brazil's newly appointed foreign minister, Ernesto Frago Araujo, who starts his new job in January under President Jair Bolsonaro, has stated that the climate change issue was invented by "cultural Marxists" to help push a globalist agenda that is anti-growth and anti-Christian, reported The Guardian and the Daily Mail.  The Bolsonaro administration will take over Brazil's government on January 1, 2019. Bolsonaro selected Araujo to be minister of foreign affairs on...