Free Republic

The Good Book has been banished from rooms at a hotel operated by Arizona State University. The religious cleansing of the Thunderbird Executive Inn took place after the Freedom From Religion Foundation complained. It was a story first reported by Billy Hallowell of Deseret News. “Providing Bibles to Inn guests sends the message that ASU endorses the religious texts,” attorney Madeline Ziegler wrote to the university. The FFRF is a group of perpetually offended atheists and agnostic whack-a-doodles from Wisconsin. They are very unpleasant and very litigious people. “State-run colleges have a constitutional obligation to remain neutral toward religion,” Ziegler...

A group of pastors is suing Illinois over a law that bars therapists from trying to change a minor’s sexual orientation. The lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court seeks to exclude clergy from the ban that took effect Jan. 1. The lawsuit contends the prohibition shouldn’t apply to clergy because it violates free speech and religious rights. Illinois is among five states with bans on so-called gay conversion therapy for youth under 18. Laws in California and New Jersey have withstood legal challenges, but an attorney for the pastors says the prohibitions in those states did not include clergy. Critics...

Catholic Cardinal Kurt Koch, who heads the Vatican’s office for ecumenical relations, said that Christians “have a mission to convert all non-Christian religions’ people,” including Muslims, to Christianity, with the exception of those who follow Judaism because of its unique, familial relationship with Christianity: both religions “have the same roots.” For Muslims, he added, the “Islamic tradition” in terms of the Abrahamic religions “is not the same.” […] “It is very clear that we can speak about three Abrahamic religions, but we cannot deny that the view of Abraham in the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition and the Islamic...

Speranza points out another difficulty with the impact-origins theory. Large blocks of limestone sit within the boundaries of the Sirente "crater." Such limestone would not have survived an impact. So if Ormö's theory is correct, one must surmise that somebody set these giant chunks of rock in place since the crater formed. To Speranza, that just didn't make sense. Speranza and colleagues further argue that Ormö's radiocarbon dating gave one age for the main feature (placing it in the 4th or 5th century a.d.) and a completely different age for a nearby "crater" called C9, a date in the 3rd...

A metallic asteroid may have coincided with the fall of Rome, says Duncan Steel Thursday February 6, 2003 The Guardian In the early fifth century, rampaging Goths swept through Italy. Inviolate for 1,100 years, Rome was sacked by the hordes in 410 AD. St Augustine's apologia, the City of God, set the tone for Christians for the next 16 centuries. But the Rome of that era came close to suffering a far worse calamity. A small metallic asteroid descended from the sky, making a hypervelocity impact in an Apennine valley just 60 miles east of the city. This bus-sized lump...

It is a fact that Islam is growing rapidly in the West. In the U.S. alone the number of Muslims has risen dramatically, from about 10,000 in 1900 to 3 million or more in 1991 (some authorities say 4.5 million). Most of this growth is due to recent immigration and the high birth rate of Muslims (5 children per family on average), rather than to conversion. Still, the number of those who convert to Islam is significant. In the U.S., the majority are African-American (a third of all Muslims according to most authorities), but there have also been significant numbers...

Pope Francis has concluded his historic meeting with Patriach Kirill of Moscow and All Russia in Cuba this past week. Their Joint Declaration calls for Catholic and Russian Orthodox to stand together in support of persecuted Christians, and also to give a joint witness in favor of life and traditional marriage. There are many good things in this document, but paragraphs 24 and 25 in particular caught my attention vis-a-vis their implications for ecumenism. Here are the paragraphs in question: 24. Orthodox and Catholics are united not only by the shared Tradition of the Church of the first millennium, but...

When we think of religious persecution, the Middle East comes to mind. But the world's largest democracy? At this time last year, I urged BreakPoint listeners to pay close attention to the state of religious freedom around the world in 2015. I said that this most important of freedoms was in peril at home as well as abroad. Little has changed in the past twelve months. If anything, the state of religious freedom is even more precarious, as events in India amply demonstrate. Normally, when we think about the persecuted Church, what comes to mind are places like the Middle...

A Jewish group offering therapy for same-sex attraction will be ceasing operations in January as a result of a lawsuit filed against it in New Jersey. Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing, also called JONAH International, sent an email to supporters on New Year's Eve announcing the closure. "The N.J. court delivered its final judgement on Dec. 18, 2015. Under the order, JONAH must permanently cease operations, including providing referrals and operating its website and listserv,"read the email. "That means that our site, www.jonahweb.org, will no longer be available online after mid- January 2016, and neither of us will be...

Trust me, I know that it is hard to write accurate, easy-to-read articles about complicated Vatican theological documents. This is especially true when dealing with materials focusing on very nuanced issues that continue to cause behind-the-scenes debates among Catholics. It's even harder to write informative, catchy and, yes, accurate headlines for these kinds of stories. This brings me to a recent New York Times report that ran with this headline: "Vatican Says Catholics Should Not Try to Convert Jews." The problem with that headline is that it is simplistic to the point of being inaccurate -- that is, if the...

Video footage of Muslim missionaries preaching and converting Africans in the Christian-majority states of Malawi and Uganda, show the Islamic leaders teaching the people to "bear witness" that Allah is god, his messenger is Muhammed, and "Jesus is the slave of Allah and his Messenger." Many of the people repeating the Islamic instructions are young but there are also many middle-aged and older people and, in one case, an apparently former Christian teen who is ordered to tear a crucifix from around his neck and "bear witness" to Allah. ...

She worked for the Clinton administration, became a liberal pundit for the Daily Beast and a regular Democratic contributor to Fox News. On top of that, all her friends were agnostics or atheists. So when God pursued and won her reluctant heart, she was more surprised than anyone else. "If there was one thing in which I was completely secure, it was that I would never adhere to any religion-especially to evangelical Christianity, which I held in particular contempt," writes Kirsten Powers, in a first-person account of her conversion published in Christianity Today. The daughter of archeologist parents, she attended...

In Germany, hundreds of Muslim refugees are turning to Christ at a Berlin church. The Evangelical Trinity Church has swelled from 150 to 600 members in just two years, and many are Muslims fleeing Iran and Afghanistan. Mohammed Ali Zonoobi, an Iranian asylum seeker, was recently baptised. "I feel like I am born again", he sobbed. Many of the refugees are seeking asylum in Germany and converting to Christianity can increase their chances of staying. If they're sent home, converts can be persecuted -- even put to death -- for leaving Islam. The church's pastor said he believes the power...

* Iranian and Afghan asylum seekers are taking three-month crash courses * Converting allows them to claim they would face persecution if sent home * Germany is expecting around 800,000 migrants this year - a 300% increase __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Muslim migrants are converting to Christianity in their droves in the hope it will greatly improve their chances of winning asylum in Germany. Hundreds of mostly Iranian and Afghan asylum seekers have changed faiths at the evangelical Trinity Church in a leafy Berlin neighbourhood alone. Many claim true belief prompted the move, but the decision undoubtedly boosts their chances of being granted...

 A Muslim flightattendant has filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEO) claiming she was suspended from her job for not serving alcohol — which is against her religious beliefs. Lena Masri, an attorney for the Council of American Islamic Relations Michigan (CAIR), says Charee Stanley followed management’s directions, working out an arrangement with her coworkers to accommodate passenger requests for alcohol. However, Masri said, ExpressJet Airlines put Stanley on administrative leave after another attendant filed “an Islamophobic complaint” that referenced Stanley’s head scarf. “We notified ExpressJet Airlines of its obligation under the law to reasonably accommodate Ms. Stanley’s religious beliefs,” Masri said at a news conference in Farmington Hills...

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. What made non-Muslims convert to Islam, leading to the creation of the Islamic world?   Early historical sources—both Muslim and non-Muslim—make clear that the Islamic empire was forged by the sword; that people embraced Islam, not so much out of sincere faith, but for a myriad of reasons—from converting in order to enjoy the boons of being on the “winning team” to converting in order to evade the dooms of being on the “losing team.” Modern day Muslims and other apologists—primarily in academia, government, and mainstream media—reject...

Republican presidential candidate and Texas Senator Ted Cruz reunited for the first time in decades with the pastor who baptized him and led his father to Jesus in the 1970s, during a campaign stop in Tennessee this week. For Cruz, he saw his stop through Murfreesboro on Monday to speak at a campaign rally as being more than just an opportunity to share his conservative views with potential voters. As Cruz took the stage to speak to the crowd, he had just one question for the audience. "I was told Pastor Gaylon Wiley was here. Is that right?" Cruz asked....

Nepal: HPI Note: This report is from a Christian website. Christians and Muslims in Nepal are criticizing the draft version of a new constitution that bans religious conversion. Spurred to action by the recent earthquake, Nepal's government introduced the draft for public comment on June 30, Reuters reported. The draft states that "any act which may be contrary to public health, public decency or morality or incitement to breach public peace or act to convert another person from one religion to another or any act or behavior to undermine or jeopardize the religion of each other is not allowed and...

Latinos are one of the fastest growing groups in the Muslim religion. The Pew Research Center says about six percent of American Muslims are Latino. And women make up a little more than half of the new converts -- the people who have changed their religion to Islam. On a recent Friday, men listened to their imam at Masjid Miami Gardens in Miami, Florida. This clergyman spoke about forgiveness. On the upper level of the Gardens, the women watch through glass. They hear the imam through a monitoring system. This is the world that Greisa Torres entered four years ago....

It has become a common occurrence over the years for Muslims in the Middle East who have converted to Christianity to claim to have been compelled to do so after dreaming of a person who they believe is Jesus Christ. Now, one militant belonging to the brutal Islamic State that has massacred Christians has converted to his victims' religion after dreaming of "a man in white" with a startling message, according to one missionary's account. "One of our YWAM workers in the Middle East was contacted by a friend earlier this year and they met up and he was introduced...