Free Republic

Sophie Cruz's encounter with the pope during a parade in Washington this week looked to be one of those spontaneous, once-in-a-lifetime-moments Francis has become known for. But for 5-year-old Sophie, the chance to wrap her arm around the pope's neck as he offered a hug, kiss and a blessing unfolded as perfectly as it was scripted by members of a coalition of Los Angeles-based immigration rights groups. For nearly a year the group had been preparing the young girl from suburban Los Angeles to make a dash for the popemobile to deliver a message about the plight of immigrant parents...

ISLAM'S DOCTRINES OF DECEPTION by Raymond Ibrahim Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst October 2008 To better understand Islam, one must appreciate the thoroughly legalistic nature of the religion. According to sharia (Islamic law) every conceivable human act is categorised as being either forbidden, discouraged, permissible, recommended, or obligatory. "Common sense" or "universal opinion" has little to do with Islam's notions of right and wrong. Only what Allah (through the Quran) and his prophet Muhammad (through the Hadith) have to say about any given issue matters; and how Islam's greatest theologians and jurists – collectively known as the ulema, literally, "they who...

The False Pope, In Great Need For the Church, Will Fall Silent! “In This Supreme Moment Of Need For The Church, The One Who Should Speak Will Fall Silent”! (Our Lady of Good Success in Quito, Ecuador, on January 20, 1610). Dear friends, As we know, it is very important to struggle everyday to seek the Truth in a world filled with confusion, sown by “the father of lies” (Jn 8:44), more than ever before. As I wrote at the beginning of my main blog site (http://josephdwight.blogspot.com): “I do not think it was by chance that when Pope John Paul...

Koran teaches the concept of "Tiqqiya," strategic lying As the debate concerning the merits of the Obama Iran deal becomes ever more animated, may I suggest that we consider the moral basis upon which the Iranian negotiators predicated their every statement When I was a child attending the New York City public school system in an America that believed in the theory of the “melting pot,” I recall reading a book about a genteel, well mannered, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant family living in a white frame house surrounded by a beautiful garden edged with a white picket fence. The family consisted...

A Brief Biblical Manual on the Problem of Deception Msgr. Charles Pope • August 13, 2015 • 0 Comments A great clarion call goes up quite often in Scripture: “Do not be deceived!” And indeed, this call must go up as never before, for we live in times of great deception. So many have been deceived about marriage, sexuality, life, the existence of God, and what our life is really all about. And while our current times show widespread deception, it must also be noted that deceiving and being deceived are common human tendencies, especially in our fallen condition. Scripture...

The latest video from the Center for Medical Progress delves further into Planned Parenthood’s grisly business of selling the body parts of aborted babies. This video was actually shot inside a Planned Parenthood clinic, which will of course make it even harder for Cecile Richards and the abortion lobby to spin this as being fake or “deceptively edited.” The Vice President and Medical Director of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, Dr. Savita Ginde, can be seen dissecting a baby aborted in the first trimester while discussing receiving payment for each organ. Aside from the obvious exploitation of innocent lives...

By lying and withholding information about the agreement, he gives aid and comfort to America’s enemy. The president “must certainly be punishable for giving false information to the Senate.” One can imagine hearing such counsel from a contemporary United States senator on the receiving end of President Obama’s “full disclosure” of the nuclear deal with Iran. But the admonition actually came from James Iredell, a champion of the Constitution’s ratification, who was later appointed to the Supreme Court by President George Washington. Iredell was addressing the obligations the new Constitution imposed on the president in the arena of international affairs....

Millions of sincere Catholics wear the brown scapular thinking by doing so it will help them spiritually. They believed the report that Mary made and is backing a salvation promise in connection with the brown scapular hundreds of years ago based on their religious traditions. Over the years wearing the brown scapular has been perpetuated by sincere Catholic leaders, such as the one in this video, but it is in complete futility that it is worn. It is a false hope and a spiritual snare. It is not based on God’s truth and is, therefore, just as deadly for...

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), a 2016 GOP presidential candidate, said he believes that President Barack Obama’s first executive amnesty for so-called DREAMers—the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—is “important” and he won’t reverse it himself if elected president. He delivered these remarks in a Spanish-language interview he gave to Univision’s Jorge Ramos. “I believe DACA is important. It can’t be terminated from one moment to the next, because there are already people benefiting from it,” Rubio said in Spanish on Ramos’s television program, according to an English translation provided by the media service Grabien. “But yes, it is going to...

Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s just-announced presidential campaign was in large measure base on three pillars; his compelling immigrant family story, his claim on conservative support as one of the 2010 Tea Party wave election’s brightest stars and his commitment of righting the foreign policy failures and world chaos wrought by President Obama and his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Yet, in his first post announcement test – the vote on the dangerous Iran nuclear weapons treaty bill put forward by Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker – Rubio voted for that dangerous bill and failed to take...

The world is becoming more religious, as the number of agnostics and others who don't affiliate with a certain religion shrinks as a percentage of the global population. By 2050, just 13 percent of people in the world will say they are unaffiliated, compared with 16 percent who said the same in 2010, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. The United States is an exception, where more Americans are expected to flee organized religion. Numbers for all of the world's major religions, except Buddhism, are expected to rise as the population does the same. Islam will grow faster...

2 Peter 2:1 But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. I am sad at the news of fellow Iowan Dr. Robert Schuller and pray for the comfort of the Lord on his family. However, I am very concerned for his soul. Dr. Robert Schuller was a prolific false teacher whose errant teachings destroyed thousands, if not millions (especially old ladies who could not drive to church who clung to...

Cards and board games are a big part of Utah culture -- perhaps it comes with the Nerdiest State title -- and Kickstarter is usually swimming with projects and ideas for new entertainment. At the moment, Kickstarter has 645 live projects involving games, with names and genres ranging from Dungeonmancer and Demon Lord to Assumptions and the recently completed and funded game Exploding Kittens (which received $8.7 million in pledges, making it the fourth highest funded project in Kickstarter history). Needless to say, even though there are hundreds of games being thrown at consumers out there, there's still demand and...

Peek behind the curtain of some "progressive" or "hip" evangelical churches, past the savvy technology and secular music, and you will find more than just a contemporary worship service. You'll find faith leaders encouraging young evangelicals to trade in their Christian convictions for a gospel filled with compromise. They're slowly attempting to give evangelicalism an "update"—and the change is not for the good. It's painful for me to admit, but we can no longer rest carefree in our evangelical identity—because it is changing. No doubt you have seen the headlines declaring that evangelicalism is doomed because evangelical kids are leaving...

FacebookTwitterEmailMore Obama, like many before him, excuses Islamic State because the Christians did it first President Obama took to the floor during Thursday morning’s National Prayer Breakfast. He defended IS by saying the Christians did it first with the Crusades. So let’s actually look at how Islamic Jihad has spread across North Africa and Europe.  The image above shows the Muslim conquest battles and by comparison, the image below shows the areas where the Crusades took place.That seems a lot less than President Obama would have you believeNow what the short video that explains the difference between an aggressive Muslim expansion...

China launched a secret 100-year modernization program that deceived successive U.S. administrations into unknowingly promoting Beijing’s strategy of replacing the U.S.-led world order with a Chinese communist-dominated economic and political system, according to a new book by a longtime Pentagon China specialist. For more than four decades, Chinese leaders lulled presidents, cabinet secretaries, and other government analysts and policymakers into falsely assessing China as a benign power deserving of U.S. support, says Michael Pillsbury, the Mandarin-speaking analyst who has worked on China policy and intelligence issues for every U.S. administration since Richard Nixon. The secret strategy, based on ancient Chinese...

Imagine this: A man woos a woman to bed with tales of his riches, fast cars and a vacation home in Monaco. But he actually lives in his mother’s basement. Or this: A seemingly wealthy widow convinces a younger man to sleep with her on the notion that they may marry and he’ll inherit her money. In reality, she’s broke. In both cases, someone lied about his or her status in order to have sex with someone else. Under a bill recently proposed by a south Jersey lawmaker, such actions would not only be considered dishonest. They could prompt charges...

The White House is tired of hearing about Jonathan Gruber’s comments. Everyone is getting “pretty tired of relitigating” Gruber's comments — everyone except Republicans, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday. Gruber’s comments that the Affordable Care Act was passed because of the “stupidity” of the American voter is not shared by “anybody at the White House,” Earnest said, adding very few Americans are paying attention to the narrative. “Some Republicans are fanning the flames of those old political arguments because it's politically advantageous. It's easier for them to talk about six-to-eight-year-old videos than to talk about how the...

Nature of a regime that is heir to a tradition of misdirection and deception When Putin met Harper at the G-20 this week, it is said that the Russian leader insisted to the Canadian Prime Minister that there were no Russian troops in the Ukraine. Last week also saw a Moscow television station insisting they had dramatic footage proving that the MH-17 flight downed over the Ukraine last July was actually shot down by a Ukrainian fighter plane; and not by a drunken Cossack in command of a Russian SAM battery. Ah, Russia… some things just never change. Russia is...

It’s not exactly the Ems Dispatch (the diplomatic cable Bismarck doctored to provoke the 1870 Franco-Prussian War). But what the just-resurfaced Gruber Confession lacks in world-historical consequence, it makes up for in world-class cynicism. This October 2013 video shows MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, a principal architect of Obamacare, admitting that, in order to get it passed, the law was made deliberately obscure and deceptive. It constitutes the ultimate vindication of the charge that Obamacare was sold on a pack of lies. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” said Gruber. “Basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter...