Free Republic

Thousands of Christian villagers in China have been told to take down displays of Jesus, crosses, and gospel passages from their homes as part of a government propaganda effort to “transform believers in religion into believers in the party.” The news comes weeks after the CPC held its national congress, where Xi continued to consolidate party power and passed a historic measure to write his political philosophy into its constitution. SCMP called Xi “the country’s most powerful leader since Mao” Zedong, who also developed a personality cult through portraits in Chinese homes. The news outlet also noted Xi’s efforts to...

What Does It Mean to Die? When Jahi McMath was declared brain-dead by the hospital, her family disagreed. Her case challenges the very nature of existence. (New Yorker is not allowed to be posted)

A professor of religious studies at Michigan State University recently argued that white people who practice yoga are guilty of enjoying a “system of power, privilege, and oppression.”

Critics accuse it of threatening the separation of church and state; in truth, Washington’s new museum makes an invaluable contribution to American (and Jewish) cultural literacy.

Fearing that America was one step closer to becoming a theocracy with the opening of the privately-funded Museum of the Bible in Washington D.C., on Thursday and Friday, CBS This Morning and NBC’s Today hyped the supposed “controversy” swirling around the institution, even claiming that a “cloud of suspicion” hung over the building as it opened its doors. “Coming up on CBS This Morning, I’ll tell you why this museum is generating some controversy. It’s just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol,” warned correspondent Chip Reid on Thursday. Introducing the segment minutes later, co-host Charlie Rose emphasized that the...

One year from today, Washington, D.C. will see the latest addition to its plethora of museums. The Museum of the Bible will open in November 2017 and is sure to draw millions of people from all over the world. The Museum of the Bible will not only be Washington, D.C.’s newest museum but it will also be one of the best. It will catalogue the thousands year old history of the Bible in a way that will be appealing to both the academic and the lay person, to the spiritually inclined and the non-believer, and to adults and children....

The National Mall may be the nation's front lawn, but even at holiday time the museums that line it are only lightly decorated with Christmas trees and lights and not with any religious displays. But a new privately-owned museum is going up just a few blocks away - the Museum of the Bible - that only wants to celebrate Scripture.

Some intriguing details from NPR: In Washington, D.C., construction is underway on the Museum of the Bible, an eight-story, $400 million enterprise funded by Hobby Lobby president Steve Green.Green is a Pentecostal known for donating to conservative evangelical universities and developing a public school curriculum based on the Bible. After the craft store’s controversial victory in this summer’s Supreme Court ruling over contraception, some people worry the new museum will come across as evangelical propaganda. But organizers behind Green’s latest venture say it won’t be a memorial to evangelism.The Museum of the Bible will house the more than 40,000 artifacts...

When the Green family, founders of U.S. retail chain Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., purchased their first biblical artifact in November 2009, they never expected to assemble in only a few years what is now one of the world’s largest private collections of rare biblical texts, objects, and artifacts. Known as the Green Collection, the compilation of around 40,000 objects includes some of the rarest and most significant biblical texts and artifacts ever assembled under one roof. NOW THEY WANT TO SHARE THAT WITH ALL AMERICANS, BUILDING A BIBLE MUSEUM JUST IN THE HEART OF OUR NATION. The museum in Washington,...

The billionaire owners of craft giant Hobby Lobby are under federal investigation for allegedly looting hundreds of ancient artifacts from the Middle East for use in their personal “Museum of the Bible,” according to a report. The Green family has been under investigation since 2011, the Daily Beast reports, when Memphis customs seized nearly 300 clay tablets en route to the Hobby Lobby headquarters in Oklahoma City. …

One of America’s most famously Christian businesses is amassing a vast collection of Biblical antiquities. The problem is some of them may have been looted from the Middle East. In 2011, a shipment of somewhere between 200 to 300 small clay tablets on their way to Oklahoma City from Israel was seized by U.S. Customs agents in Memphis. The tablets were inscribed in cuneiform—the script of ancient Assyria and Babylonia, present-day Iraq—and were thousands of years old. Their destination was the compound of the Hobby Lobby corporation, which became famous last year for winning a landmark Supreme Court case on...

Villagers say they’ll boycott St David’s Church, in Blaenporth, Ceredigion, Wales, in protest. Church bosses say pilates is OK, but not yoga, which ‘might be seen to be in conflict with Christian values and belief’.

Times reporter Michelle Goldberg notes the “well-documented resurgence of occultism among millennials.” In investigating this, she visited a “fashionable occult boutique” in Brooklyn, attending a presentation on witchcraft by an individual called Dakota Bracciale: Bracciale, who uses the gender-neutral pronouns they and them, grew up in an evangelical household — somewhere “between ‘Jesus Camp’ and snake handlers” — and said that the new atheism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens had a profound effect on their generation. But atheism wasn’t enough, said Bracciale: “It left this huge vacuum, and that vacuum had to be filled with something.” This is a...

In 1943 and 1944, thousands of Polish soldiers were stationed in the Middle East to prepare for a possible Nazi invasion. Many soldiers collected artifacts during this period, mostly coins but also clay lamps, figurines, glass vessels and even clay tablets with cuneiform inscriptions. Some of these finds were excavated by the soldiers themselves. Evidence of this can be seen in the Polish Cave at Tel Maresha, in Beit Guvrin National Park in central Israel, where a soldier evidently carved the Polish army emblem on a wall. Other parts of the collection were purchased at antiquities markets as souvenirs from...

In Matthew 11, Jesus expresses his frustration with the people in his native region who, despite witnessing his mighty works, refused to repent and believe the Gospel. He singled out the residents of Bethsaida, the home town of Peter, Andrew and Philip. “Woe to you, Bethsaida!” he declared. “For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you.” Other mentions of Bethsaida in the...

Israeli and French researchers to excavate ancient site of Kiryat Ye’arim, outside Jerusalem, one of the few unstudied biblical tels One of the few remaining unstudied major biblical sites, where according to the Bible the Ark of the Covenant was kept for two decades, will be excavated by archaeologists this summer for the first time. Organizers hope the anticipated study of Kiryat Ye’arim (also transliterated as Kiriath Jearim) will shed light on the site’s significance during the Iron Age, the period associated with the biblical account of King David. Kiryat Ye’arim is mentioned over a dozen times in the Bible...

A scene straight from the Temple of Solomon was recreated on Tuesday evening when Kohanim lit the menorah, but even more wondrous than this sight was the fragrance that accompanied the event: for the first time in 2,000 years, incense was burned in the Biblically prescribed manner. The Temple reenactment took place in the Gan Tekuma park adjacent to the Jewish Quarter inside of Jerusalem’s old city walls at 5:00 PM, just after sunset. The Kohanim (Jewish men of priestly descent) were dressed in priestly garments as described in the Bible.

The Unholy Alliance's propaganda train is never late. Jennifer Williams is a great enthusiast not just for Christmas,  but for the Muslim Jesus, about whom she is sure you have never heard, and she’s here to enlighten you: Christmas, as everyone knows, commemorates the birth of Jesus and is a major religious celebration for Christians around the world. But what many people don’t know is that Jesus is an important figure in Islam, too, even though most Muslims don’t celebrate Christmas (though some, especially some American Muslims, do). Actually, by now many Infidels all over the Western world do know...

Despite attempts by modern biblical scholarship to debunk the gospel account of three magi visiting the newborn Jesus in Bethlehem, the stories were “historically true” according to extensive research by author Dwight Longenecker. In his new book, Mystery of the Magi: The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men, Longenecker, a scholar and Catholic priest, states that an impartial study of the relevant data “shows beyond reasonable doubt” that the Magi of Matthew’s gospel were historical figures. For many years, Longenecker writes, skeptical scholars have rejected the possibility that the infancy stories about Jesus could be historical for a number...

It's one of the greatest artworks in the world, and now Chinese archaeologists and artists are using 3D printing to make a perfect copy of the Yungang Buddhist Grottoes. 'West Empress Chamber', the number 3 and the largest cave of Yungang Grottoes in northern China, have been meticulously re-created using specially developed 3D printers and state-of-the-art scanning technology. ... The original 'West Empress Chamber' was carved between the 5th and 6th century during the Northern Wei Dynasty - when the religion first flourished in China. The full-size replica is enormous, measuring 17.9 metres (59 feet) in length, 13.6 metres (45...