Free Republic

American Christian author Dr. Frank Turek notes that Cambridge-trained Ph.D. Stephen Meyer's New York Times best-seller, "Darwin's Doubt," is creating a major scientific controversy. Because Darwinists absolutely hate it, Meyer's well-reasoned argument that an intelligent designer is the best explanation for the evidence at hand elicits irrational accusations that Meyers is anti-scientific and guilty of endangering sexual freedom everywhere. (Darwin's Doubt, Turek, Townhall.com, July 09, 2013) Meyer writes, "Neo-Darwinism and the theory of intelligent design are not two different kinds of inquiry, as some critics have asserted. They are two different answers – formulated using a similar logic and method...

While Liberals wear the badge of self-righteous compassion on their sleeves, for the world to admire, some of us are looking beyond the hype for an explanation of this Obama philosophy that has trapped us in economic and moral doldrums for the last four years. Obama came to the national stage as a messianic figure; he could fix our problems and bring Americans together. Not even the most deluded Marxists among us are still clinging to that claptrap, but the human animal is resilient and clever, and the Liberal thinkers, as well as the simple minded, are looking desperately for...

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Arianne Gasser of Canton, Ohio, is proud to call herself a graduate student at a prestigious Catholic university, and she also is proud to call herself an atheist. The pride she has in her atheist status is part of what inspired her to travel from the Philadelphia area, where she is enrolled at Villanova University, to Washington in March to join thousands of other atheists, agnostics and other nonbelievers for the "Reason Rally," an event that was billed as an assembly to unify secular people nationwide. Carrying a sign that reads, "This is what an atheist looks...

The average American teenager's cultural diet of school, media, sports, and/or church is not preparing them to emerge as morally capable adults. Throughout American history, people have constantly worried about the moral fiber of young people, the next generation. The Puritans turned this worry into a whole new sermon genre, the "jeremiad." Just like the prophets of old, they thundered that the rising generation had turned away from God, become distracted by the things of this world, and gotten mired in sin. If people did not turn back to God, the Jeremiahs warned, judgment was coming.Christian Smith's recent Lost in...

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." Genesis 1:27, KJB For fifteen hundred years, Christendom and then later Protestant America, had followed St. Augustine (AD 354-430) in affirming that as all men are the spiritual image-bearers of the transcendent Triune God then it logically follows that each person is a trinity of being — of soul, spirit, and body: "The essence of the human is not the body, but the soul. It is the soul alone that God made in his own image and the...

Once a self-identified founding member of the American “religious right,” Franky Schaeffer now says that “religion is dumb” and “man made.” Although Schaeffer grew up among some of the most influential evangelicals of the twentieth century, and worked as one of them during much of his adult life, he now believes the Bible is a fraud and that Christianity teaches “misogynistic” practices. Schaeffer, the son of the late evangelical theologian, philosopher, and founder of the L’Abri Fellowship, Francis Schaeffer, discussed his newest book at the Kansas City Public Library on September 27, 2011. His recent book, Sex, Mom, and God:...

For more than a year, federal authorities pursued a man they called simply "the Hacker." Only after using a little known cellphone-tracking device—a stingray—were they able to zero in on a California home and make the arrest. Stingrays are designed to locate a mobile phone even when it's not being used to make a call. The Federal Bureau of Investigation considers the devices to be so critical that it has a policy of deleting the data gathered in their use, mainly to keep suspects in the dark about their capabilities, an FBI official told The Wall Street Journal in response...

Video The murderer, Jared Loughner, is a leftist, atheist, anarchist, nihilist, US hating, government hating, religion hating miscreant. Loughner on the Bible: "Earn money from a great lie" - that doesn't sound like a right winger! A 9/11 Truther!!!! Video puts his internet posts out as evidence.

28 Sep, 2010, 10.15AM IST,PTI Man leaves behind 1905-page suicide note shot himself at Harvard Yard on September 18. His family and about 400 friends received the 1,905-page suicide note in a posthumous e-mail. In the note Heisman wrote that he took his life as part of a philosophical exploration he called "an experiment in nihilism." The lengthy document included 1,433 footnotes, a 20-page bibliography, over 1,700 references to God and 200 references to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Heisman wrote, "Every word, every thought and every emotion come back to one core problem: life is meaningless... The experiment in...

The man who shot himself on the steps of Memorial Church Saturday morning had published online a 1,905-page document entitled “Suicide Note,” according to his mother. The death of Mitchell L. Heisman, a 35-year-old Somerville resident, on campus was met with shock, and University officials described the incident as “tragic.” “It’s really sad, it was horrible, and these kinds of incidents affect all of us really negatively,” Dean of the College Evelynn M. Hammonds said in an interview yesterday. “This campus is situated in an urban context, and we can’t control these kinds of things.” Born in New York City...

A glimpse of the analysis in Dr. Leonard Peikoff's forthcoming book, The DIM Hypothesis. At the 2010 Objectivist conference/OCON, Dr. Leonard Peikoff was presenting material from his forthcoming book, The DIM Hypothesis, in which he analyzes Western culture and history from the perspective of the epistemological process of integration. I was surprised to learn that, according to Peikoff’s analysis, Barack Obama is not, as I and others have been saying, a socialist or communist. Socialists or communists are examples of what Peikoff calls “misintegration,” or integration by non-rational means. Obama, Peikoff thinks, is anti-ideological, and as such has no...

As modern men and women — to the degree that we are modern — we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we venture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we measure the meaningfulness of our lives. Or, to phrase the matter more simply and starkly, our religion is one of very...

Barack Obama is proving himself to be a destructive nihilist with capitalism, the Constitution, the Rule of Law, and the traditional American experience in his crosshairs. In today's American culture there are other sorts of nihilism. Pop culture nihilists much more common, comprising a virtual demographic segment of self-satisfied know-nothings. Destructive nihilists are rarer, but more fearsome. They believe western civilization is so corrupt that wholesale destruction is the only solution. Nihilism, while easily abused by the casual thinker, is actually both political, and in a thunderingly empty way, deeply spiritual. Russian author Ivan Turgenev's character Bazarov explains in Fathers...

By far the movie’s gravest insult to posterity, however, is its treatment of the Texas Ranger captain, Frank Hamer, who may (or may not) have been instrumental in bringing them down. As seen in the movie, Hamer (played by Denver Pyle in an uncharacteristically dour performance) is a kind of harsh Puritan ideologue, so righteous that when Bonnie (whom Dunaway has made us love) flirtatiously poses for a funny snapshot with him, he spits savagely in her face. He considers her so morally tainted that he is sickened by her. Then later, like a serpent in a garden, he coos...

Nearly everyone cares—or says he cares—about art. After all, art ennobles the spirit, ­elevates the mind, and educates the emotions. Or does it? In fact, tremendous irony attends our culture’s continuing investment—emotional, financial, and social—in art. We behave as if art were something special, something important, something spiritually refreshing; but, when we canvas the roster of distinguished artists today, what we generally find is far from spiritual, and certainly far from refreshing. It is a curious situation. Traditionally, the goal of fine art was to make beautiful objects. The idea of beauty came with a lot of Platonic and Christian...

Leo Strauss (1899–1973), the father of Neoconservatism, predicted that liberalism must give way to relativism and that relativism must eventually give way to nihilism. My last essay discussed the world view of liberalism and the intellectual and psychological causes of its decline. This essay will introduce the subject of nihilism and track the two main routes by which liberals can change into nihilists.

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Barack Obama's foreign policy advisers said Tuesday that Osama bin Laden, if captured, should be allowed to appeal his case to U.S. civilian courts, a privilege opposed by John McCain. Responding to questions from The Examiner, Sen. John Kerry and former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke said bin Laden would benefit from last week's Supreme Court decision giving terrorism suspects habeas corpus, the right to appeal their military detention to civilian courts. “If he were to be brought back,” Clarke said of bin Laden, “the Supreme Court ruling holds on the right of habeas corpus.”...

According to American media reports (and what could be more reliable?) the hottest gift items for pre-school children in this year's Christmas buying season are: cellphones, laptops, digital cameras, and MP3 players. A New York Times item directs us to the “hottest toys list” at Amazon.com, and such products as the Easy Link Internet Launch Pad from Fisher-Price; and an exercise bike for toddlers, connected to a video game. The theme of, “get the kid staring at a screen,” runs right through the chart, and since the screens are interactive, let me take this opportunity to warn medical professionals to...

Apathy U by: Emily Mullin, November 27, 2007 “Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.” The quote was said by one of our most famous founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson. And although it was spoken over 200 years ago, the message is still applicable today. The world has changed slightly since the time of Thomas Jefferson, and so has the youth of America. Young people now live in a sort of bubble, a controlled environment called college. We permeate our brains with information five days a week and our livers with...

Another Theory of Relativity by: Malcolm A. Kline, November 06, 2007 Relativists, beware. The professors who tell you that “Everything is relative” probably fail to relate how destructive an idea that is. In an interview with Hillsdale College’s Imprimis magazine, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas noted “the connection between relativism, nihilism, and Naziism.” “The common idea that you can do whatever you want to do, because truth and morality are relative, leads to the idea that if you are powerful enough, you can kill people because of their race or faith,” Justice Thomas explains. “So ask your relativist friends sometime:...