Free Republic

Egypt's Coptic Christians will learn who is to be their new leader after a blindfolded altar boy, believed to be directed by God, chooses one of three names out of a box. The new Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of All Africa in the Holy See of St Mark the Apostle will on Sunday succeed Pope Shenuda III, who died in March leaving behind a community anxious about its future under an Islamist-led government. He will be the 118th pope in a line dating back to the origins of Christianity and to Saint Mark, the apostle and author of one...

Statistical correlations This is a compilation of how states rank according to their voting record, faith, beliefs, etc., from polls and records, and their possible relations to each other. Also, demographical map below More national stats on the spiritual, etc. State of the Union here. Rankings (1,2,3...) mostly by this author (could have slight errors). Click on the word "rank" to go to the sources. Duplicate percentages = same rank, thus highest rank less than 50. Press F11 key on most browsers for full screen viewing. PDF download here. Political rank determined by average margins of victory in last...

In a multi-part series given by Glen Beck, Beck interviews a man who is in charge of a large homeless shelter for veterans. The man interviewed recalls meeting Romney back when he ran against Ted Kennedy. When Romney came he inspected the books and thanked the man for running an efficient charity. He asked the man what was most needed by his organization. The man said milk. With so many people it was so costly. Later the man gets his milk from the milk man and the bill is cut in half. The milk man told him he was not...

We usually assist in Africa and other impoverished areas around the world, just like Red Cross does, said Sgt. Angelo A. Sedacca of the NYPD, talking about his work with the Knights of Malta, a Catholic charitable organization in more 120 countries throughout the world. Now we're needed here in New York City in the aftermath of Sandy, he told the Catholic News Service. If you happened to have a roof over your head and electricity in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and could hear above the political noise over whether or not New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie helped President...

America is a seething hotbed of “Islamophobia,” filled with ignorant racist rubes who irrationally fear the benign Muslim religion, according to the Obama administration’s lead investigator into the Benghazi atrocities. So said former Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering in more polished, diplomatic language during an Oct. 23 panel discussion at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The talk was on “what role the faith community can play in fighting Islamophobia,” a make-believe mental illness that Islamists would love to have listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Radical Islam’s stateside defenders frequently accuse anti-terrorism hawks of “McCarthyism,” hurling...

Until recently, Americans were used to hearing about threats to religious freedom in other countries. “From the end of World War II, for about 50 years, our understanding of religious liberty was relatively stable,” Notre Dame professor Gerard Bradley said in a Georgetown University seminar on October 24, 2012. “Our understanding was that the greatest threat to religious liberty was public authority. But somewhere around the turn of the millennium, that changed.” “At around this time, what has previously been thought of as a canonical definition of religious freedom turned into a relativistic one,” Bradley said. “There are two kinds...

Baptist Pastor Mark Harris stood before his flock in North Carolina on Sunday and joined hundreds of other religious leaders in deliberately breaking the law in an election-year campaign that tests the role of churches in politics. "Pulpit Freedom Sunday" has been staged annually since 2008 by a group called the Alliance Defending Freedom. Its aim is to provoke a challenge from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service in order to file a lawsuit and have its argument out in court...the IRS has yet to respond - even though the pastors tape their sermons and mail them to the agency. Stanley...

Richard Land, an influential leader within the Southern Baptist Convention, is endorsing Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney just days ahead of the Nov. 6 election. Land, who heads the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, reversed a personal pledge not to endorse candidates. He said he could not stay silent in an election that was the most important since Abraham Lincoln's win in 1860. Land made his endorsement in a column for the Christian Post, where he serves as executive editor. "I am personally breaking a 24-year tradition of not exercising my right as a private citizen to endorse a...

Obama’s Abortion-HHS Mandate a Full-Fledged War on Religion by Matt Bowman | LifeNews.com | 10/31/12 11:09 AMThe fact that Tyndale House Publishers, based in Carol Stream, has needed to take a stand in court against ObamaCare’s abortion pill mandate should itself shock most Americans. The publisher simply believes that devout Christians in America are exercising religion when they publish the Bible and give the proceeds to religious charity. But even this idea is now disputed.The president’s agencies have written rules that render evangelistic publishing of the Bible to be, well, not really religious. To the people who drafted the...

NBC's sitcom "The New Normal" isn't just trying to remake society for the Gay Left. It's trying to remake Christianity, which is to say, destroy it. For its October 22 episode, "The Godparent Trap," NBC ran promos with the gay character Brian in the confessional, and the priest sneering, "If you're not going to take this seriously, I'm going to go back to playing Angry Birds." As the plot unfolds, we're told Brian was raised Catholic, and as he sits in a pew and looks around at religious pictures, he cracks gay jokes in his mind. He sees the Apostles:...

During Obama's congressional race in 2000, he told an assembled audience that he is against prayer in school. The quote is from the Hyde Park Herald in February of 2000. Obama says the following: "I’m strongly opposed to school prayer, but not prayer. Public schools are not the appropriate place. … It goes beyond separation of church and state and goes to the heart of what we believe in.”

Think religion, think ritual: history, perhaps sacred writings, proscribed sets of moral laws, and potentially a sacrifice or two. There are plenty of organizations and cultures around the world that claim they adhere to a certain set of beliefs, but could adoration and a cult following for a technology firm be the next step? The University of British Columbia's Dr. Kirsten Bell believes that much of the aforementioned applies to Apple. After observing launch videos, and recently attending the iPad mini launch for TechNewsDaily, the social anthropologist said that Mac fandom has some strikingly similar parallels between a religion or...

In the summer of 1880, George H. Walser founded the town of Liberal in southwest Missouri. Named after the Liberal League in Lamar, Missouri (to which the town’s organizer belonged), Walser’s objective was “to found a town without a church, [w]here unbelievers could bring up their children without religious training,” and where Christians were not allowed (Thompson, 1895; Becker, 1895)... Some of the early inhabitants of Liberal even encouraged other infidels to move to their town by publishing an advertisement which boasted that Liberal “is the only town of its size in the United States without a priest, preacher, church,...

I was on a conference call yesterday regarding intelligence gathered from a highly placed source that liberal Obama surrogates are planning to target Evangelical mega-church parking lots with bigoted anti-Mormon flyers the final weekend before the election in key battleground states like Ohio, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Mega-church pastors are being notified to have parking lot attendants be on the lookout for such a lit drop. But please forward this post to all pastors of both Protestant and Catholic churches, particularly in battleground states. It may surprise you to learn that most of anti-Mormonism is on the LEFT, not the Right....

It may be that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was once a useful organization, but it has long since decayed into a festering, anti-Christian, pro-illegal alien, pro-perversion monstrosity. If there is a prayer being prayed in a public institution or a Christian cross displayed on public land, you can bet the ACLU will be there to jump up and down and threaten to sue based on the fraudulent claim that a “separation of church and state” exists in the United States Constitution. There is no such clause in the Constitution, but that does not stop the ACLU from continuing...

Bishop E.W. Jackson is a compelling and controversial pastor, speaker, author, lawyer and Marine. As the founder and president of Staying True to America’s National Destiny (STAND) and head pastor of Exodus Faith Ministries in Chesapeake, Va., he is focused on preserving.... Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/21/leaders-with-ginni-thomas-bishop-e-w-jackson/#ixzz2A2dkEo8B

If you recognize the name Shel Talmy, you’re a true rock ‘n’ roll aficionado. He was the original producer of The Who and The Kinks. Producing just one of these legendary bands would in itself make him legendary – two makes him monumental. He was there when Ray Davies sang You Really Got Me and Roger Daltrey sang My Generation. Mr. Talmy walked into my office one day. He wanted help collecting his royalties for all those timeless songs that he helped to shape. After decades in England, he had just moved back to the United States, and, when I...

Our White House has been residence to Unitarians, at least one likely Deist, and multiple Freemasons. Is Romney’s Mormonism really any weirder?

In the latest religious battle in Hillsborough County schools — call it Eastergate -a federal magistrate says a fourth-grader should have been allowed to pass out invitations to classmates for an Easter egg hunt to "learn the true meaning of Easter."And that telling him no violated his right to free speech.I figured this news would have conservative Christian activist and current School Board candidate Terry Kemple — whose group was behind billboards that called the separation of church and state a lie—cheering.Hooray for the First Amendment!Though, actually, what he said was: "It was an accurate ruling."It got me wondering, though....

A woman throws icons away in a propaganda poster which states, "The Bright Light of Science Has Proven That There Is No God." Denver, Colo., Oct 19, 2012 / 05:43 pm (CNA).- Some 40 Soviet propaganda posters against Christianity will soon be displayed at Denver’s Catholic cathedral as part of an exhibit dedicated to religious liberty. “These posters remind us that societies can turn very deadly when you have a kind of radical secularism which manifests in an anti-Christian attitude … you see it in all its ugliness through the lens of these posters,” Father Doug Grandon told CNA...