Free Republic

Port Royal was called "the richest and wickedest city in the world" or "the Sodom of the New World." Suddenly, JUNE 7, 1692, an earthquake and tsunami sank Port Royal under the sea, followed by violent aftershocks...

As far as Obama is concerned the notion of Good vs Evil is just another conspiracy theory The most destructive, finish-them-off style damage coming from the deadly arsenal of President Barack Obama is his persistence to ‘disappear’ steadfast belief in God and in anything good. As far as Obama is concerned the notion of Good vs Evil is just another conspiracy theory. This is a Messiah who covets everyone’s belief in the Creator, and also their belief in the inherent goodness of America that was always there and even in the tumult he deliberately dishes out from the Oval Office...

Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami (AP Photo/Alan Diaz) (CNSNews.com) - Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami, who serves as chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, has delivered a sermon warning that religious liberty is under attack in the United States and that American Christians “are being increasingly subject to a soft despotism.” A transcript of the archbishop’s sermon--which was delivered at a special mass for Catholic lawyers in Broward County, Fla.--is now linked to a page on the USCCB’s website that is dedicated to the issue of religious liberty. “While atrocities are...

Wednesday on the House floor, Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL) criticized Texas for its conspiracy theories and then said God must understand Spanish because he named his son Jesus.

Since the devices first went on sale in April, Apple (AAPL, Tech30) has received 7 million orders in total and shipped 2.5 million watches so far, according to a Global Equities Research report, citing tracking methods used by app developers. Apple is expected to deliver about 5 million Apple Watches by the end of the quarter, which is two times more than analysts expected, Trip Chowdhry, Managing Director of Global Equities Research, told CNNMoney. This would beat the company's previous "new category" debuts -- the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. When the iPod first went on sale in 2001, Apple sold...

How should we judge the health of a culture? We might do it by pointing to its greatest virtues. The Greek city states between 500 and 300 B.C., though they were not especially densely populated, gave the west the architectural “language” it still employs for everything from grand hotels to private homes. The colonial house, in this sense, belongs to a Greek colony before the American. Athens gave us the ideals and some of the techniques of democracy. She invented the drama, and the great troika of tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, are unsurpassed by anyone to come, except for...

Our fallen heroes, our country, and our civilization deserve no less, no less than our best efforts and no less than our best sense Any reasonable stance about the nature of Islam invites both reasoned and unreasoned Commentary, and from all sides of the spectrum of belief systems. When discussing Islam it seems as if the perspectives we’re stuck with are those of the mink-wearer—vs. the mink. Certainly these two perspectives cannot be reconciled. So it seems with the nature of Islam. Even when we boot irrational arguments from the room, many legitimate but diametrically opposed arguments remain standing.

Attendance at the Southern Baptist church on Scenic Drive had dwindled to about 15 most Sundays... There was another congregation...that had been meeting in living rooms and whose pastor carried business cards that quoted from John 4:35: “Look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.” Maybe they wanted to buy the church... .... selling to the Arabic Baptists might be their best hope of keeping the church from closing. They prayed and then took a vote, and now, a few miles away in a suburban living room, the members of the fledgling Arab congregation were considering an opportunity they...

While America continues to face an expanding national security threat, President Obama has great difficulty in identifying the enemy that has been at war with the United States for over 35 years. Using terms such as “violent extremism” and “workplace violence” does an enormous injustice to our military forces, as well as to all law enforcement agencies that must be prepared to confront the Islamic jihadis on a daily basis. For example, the Obama administration directed all of our training manuals, that accurately portrayed the Islamic threat, to be purged by removing anything that didn’t portray Islam as a religion...

The persecution of the Catholic Church and other morally conservative religious bodies has begun in the United States. As predicted, it isn't -- thank God -- bloody persecution like the persecution of Christians in many countries. But it's real persecution and likely to get worse. This new persecution currently has two prongs. One consists of pressuring individual religious believers to cooperate with public policies inimical to faith. The other prong is pressure targeted at religious groups and institutions to adapt their programs to the promotion of values hostile to the sponsors' moral convictions. When and if the Supreme Court announces...

Mike Huckabee doesn't have a lot of prominent defenders, and I am not volunteering for the job. Huckabee has always struck me as a right-wing populist-progressive. A deeply religious -- and by all accounts decent -- man, Huckabee nonetheless has a view of the state that would have jibed almost perfectly with such forgotten titans of the Progressive Era as Richard Ely, Josephus Daniels and even William Jennings Bryan. Ely, a mentor to Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt and the founder of the "Wisconsin school" of progressivism, believed that "God works through the state in carrying out His purposes more...

Jeff Foxworthy hosts a question and answer time with Ravi Zacharias and Michael Ramsden following Ravi's lecture "Is America Really Christian?"

One year after authorities sent excavators to tear down the large Sanjiang Church in Wenzhou, China, officials have returned to remove crosses from the top of churches in Zhejiang province, even drafting regulations banning crosses from the cityscape. Dozens of churches in Lishui city had their crosses removed in May, with one cross burning up as the cutting machinery malfunctioned, according to ChinaAid. The demolitions come after a months-long break in the Zhejiang campaign that saw more than 425 churches lose their crosses or have their entire buildings destroyed.

Millennials—soon to be the largest generation of Americans, surpassing the baby boomers—are fleeing organized religion in droves. As a result, a generation of Americans is creating a national existential crisis. How can a country that regularly proclaims “God Bless America,” emblazons its currency with “In God We Trust,” and mentions God so frequently that it could make a secularist nauseous, survive if the largest demographic is indifferent toward the Almighty? According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, about 35 percent of millennials have no religious affiliation and thus are categorized as the “nones.” Approximately 56 million Americans...

So, a Canadian Christian jeweler custom-made a pair of engagement rings for a lesbian couple, Nicole White and Pam Renouf, at their request. Later, when they found out that the jeweler personally opposes same-sex marriage, they went to pieces and demanded their money back.

An anti-Christian zealot is calling for the court martial of an Air Force general for publicly giving his Christian testimony while in uniform. In a speech at the National Day of Prayer Task Force event earlier this month, Major General Craig Olson credited God for his accomplishments in the military, and referred to himself as a "redeemed believer in Christ." But the Air Force Times reports that Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, has taken issue with Olsen's remarks. Weinstein has called for him to be severely punished. “[Major General Craig Olson must be court martialed] aggressively...

A couple of weeks ago a toddler shot himself in the head after finding a gun under the pillow of his parent's bed. Just days later a police officer accidentally shot his mother at a family wedding while adjusting his jacket. Last year, a nine-year-old girl was being shown how to use an automatic weapon and accidentally killed her instructor. In Idaho a two-year-old boy was shopping at Walmart with his mother and three other children, when he found a gun in his mother's bag; he pulled the trigger and killed her. Some would argue that these tragic stories...

One of the most common assumptions is that religiosity is linked to economic and technological underdevelopment. As a society gets more technologically and economically advanced, the thinking goes, religiosity naturally fades away and is replaced by a more secular worldview. Exhibit A is usually Western Europe, which grew more secular as it grew richer (and much, much more violent) across the 19th and 20th centuries. Exhibit B is the world's most religious continent — Africa — which happens to be its poorest. Under this view, the 21st century will be the century in which secularization spreads even further as the...

"..........Indeed, The Libertarian Mind is a mixture of “whatever” the individual deems to be his interest. “Whatever” can consist of the reasonable libertarian outcry against big government and abusive regulations, or its excellent affirmation of free markets, rule of law and property rights. But “whatever” also consists of the throwing off of moral restraints that inhibit gratification and self-interest. Thus, the author obsesses about the urgent need for same-sex “marriage,” the end to pornography restrictions, and the right to legal drug use.Throughout his explanation,...(h)abits like drug abuse, for example, are only seen from the individual’s perspective of happiness and not...

Maybe someone can explain this. Making sense of this can't be easy. The question is whether or not it can be done and even greater, whether it should. How did society come to a point in which a person can sue for forced abortions on minority children and be lauded as an advocate? Isn't this something that anyone on the most basic of levels, and I'm talking real basic over here, should find loathsome and disgusting? At the same time, a person who says that the life of a potential or developing baby is worth more than that of a...