Free Republic

Here’s an ugly truth you can drop in the punchbowl at your next office party – most Western men and women, including many who consider themselves conventionally religious, treat human beings as subhuman. They accept without reflection theories of human life that reduce us to brainy animals, or let us play at being gods. These theories render suffering meaningless and train us to live as cowards; they teach us to despise the weak but train us in habits of laziness and avoidance; they speak the language of progress while in fact encouraging the lowest of human instincts; they claim to...

Can the family die, as a legal and social institution in Italy? Such a question could not even have been asked 40 years ago in this country, but in that time, the social and demographic landscape has changed dramatically, and the unthinkable is going on around us. For some time I’ve been thinking about and reading various opinions on how the destruction of marriage as a legal and social institution in the formerly Christian West, has forwarded the aims of that nebulously defined, but apparently all-powerful, class of people I’ve come to call, simply, “the Statists” or “the Secularists.” It’s...

Wake up, conservatives -- and Christians. We're getting our rear ends handed to us, and we'll continue to if we don't do a better job of fighting back. I'm not just talking about electoral politics. Liberal and secular activist groups are as aggressive as ever and winning, energized and enabled by this most radical of administrations -- and equally so by deer-in-the-headlights conservatives. The latest episode in this particular series of unfortunate events involves the Y's rolling over to the relentless bullying of pro-abortion activists to evict Students for Life of America from its facilities. These self-depicted arbiters of tolerance...

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia is pictured following an interview in Rome in October 2012 (CNS photo). First Things has posted an address, "Wisdom, Christian Witness, and the Year of Faith", given yesterday by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput at the National Shrine, Washington, D.C., as part of the National Shrine’s Year of Faith lecture series. It begins with a reflection on the 1800-year-old diary of a Roman emperor: Marcus Aurelius held absolute power in a corrupt age. Yet despite that, he chose to seek what is true and right and lasting; and he disciplined his own life accordingly....

There is no doubt about it, the times,they have changed. The United States of America has an official new state religion and it is godless Secularism based upon the Humanist Manifesto (press here to read it). Godless Secularism elevates the human individual into a god and makes the worship of the individual the centerpiece as it shunts the common good to the periphery as well as forcing authentic religion and her true God into the private and personal never to influence the public. This new state religion influences in powerful ways the politics of this land and many politicians...

If you've ever had the great fortune of seeing the entrance to a mosque, you'll have noticed that there are two doors: one, the main, huge, is for men, another, small and lateral, for women (as in the picture below of the East London Mosque). Apparently we need "right-wing groups" now in England to protest sexism, because the Left totally condones it. The recently-formed England National Resistance (ENR) felt outraged that the North West Kent Muslim Association’s mosque in Crayford High Street has separate entrances for men and women. Particularly offensive is the fact that this was once a church,...

ISTANBUL — Police officers attacked a group of peaceful demonstrators on Friday in Istanbul’s Taksim Square with water cannons and tear gas, sending scores of people, protesters and tourists alike, scurrying into shops and luxury hotels and turning the center of this city into a battle zone at the height of tourist season.

Jerome Corsi discusses his newest book, The Bad Samaritans today on the Joy Tiz show at 2 pm PDT/5 pm EDT. He'll tell us about the Bad Samaritans and their nefarious plans to drive Christianity out of our society.

People like Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion (Amazon USA) , (Amazon UK) , and Christopher Hitchens, who wrote God Is Not Great (Amazon USA) , (Amazon UK) , et al, when attacking “religion”, play on various ambiguities. They create ambiguities in their choice of terms and then these ambiguities are convenient for them. The first instance of ambiguity is the use of the term “religion”. It puts together all sorts of people and doctrines which may have very little in common. To give an analogy, the flat earth theory is undoubtedly a theory of physics. It says something...

A man holds a large U.S. flag before an Oct. 14 Mass and Pilgrimage for Life and Liberty at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. (CNS photo/Leslie E. Kossoff) In a previous article, “The Puzzle of Religious Liberty,” I brought before readers a rather vexing quandary. Somehow our hearty affirmation of religious liberty—which would seem to be a good thing—ends up producing a secular state that uses its powers to enforce a secular agenda that contradicts our religious liberty. How does it happen? In order to limit governmental interference in our religion, we...

Defense Department materials classifying Christians as extremists reflect the ideology of the boss. Whoever put together the recently reported Defense Department materials classifying Catholics and Evangelicals as extremists can be excused for simply reflecting, if a bit overenthusiastically, the ideology of the boss. Obama’s anti-Christian secularism is the order of the day. Why wouldn’t that philosophy seep into DOD materials? The military is dismissing this slide show for a U.S. Army Reserve presentation, which placed the Catholic Church in the same category as al Qaeda, as an isolated incident. An Army spokesman told the press it “was produced by an...

BERKELEY — Religious affiliation in the United States is at its lowest point since it began to be tracked in the 1930s, according to analysis of newly released survey data by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and Duke University. Last year, one in five Americans claimed they had no religious preference, more than double the number reported in 1990.

The retirement of Benedict XVI and speculation about his potential successors have brought back the old categories for Catholic clergy and laity – liberal, progressive, and conservative – in the secular media. But the media have missed a critical point: while there are certainly various viewpoints within the Church (which has always been the case, and is a good and healthy condition so long as these viewpoints are faithful), these labels, as they have been used for decades, no longer fit the current state of the Church. “Liberal” or “progressive” were terms applied in the years after the Second Vatican...

A Most Puzzling Puzzler I invite the reader to think through an interesting and very serious conundrum. Many of us are rightly alarmed at ever-bolder attempts by our increasingly secular state to violate the religious liberty of its citizens. To ward off such violations, we embrace the relevant part of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …”  We therefore invoke the so-called “Free Exercise Clause” as a shield to impede attempts by the state to control or prohibit the free exercise of our religious convictions (and...

Religious freedom experts are decrying a recent announcement by the French government that it will deport and dissolve groups that are labeled extreme and appear to suffer from “religious pathology.” … At a Dec. 11 conference, French interior minister Manuel Valls announced that new government surveillance policies will be aimed at shutting down religious groups including traditionalist Catholics if they show signs of a “religious pathology” that could lead to violence, reported Reuters. The conference was held two days after French president François Hollande announced the creation of a new agency, the “National Observatory of Secularism,” to observe and promote...

The truth is a hard thing to hear and even a more bitter pill to swallow. But until we face the truth, we are doomed to sink lower into the abyss as a society. The truth is that a godless nation is a nation doomed to fall. We as a nation have slowly accepted and pompously come to believe that wisdom begins and stems from us. Secularism is the view that all things religious should be excluded from daily public living, specifically pertaining to political and social concerns. Thanks to secularism, the mindset today is that God and religious opinion...

On Monday night, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly had some tough words for secular progressives, highlighting their purportedly dangerous views on social and economic issues. The subject of his “Talking Points Memo” segment asked, “Is traditional America gone for good?”The popular television host commenced the segment by noting his belief that traditional America can, once again, rise to prominence, however, he contended that “it will take a very special person to make that happen.” To corroborate O’Reilly’s point that the nation may, indeed, bounce back to its traditional roots, he noted that, despite winning re-election, Obama is slipping in popularity.“Left-wing ideology...

(RNS) Last month, Lauren Anderson Youngblood, communications manager for the Secular Coalition for America, approached Broderick Johnson, a senior adviser to the Obama campaign, as they both left a conference on religion and the election. The SCA is an umbrella group representing 11 nontheistic organizations. So who, Youngblood asked Johnson, could she reach out to with their concerns about civil rights, access to health care and education? “He said, ‘We don’t view you as a constituency,’” Youngblood said. “He said, ‘We don’t do outreach to that community.’” After Tuesday's election, that may soon change. According to a Pew Forum on...

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...

LILLE, France (Reuters) - Police in France said on Friday they were trying to identify the skeleton of a man believed to have lain undiscovered in bed for more than 15 years. The body, found in an abandoned house in the northern city of Lille, is thought to be that of the elderly owner of the property, who lived alone and appeared to have no relatives. Police said they had found piles of unopened mail at the house dating back to 1996.