Free Republic

The secular reprobate mind is filled with violence, moral relativism and lawlessness designs and its actions have ravished this nation since the 60's beyond all recognition of what the founding fathers envisioned. Let us first look at the barbaric act of abortion. Since 1973 there has been 55 million abortions of our American children. May I say that NO gun has ever achieved that statistic not even all the combined arsenal of WW2! The abortion agenda of the Left is the holy grail of their godless ideology. The abortion ideology is a narcissistic ideology, which at its core is rooted...

Zoos with humans on display; an academic who wishes publicly that 90 percent of humans would perish from ebola; suicide tourists; “after-birth abortions” – what is the world coming to? In a new book, The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life, history professor Richard Weikart examines the intellectual currents that produce these shocking phenomena and defends the sanctity of human life. Here, Professor Weikart answers some questions from MercatorNet. ‘The Death of Humanity’ is a sombre title. Are things really that bad? What do you mean by it?My title refers to the way that many intellectuals and scholars...

People often speak of places of sanctuary, where they feel most free and where they can “breathe.” One such place for me—a former high school teacher—is within the walls of a school. There is something invigorating and God-inspired in having people of different ages, backgrounds, and experiences exercise their minds around common subjects and principles, learn the facets of the world, and seek answers about their place in it. Whether in the context of a public or private educational institution, this wide-open breath of a school community has always provided me a true sense of freedom.Presently, however, the air...

FEMINIST CELEB: We need ‘Euthanasia Vans’ to drive around and get rid of all the old people Katie Hopkins suggests that we create “euthanasia vans” that drives door-to-door and kills off the elderly. “We just have far too many old people,” the feminist says. “It’s ridiculous to be living in a country where we can put dogs to sleep but not people.” According to Hopkins, this can be carried out stylistically, you know, with a flair. “Euthanasia vans — just like ice-cream vans — that would come to your home,” Hopkins says “It would all be perfectly charming. They might...

An atheist member of the Arizona House denied the chance to deliver the chamber's opening prayer by majority Republican leaders last month got the opportunity Thursday, only to see leaders rule his prayer didn't pass muster and call up a Christian pastor. The opening prayer by Democrat Juan Mendez included a call to work to help the state and its residents flourish and to "honor the Constitution and the secular equality it brings." But he didn't pray to any deity, which infuriated some Republicans who are Christians. Mendez said before the session that he had been invited to deliver the...

Off the record, a colleague of mine with decades of hospice experience predicted to me that the government would eventually get rid of the requirement that hospices hire chaplains. This particularly caught me off guard because I had just procured such a position with Center for Hope Hospice in Elizabeth, NJ. He elaborated that "the government wants to save money. They say America is becoming more secularized anyway, and so chaplains aren't needed all that much." Not that my shiny new job offer was about to vanish and "go gentle into that good night," but I was nettled by the...

The words that we use matter. When we speak using terms from Torah, our intention is clear. We believe that Torah is the source of our moral values. But once we start using English terms and ideas, we enter a dangerous philosophical minefield. We use words thinking that we’re expressing Torah ideas, but without realizing it, we are employing secular ideas as well. One prime example is "human rights." People use this term as if it's some kind of innate, obvious Truth, yet they fail to explain why it is so. Where oh where do these "human rights" come from...

Which is obvious to anyone not intentionally misreading it. The real news here is not that Antonin Scalia said this, but that it’s the slightest bit controversial. But that’s not something that happened overnight. The secular left and their media servants have spent decades pushing the idea that the establishment clause is about protecting the non-religious from maniacal Jesus freaks - especially the nightmare scenario in which the Jesus freaks get a job with any public entity and are guided in any decision by biblical principles. Scalia is a man who actually knows about the founding of the nation and...

We’ve all heard of people doing something secular in a “religious” way, and one area of life to which that applies is sports and physical fitness.Now, some are suggesting that the culture surrounding training gyms may very well fall under the umbrella of religion.The New York Times noted recently that in a society that is increasingly secular, many people are applying their religious sensibility to athletic activity. Many of the parallels with religion can be found, the newspaper noted, in a Crossfit gym: adherents getting out of bed at an ungodly hour in order to spend a significant amount of time in...

Today is the first day of Advent, which marks the start of the pre-Christmas season. It is observed by many, if not most, of the Catholic faithful. And it is in popularity among Protestants, particularly those of us who count ourselves evangelical Christians. Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas and ends on Christmas Eve. During that four-week period, the Christian faithful prepare for the commemoration of the birth of Christ. Satan hates Advent. That’s because he wants to take the “Christ” out of Christmas. He doesn’t want Christmas to be a Godly “holy-day.” Rather, his aim is to reduce the...

The fact that more than sixty percent of the Irish electorate supported an amendment to the nation's constitution recognizing same-sex "marriage" caught many people by surprise last spring. They may have been clinging to an outdated image of Ireland as a bastion of devout Catholicism. Unfortunately there are further disturbing changes that are being advanced. One is more symbolic. Many, including a former news director of the national radio and television station, are asking that the broadcasting of the Angelus be dropped. It is viewed as an anachronism in an Ireland that has "an increasingly multi-ethnic, multi-faith population," and is...

The death of Europe is in sight. Still hazy and not yet inevitable, but nevertheless visible and drawing nearer—like a distant planet in the lens of an approaching satellite. Europe is reaching its end not because of its sclerotic economy, or stagnant demography, or the dysfunctions of the superstate. Nor is the real cause the massive influx of Middle Eastern and African migrants. Those desperate people are just the latest stiff breeze against the timber of a desiccated civilization. Europe is dying because it has become morally incompetent. It isn’t that Europe stands for nothing. It’s that it stands for...

A remarkable turn for a school named for a minister, via The Washington Post:    A Harvard Crimson poll of the university’s class of 2019 provides a glimpse into the beliefs and practices of incoming freshman, including sex, politics and drug use. Some of the interesting findings included the religious breakdown, especially when compared to other millennials in the U.S.Harvard’s combined number of atheists and agnostics among its incoming class exceeds the number of Catholics and Protestants, as Pew Research Center’s Conrad Hackett noted. The number appears to be a striking contrast with the rest of the U.S. millennial population, those from ages 18 to 34.Pew’s...

If there is one thing consistent about the tides of the culture wars, it is that whenever one side is emboldened, it inevitably leads to overreach. The secular Left is proving this point with gusto in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to nationalize gay marriage, calling for the removal of tax exemptions for churches and religious non-profits who continue to hold the tired old definition of marriage that existed all the way up until yesterday. This step, which would crush the budgets of many churches and non-profits, reveals an amusing hypocrisy of the modern Left’s turn against civil...

        Lyrics: The economy is shrinkingOur money is a jokeWe should go back to trading seashellsAnd just admit that we're brokeAnd our food supply is shrinking(yeah, yeah)But we continue happily(yeah, yeah)Building condos on farm land(yeah, yeah)And dumping sewage in the sea(yeah, yeah) Someone's talking 'bout a big ideaSomeone's talking 'bout a higher visionEverybody's on the runLookin' out for number oneAnd your big ideas don't fit Big ideas in the shrinking worldBig ideas in the shrinking worldBig ideas in the shrinking worldWell you make us real nervous with your big ideas Our water is shrinkingAll the pipes...

Some readers may remember the post about Ulf Ekman, a prominent Evangelical pastor who stunned the world when he announced last year he was becoming Catholic.Now, an update, The National Catholic Register: On March 9, 2014, Ulf Ekman, founder and pastor of Word of Life church in Uppsala, Sweden, shocked his congregation with the announcement that he and his wife, Birgitta, were leaving Word of Life to join the Catholic Church. The Ekmans’ decision created a commotion, not only among the Protestant faithful, but even throughout decidedly secular Sweden.The Ekmans will present their story at the “Defending the Faith Conference” July 24-26 at...

NBC has canceled A.D. The Bible Continues after just one season, Deadline reports. The miniseries, created by Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, was a follow-up to their record-breaking miniseries The Bible, and chronicled the early days of modern Christianity. A.D., which premiered on Easter, was positioned as an event series at NBC, but Downey, Burnett and the network had indicated that subsequent seasons were part of the plan. It's possible that the show will continue on another platform

If you doubt that Christians are fair game for ridicule by the cultural left, take a look at the hit piece on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia by Jeffrey Tayler for Salon. I can't decide which is worse, the title or the subtitle. The title: "Antonin Scalia is unfit to serve: A justice who rejects science and the law for religion is of unsound mind." The subtitle: "The justice claims to be an originalist, but his real loyalty is to religion and a phony man in the sky." The writer is trying to be cute, but don't conclude that any...

A conversation with Peter SeewaldIn his futuristic novel Brave New World, the British author Aldous Huxley had predicted in 1932 that falsification would be the decisive element of modernity. In a false reality with its false truth – or the absence of truth altogether – nothing, in the final analysis, is important any more.There is no truth, there is no standpoint. Today, in fact, truth is regarded as far too subjective a concept for us to find therein a universally valid standard. The distinction between genuine and fake seems to have been abolished. Everything is to some extent negotiable. Is...

What is Sloth? It is More Subtle and Devilish Than Mere Laziness By: Msgr. Charles PopeOne of the more misunderstood of the cardinal sins is sloth. This is because most see it merely as laziness. But there is more to sloth than that. Let’s take a moment and consider some aspects of the cardinal sin we call sloth.The Greek word we translate as sloth is ἀκηδία akedia (a = absence + kedos = care), meaning indifference or negligence. St. Thomas speaks of sloth as sorrow for spiritual good. By it, we shun spiritual good as too toilsome (cf ST...