Free Republic

As the chart ... shows, Catholicism is the most common religious tradition in 17 states, while white evangelical Protestants are first in 15 states, mostly in the South. The religiously unaffiliated are the most common religious group in 13 states, mostly in the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast. Three states are outliers: Utah, which is 56 percent Mormon, the largest percentage of one single religious tradition, and Iowa and North Dakota, where white mainline Protestants are the dominant religious tradition.

What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised? I was. As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture. What I...

Family of Bishop Shi Enxiang, who spent more than half a century in detention for refusing to renounce Pope's authority, told by a village official last month that he had died, aged 93In a living room plastered with pious images, the Shi family flicked through timeworn pictures of a wizened man with tortoiseshell glasses and bright eyes, the oldest bishop of China’s underground Catholic church. Almost a month ago, they were passed word that Bishop Shi Enxiang – who spent more than half a century in detention for refusing to renounce the authority of the Pope – had died, aged...

Robert Jeffress, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas. joined Father Gerald Murray of New York on Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor" Tuesday night to encourage Americans of all faiths to contact the White House and demand that the Obama administration call out radical Islam and take action to defeat the Islamic State terrorist organization. "This is part of a disturbing pattern," Jeffress said when asked by Bill O'Reilly what he made of Obama's initial refusal to call the ISIS beheading victims Coptic Christians [until he publicly acknowledged that the 21 Egyptian men were Christians and not just "citizens"...

President Obama, during his National Prayer Breakfast speech, Thursday: "No god condones terror. No grievance justifies the taking of innocent lives or the oppression of those who are weaker of fewer in number." All people at all times and locations have the right to defend themselves from terror. Despite Obama's words that have clearly angered people, we can see the following as an example: Christians within the confines of the Byzantine Empire had a right to defend themselves from Muslims who terrorized them, but we all know that Pope Urban II could in no way possible know that anyone who...

The co-founder and former guitarist of the popular world-famous Christian rock band the Newsboys has officially renounced his Christian faith and is calling members of the current version of the band hypocrites. George Perdikis, who founded the chart-topping Christian band in 1985 with his friend Peter Furler, wrote an op-ed on Wednesday published by the website Patheos explaining how he transformed from a guitarist in one of the most popular Christian rock bands of all-time to a cosmology-enthused atheist. "I always felt uncomfortable with the strict rules imposed by Christianity. All I wanted to do was play rock and roll,"...

Clint Eastwood's "American Sniper" had another jaw-dropping weekend, reaching an impressive $200 million at the domestic box office. Despite the film's colossal success, liberals like former DNC chairman Howard Dean and director Michael Moore just won't let "American Sniper" go. Over the weekend, Moore invoked Jesus in a slew of incendiary tweets aimed at dishonoring American soldiers and the Iraq war. One tweet stated "Tomorrow's Sunday School (1 What Would Jesus Do? Oh, I know what he'd do --hide on top of a roof and shoot people in the back!" He followed that tweet with: Sunday School: (2) But What...

Captured By Grace [video at link] Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner turned bombardier, survived a plane crash and prisoner of war camps during WWII. He returned a hero, but his greatest battle was yet to come.

As Islamists continue to kill innocents, they provide more fuel for the oft-made atheist claim that religion is evil. Atheist Richard Dawkins condemned the recent attacks in France by tweeting, "No, all religions are NOT equally violent. Some have never been violent, some gave it up centuries ago. One religion conspicuously didn't." Dawkins is right that some religions and religious people have consistently perpetrated evil. Atheists often use this fact to support atheism. However, the existence of evil turns out to be a bigger problem for atheists to explain than for theists. The kind of evil Dawkins and the rest...

As atheistic movements grow more bold, they are putting up monuments and anti-shrines and billboards. Here are some images of atheist billboards and what I would say to them, if they could hear me … Indoctrinate you? As painter George Braque said “Art disturbs; science reassures.” I cannot limit myself to teaching you the reassuring facts of science and the “carpe diem” philosophy of the world — I must introduce you to the truths that challenge: These include beauty, sin, God, the afterlife, and the often difficult necessities of love. I don’t want to indoctrinate you; I want the truth to...

I come from a Jewish family hardwired to Socialist ideas and to atheism for four generations. The last one in my lineage to believe in God must have died in the beginning of the last century. Christmas is to me a date with no special significance, even though I have learned to respect those who celebrate the birth of Jesus. But I wish to take the opportunity of this Christmas Eve to make a confession. A year and a half ago, I wrote for Opera Mundi one of the most flawed articles of my journalistic career. The title says it...

When he’s not mocking Americans for being Bible-toting, bitter gun-clingers, every chance he gets Barack Obama loves to throw Bible verses around. The problem is that the verses he quotes are usually out of context, woefully misinterpreted, cherry-picked and distorted to support a socialist worldview, and occasionally completely made-up. Listening to the president play the reverend on more than one occasion would lead one to believe Jesus Christ was a Marxist whose only objective was to further Obama’s Gospel of Collectivism. Moreover, for the Scripture enthusiast the president portrays himself to be, it’s amazing how he manages to avoid the...

THIS Christmas our family will go to church. The service is held in a beautiful old church in the charming town of Walpole, N.H., just over the border from Vermont. The Lord’s Prayer hangs on the wall behind the sanctuary. A lectern rises above the nave to let the pastor look down on his flock. The pews and the side stalls have the stern, pure lineaments suited to the Colonial congregation that once came to church to face God. Except that this church is Unitarian. Unitarianism emerged in early modern Europe from those who rejected a Trinitarian theology in preference...

Ryan Bell, an ex-pastor who quit his faith in God for a year following his resignation from the Hollywood Adventist Church and a divorce from his wife of 17 years, is set to decide New Year's Day whether he will remain a believer or become an atheist. While he has distanced himself from zealous atheists, Bell expressed a desire to be "good" without submitting to boundaries. Nearing the end of his yearlong embrace of non-theism, Bell told the LA Times that leaving the faith has allowed him to see "both sides of the coin." The former Fuller Seminary and Azusa...

(CNSNews.com) -- When the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) went after a city council in Jay, Fla., for displaying a nativity set on public property, the atheist group might have won a battle, but seems to have lost the war. The FFRF, known for protesting any and all religious displays in public places, sent a complaint letter recently to local officials in the 526-person city of Jay, arguing against the life-sized nativity that had been set up on the site every Christmas for nearly 40 years, the group said in a press release. In a letter sent to the city’s...

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, one of the largest secular groups in America, announced it is erecting 11 different billboards across Chicago this week with various messages. Some of the ads ask people to "think for (themselves)," while others argue that kindness "comes from altruism" and not from "seeking divine reward." "Research shows that atheists and other nonbelievers remain at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to social acceptance. One reason for that is that even though at least 20% of the population today is nonreligious in the United States, many Americans have never knowingly met an...

Although these bans aren't enforceable under federal law, a coalition of atheists are now lobbying to remove language from constitutions in Maryland and six other states that prevent people who do not believe in God from holding public office. Along with Maryland, the constitutions of Arkansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas all bear language prohibiting people who do not believe in God from holding office according to The New York Times. And the Openly Secular coalition wants the language removed. "If it was on the books that Jews couldn't hold public office, or that African-Americans or women...

In a spectacular and telling failure of journalism MSNBC reported recently that Pope Francis “broke with Catholic tradition” by asserting that the Big Bang theory is real. Instantly, the Internet responded with the name Georges Lemaitre, one of the creators of the Theory of Universal Expansion who also happened to be a Jesuit priest. He is also the first entry on a Google search of “Catholic Big Bang.” That the MSNBC author did not bother to do one search before making a pronouncement about the faith of a billion people displays abysmal incompetence. But it also reflects very skewed...

Has science now proven that God exists? Douglas Ell, author of the new book Counting To God, will speak about this and other “big questions” related to science and faith in two lectures at Trinity Episcopal Church in Vero Beach. Times: Tuesday, October 21, 2014, 6:00 pm Tuesday, November 18, 2014, 6:00 pm Location: Trinity Episcopal Church 2365 Pine Avenue Vero Beach, FL 32960 Both talks are open to the general public and there is no charge. In Counting To God, Ell applies the lens of mathematical analysis to a series of scientific discoveries, drawing startling conclusions about the relation...

The intellectual role that used to be occupied by theology is now largely filled by science fiction. Wikipedia lists only a dozen of possibly hundreds of books where writers, some of them practicing mathematicians or scientists themselves, examine the consequences of our current understanding of the universe. The familiar, everyday world that we know isn’t what it seems. It is actually a strange place. On large scales it isn’t governed by ‘common sense’ Newtonian physics but by the paradoxes of relativity. At very small scales, perhaps at its foundation, it is governed by quantum phenomena, which is stranger still. Arthur...