Free Republic

South Africa's Nobel peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu says he will never worship a "homophobic God" and will rather go to hell. The retired archbishop was speaking at the launch of a UN-backed campaign in South Africa to promote gay rights. Despite sex-same relationships being legal in South Africa, it had some of the worst cases of homophobic violence, UN human rights chief Navi Pillay said. Archbishop Tutu, 81, is a long-standing campaigner for gay rights. 'Toilet brush attack' He retired as Archbishop of Cape Town in 1996, but has remained the moral conscience of the nation, correspondents say. Same-sex...

Today is the 504th anniversary of the birth of John Calvin (July 10, 1509) — and the 497th anniversary of misunderstanding Calvinists. To commemorate the event, let’s look at a recent notable example provided by The Economist. The article is out-datedly titled, “Dippers divided” and the subhead is “Where evangelicals disagree.” Where evangelicals disagree, apparently, is on whether to maintain, the “theocon” alliance in American politics between Catholics and evangelicals, who have set aside their doctrinal differences (over the Virgin Mary, for example) to take a joint stand against abortion and in favour of the traditional family. What could be...

In which Bishopess Schori’s “Theo-fantastic” Curacao sermon is reexamined, evaluated, judged, and ditched. Brethren, Peace and good to all of you. I can't listen to this sermon! I’ve been asking myself what (or who) possessed Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishopess of the Episcopal Church, to deliver this sermon in Curacao. As you might remember, I commented on it not long ago on a previous blog post. I think I got the answer after reading a chapter of this book, God or Goddess?: Feminist Theology : What Is It? Where Does It Lead?, by Manfred Hauke....

1.) IF John Hagee, Perry Stone, and/or anyone else on TCT, TBN, INSP, WCT, etc, accept women as being able to occupy the positions of apostles, and/or prophets, and/or evengelists, and/or pastors and/or teachers (with such examples such as Paula White and Joyce Meyer (whom I believe operate as a pastor and teacher respectively)), and... 2.) IF they believe that women can occupy these positions within the sphere of the New Testament/New Covenant, and... 3.) IF they believe that the office of Rabbi (Messianic or otherwise) has been carried over into the New Testament/New Covenant, (with such examples as Kurt...

Full Title: “Gay Marriage” Shows Us Why Theology Matters. Three ways Biblically sound theology will help in the same-sex marriage debate To invite homosexuals to embrace themselves so that they are no longer lonely is agreeing with those on the left that God was wrong in ordaining the family as one man and one woman together in marriage. It is agreeing with those whom God is pouring out His wrath. It is agreeing with those who have cast off any notions of holiness, purity and piety in the church. It is, as I have said, theological suicide. Over the weekend...

Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-meta­physical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.” (I suspect Lewis would have particularly relished the last of these.) These insults and more can be found in her marginal notes on a copy of Lewis’ Abolition of Man, as printed in Ayn Rand’s Marginalia: Her critical comments on the writings of over 20 authors, edited by Robert Mayhew. Excerpts appear below, with Lewis’ writing (complete with Rand’s highlighting and underlining) on the left and...

May 10, 2013 (HLIWorldWatch.org) - Polls show that most young people today, even those who identify themselves as Christians, have no problem with “same-sex marriage.” If young people today are at all aware of what the Catholic Church teaches about marriage and human sexuality, what they think they know is often only a caricature of the truth. They see it as simply a set of prohibitions established by men. But what the Church actually presents is a vision of the beauty of marriage as a sacred union between one man and one woman who are committed for life and open...

Are you saved? Have you ever been asked this question? Has anyone ever told you that Catholics think they can work their way into Heaven? The Catholic Church does not now, nor has it ever, taught a doctrine of salvation by works - that we can “work” our way into Heaven. And, the Bible does not teach that we are saved by “faith alone.” The only place in all of Scripture where the phrase “Faith Alone” appears, is in James 2:24, where it says that we are not justified (or saved) by faith alone. However, if works have nothing to...

Is Mankind Getting Dumber? by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Do today’s children have lower I.Q.’s than yesterday’s? Yes, according to measurements of intellectual and emotional strength gathered from different countries and contexts. The results show the same basic decline and resist the notion that public or other forms of education are to blame. Could the cause instead lie within? Stanford University professor Gerald Crabtree thinks so. He published a pair of essays in the journal Trends in Genetics, citing new discoveries that show why the human intellect is “surprisingly fragile.”1 This biblical creation-friendly notion didn’t sit well with the authors...

Coelacanths: Evolutionists Still Fishing in Shallow Water by Timothy L. Clarey, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * A recent report, published in Nature,1 on the genome sequence of the so-called living fish fossil, the African coelacanth, has some evolutionists scrambling to defend their story. This is because the coelacanth's DNA is similar to other types of fish and not land animals, thus forcing the evolutionists to postulate that the coelacanth evolved slowly.1 Although modern coelacanths are found in water about 500 feet deep, Axel Meyer, a member of the study team believes that ancient coelacanths may have lived in shallow...

THE PROTESTANT PRETENDED REFORMATION
IS NOT THE WORK OF GOD CHAPTER I.     Q. Can any one reasonably believe that the change in religion brought about by Luther is the work of God?     A. No one can believe it, unless he be utterly ignorant of the true nature of religion, and very unlearned in the matters of history.
     Q. Why do you make this answer?
     A. Because, in the first place, the author of the Reformation is not a man of God; secondly, because his work is not the work of God; thirdly, because the means which he...

Within moments of Pope Benedict’s announcement that he was abdicating the Chair of St. Peter, secularists began demanding that the College of Cardinals choose a less rigid, more progressive pontiff; in other words, a pope who would repudiate Church teachings on chastity, same-sex “marriage,” divorce, contraception, abortion, and priestly celibacy.Leading the charge was The New York Times, which devoted plenty of front page, above-the-fold space to castigating the Church and Benedict. The op-ed editor published, ad nauseam, the usual tired-old Catholic critics, including Garry Wills and Hans Küng.And the moment secularists realized that Pope Francis is not a South American liberation theologian, but...

Q: Okay, so what is the Christian account of how revelation occurred?As Elmer Fudd might say, “Vewy, vewy swowly.” Divine revelation didn’t happen in a blinding flash—such as God dropping the Summa Theologiae on top of a mountain and waiting for people to invent the Latin language so they could read it. (Though He could have given them magical spectacles that would translate it for them….) It seems that God preferred to slowly unfold His personality and His will for us through the course of tangled, messy human history. We might wonder why, and call up the divine customer service...

Hello Brothers and Sisters in Christ –We need to seek Jesus with repentance (Acts 26:20), fasting (Matthew 9:15, Mark 2:20, Luke 5:35), weeping, and round the clock prayer, until God visits as he did in the Welsh Revival, after the Revolutionary War, and just before the Civil War, and throughout the 20th century. The USA is in serious trouble with the LORD. This should be apparent from … American Christianity has until the coming revival been in decline and is helpless against porn, divorce, sin, … Despite the LORD telling us in Matthew 5:13 to be "salt", the Church in...

And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made: And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth. Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground; But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth: then he...

The Devil, You Say! Hardly had the shooting stopped at Sandy Hook Elementary School before the national commentary machine cranked up. Everyone and his dog had something to say: Most of it, as events would show, centered on the compelling need, or lack of it, for gun control. To the Rev. Dr. Bill Dickson, it seemed the time had come for a metaphorically deeper treatment, focused on the seething, slithering abode of evil itself and the inhabitants thereof. "Something shocking is going on in the world," Dr. Dickson, rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Fort Worth, told me...

The video below shows “American tacky” in all its glory. A man who loved Burger King dies and his family honors him by taking the funeral procession through the Burger King “drive thru.” Free Burgers for all on the way to the Cemetery, hearse and all.I’ve seen worse, I have to admit. Probably at the top of the list is and “Funeral Home Drive- thru” where the deceased is actually on display in a window. No need to get out of your car and actually visit the family. No, that’s too much trouble and lacks the kind of convenience we...

Featured Term (selected at random):APOCRYPHA Originally writings that claimed a sacred origin and were supposed to have been hidden for generations; later, a well-define class of literature with scriptural or quasi-scriptural pretensions, but lacking genuineness and canonicity, composed during the two centuries before Christ and the early centuries of our era. Protestants apply the term improperly to denote also Old Testament books not contained in the Jewish canon but received by Catholics under the name of deuterocanonical. The following is a list of the Apocrypha: Apocrypha of Jewish Origin: Jewish Apocalypses; Book of Henoch; Assumption of Moses: Fourth Book of...

11 Biblical Tests of Genuine Salvation - In 1746, about six years after the Great Awakening, in which Jonathan Edwards was the primary instrument of God to preach the gospel and bring about the greatest revival in American history thus far, Edwards wrote A Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections. He wrote it to deal with a problem not unlike one we face today: the matter of evidence for true conversion. Many people want the blessings of salvation, especially eternal security, but no more. In the explosive drama of the Great Awakening, it seemed as though conversions were occurring in great...

Based on Romans 2:28-29, some have concluded that being Jewish is a spiritual rather than ethnic matter, and that people become "spiritual Jews" when they become Christians. Romans 2:28-29 reads, "For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly neither is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that which is of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter; and his praise is not from men, but from God." For understanding this passage the near context of the passage is very important. Chapter 2:1-16...