Free Republic

Stalin, a cynical and clever leader, didn’t experience any epiphany but simply knew that taking it easy on the Orthodox Church was important for winning the war. First, many Soviet citizens remained secretly religious (which was not directly forbidden), so the “legalization” of Orthodoxy helped to keep the nation at war united – quite a crucial thing. Second, the Allies were pushing Stalin towards loosening his grip on the religious: the oppression of the faithful was bad publicity, internationally speaking. Third, in 1943 the Red Army was regaining the Soviet lands previously occupied by Germans. The occupants, trying to gain...

(IsraelNN.com) Professor Richard Dawkins, a senior British evolutionary scientist and outspoken atheist, drew fire on Monday for saying that Jews “more or less monopolize American foreign policy.” Religious Jews are a small group, Dawkins said, but are “fantastically successful” in lobbying the US government. Dawkins, who is currently in the US in an attempt to promote atheism and fight religious influence, expressed hope that atheists would be similarly successful in determining government policy. A number of Jewish leaders responded immediately, with ADL head Abe Foxman calling Dawkin’s remarks “classic anti-Semitism.” Malcom Hoenlein, a senior official in the Conference of Presidents...

The Congressional Freethought Caucus has just added another two members: Reps. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ). Nadler has been in the House since 1993, representing a part of New York that includes central Manhattan, and is currently the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee (the most powerful Democrat in that group). Ironically, after the 2020 Census and subsequent redistricting, Nadler was forced to run against a fellow incumbent House member to retain his seat and he ended up the winner. The person he defeated in the 2022 Democratic primary? Carolyn Maloney… who happened to be a member...

A new survey has found that more than half of Americans do not believe God exists or that He “affects lives,” prompting one prominent researcher to highlight the need for “sweeping national repentance and spiritual renewal.” The Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University released the second installment of its American Worldview Inventory 2025 on Wednesday. The research found that overall, 60% of Americans do not believe God exists or that He “affects lives.” Nearly half of self-identified Christians (47%) and a slightly smaller share of theologically identified born-again Christians (40%) said the same. George Barna, director of research at...

Larry Sanger may be a lifelong skeptic, but the co-founder of the world’s most popular online encyclopedia is certain he’s had a dramatic conversion to the Christian faith. Sanger, 56, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 along with Jimmy Wales in pursuit of a “free and open” internet, detailed his roughly 35-year journey from “skeptical philosopher” to Christianity in a new blog on his personal website. Outlining a philosophy he called "methodical skepticism," which rejects any belief that cannot be known "with certainty,” Sanger said after years of questioning and weighing the arguments for and against God's existence, he found himself...

Therefore, this is what the LORD says: You have not obeyed me; you have not proclaimed FREEDOM for your fellow countrymen. Jer 34:17 The major war in America is the secularist/Atheists vs. Christianity. The National Religion of the US is Atheism which is being preached by fundamentalist Atheists every Christmas and Easter. If they’re so comfortable w/their religion why are they so defensive against Christianity. Not only are they forcing the Courts to ban Christians from every public event, they will not tolerate any Christian symbol or thought anywhere outside the Church. Atheism is the foundation of liberalism just as...

JTA — For decades, Americans United for Separation of Church and State called its adversaries “religious extremists.” Today, the group has a more specific target: fighting Christian nationalism. The decision to sharpen the language was made by Rachel Laser, the group’s president for the last six years. A Jew and the first member of a religious minority to lead Americans United since its founding in 1947, Laser wanted the group to be more clear-eyed about what she sees as a growing threat to religious pluralism in the United States: the belief that American laws should favor Christian values over those...

House Republicans who have led a nearly two-year investigation into a $500,000 State Department grant to an organization that promotes humanism and secularism are pressing the agency to conduct more diligent oversight after it admitted that the organization may have misused taxpayer funds.Rep. Mike McCaul, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican who heads the panel’s human rights subcommittee, have accused the State Department of trying to promote atheism overseas under the guise of advancing religious pluralism, a longtime U.S. foreign policy priority. Rep. Brian Mast, a Florida Republican who...

PROOF THAT EVERYTHING - IS A SIMULATION (Including God) Is this reality? Well, we're experiencing ... something right now so maybe the better question is: what is reality? Could everything we see, everything we experience, everything that exists in our entire universe -- be artificial? Supporters of Simulation Theory believe that not only is it possible that we're living in a simulation; it's likely. And the more we look for evidence, the more we find. Philip K Dick believed deja vu was the simulation adjusting to new code. Many people experience The Mandela Effect, a or "false memory" shared by...

The number of people in the United Kingdom who identify as atheist is greater than those who say they believe in God, according to a research project examining why people reject religion. Explaining Atheism, a three-year program overseen by Queen’s University Belfast in collaboration with other academic institutions launched in 2022, presented interim findings earlier this year on the levels of atheism in multiple countries, including the United Kingdom. According to the research project, from 2008 to 2018, the number of Brits who don't believe in God rose from 35.2% to 42.9%, leaping ahead of belief in God, which dropped...

Atheism is the absence or rejection of belief in deities. That definition makes it easy to understand an atheist thinking. What is difficult to understand about atheist thinking is their position on creation. I know neither the atheist nor the believer can refute the self-evident fact that we are part of a creation. Any discussion that begins in agreement stands a chance of progressing. What issues arise after we agree there was a creation? Why was there a creation? When was there a creation? Where was there a creation? The spine-tingling question when you put the issues together in a...

And guess what the DNC will champion in August? A major theme of the Republican National Convention was illegal immigration or the invasion of migrants across our nation’s southern border.Speaker after speaker elaborated on the migrant invasion while The New York Times midway into the convention ran an article stating these claims were exaggerated. RNC speakers were also careful to state that they supported legal immigration yet these statements were ignored as critics from the left accused the convention of being anti-immigration. Examples of the anti-immigration charge were common on the PBS show, ‘Democracy Now’ despite host Amy Goodman’s superficial...

Daniel Dennett, the American philosopher, who has died aged 82, was, with Richard Dawkins, a leading proponent of Darwinism and one of the most virulent controversialists on the academic circuit...

Atheist author Richard Dawkins described himself as a "cultural Christian" and lamented the faith's waning cultural influence in Europe, though he still derided its key tenets as "nonsense," during an interview on Easter Sunday. Speaking with British journalist Rachel Johnson, Dawkins noted that the United Kingdom is "fundamentally a Christian country," and he still personally values the Christian ethos despite not believing the religion from which it emerged. "I call myself a cultural Christian," said the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion. "I'm not a believer, but there's a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a...

I posted this on Twitter. It is driving the atheists crazy

"The Pope argued that 'solidarity is not only a moral virtue but also a requirement of justice, which calls for correcting the distortions and purifying the intentions of unjust systems, not least through radical changes of perspective in the sharing of challenges and resources among individuals and among peoples'.”

On this date in 1697, Scottish medical student Thomas Aikenhead was hanged on the road from Edinburgh to Leith for blasphemy, an already-archaic punishment inflicted for what reads like headstrong youthful atheism of a decidedly garden variety. Aikenhead partook of the times’ emerging (albeit forbidden) store of humanist and skeptical literature, and chatted most unguardedly with University of Edinburgh “friends” who tattled to authorities to the extent that, not content with testifying against him, one published a pamphlet demanding the offender “atone with blood, the affronts of heaven’s offended throne.” Said authorities scarcely elevated the dignity of the temporal throne...

We must have been fifteen or sixteen when we discovered the church visitor’s book. It was an old church, maybe medieval, and I would pass it with my school friends on our way to the town center. I’m not sure what possessed us to go in; it might have been my idea. I’ve always loved old churches. For a long time, I would tell myself that I liked the sense of history or the architecture, which was true as far as it went. Like the narrator in Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going,” I would venture into any church I found,...

One of the key contrasts between the various classical Chinese thinkers is what to make of Heaven (天). For Confucius, Heaven is the source of moral virtue and an ideal to emulate in human conduct. By and large, he concerns himself with human affairs: self-cultivation, education, and good rule. But Heaven has a will on Earth, personality and intent, and what is good in men flows down from Heaven. As the Master says, "How great was Yao as a ruler! So majestic! It is Heaven that is great, and it was Yao who modeled himself upon it" (Analects 8.19). Mengzi...

Frank Turek debates an atheist on whether or not the Gospels were written by the disciples. The atheist claims that they were not and believes he has ample evidence to prove his point but Frank Turek demonstrates that everything the atheist claims his misinformation. This debate comes to a head as the kid refuses to accept defeat, as Frank employs the very thing the kid was claiming to dismiss!