Free Republic

Seeing the new Star Trek movie last week got me to thinking about parallel universes. I was once a liberal. Now I am a libertarian-leaning conservative. Having transitioned from one orientation to the other, it occurs to me that liberals and conservatives perceive the world in completely different ways, and subsequently live their lives in different universes, each of which follows a different set of laws. The laws of my perceptual universe are, to me, as obvious and irrepressible as the laws of physics. I have come to embrace them and in so doing have enjoyed some modicum of personal...

Christian kids are typically sent to Sunday school for lessons on the Bible and morals. For nonbelievers, there's atheist Sunday school. With an estimated 14 percent of Americans professing to have no religion, according to the Institute for Humanist Studies, some are choosing to send their children to classes that teach ethics without religious belief. Bri Kneisley sent her 10-year-old son, Damian, to Camp Quest Ohio this past summer after a neighbor had shown him the Bible. "Damian was quite certain this guy was right and was telling him this amazing truth that I had never shared," said Kneisley, who...

Jennifer Hua identifies herself as a Christian. A 35-year-old former attorney studying Christian counseling at the Wheaton College Graduate School (Illinois), she has gone to church all her life and is a lay leader in her suburban Chicago congregation. She furthers her spiritual development by daily Bible reading, prayer, listening to and singing worship songs, and interacting with other Christians. And every few months, she carves out time for a silent retreat. "I do all of these things because I know from past experience I need to recalibrate my mind and my heart to be in tune with God," she...

Now praying gets 7 Christians arrested Cops call holding Bibles while lying prostrate 'disturbing peace' By Bob Unruh © 2007 WorldNetDaily.com Christians have been arrested recently at "gay" festivals for nothing more than having a protest sign that is "wider than their torso," but now police have gone even further, targeting Bible-carrying ministers for praying on public property and for standing on a public sidewalk near a "gay" festival. One of the new cases comes from Elmira, N.Y., where police arrested seven Christians who went into a public park where a "gay" fest was beginning and started to pray, faces...

10. "I knew a Mormon who was a transvestite, child molester, drug dealer, drug addict, closet devil worshipper etc. etc. etc. so this proves that all of them are either one or all of the above" 9. "If Mormons only accepted God as I see him, I'd be ok with them." 8. "Joseph Smith was a. 1. Drug addict, 2. Cult leader, 3. Very bad person, etc. etc. etc." 7. The original message found in the Gospel can be twisted, repackaged, edited, reinterpreted a thousand times and the guilty party can still call themselves "Christian" but if a member of...

What's true and what's not about the Masons is the topic of a recent book by an expert in the history of religions. Father Manuel Guerra Gómez, who is an author of 25 books on sects and other topics, recently released "La trama masónica" (The Masonic Plot), published in Spanish by Styria. Father Guerra is a diocesan priest of Burgos, and a retired professor of the Burgos headquarters of the Faculty of Theology of Northern Spain. In this interview with ZENIT he says that "the Masonic method, atheistic in nature, reflects historical relativism and leads to the socio-cultural relativism that...

"The God Delusion" Debate Wednesday, October 3, 2007 The Alys Stephens Center Birmingham, Alabama Remaining true to our goal of engaging secular culture on critical issues in a thoughtful, respectful manner, Fixed Point Foundation will sponsor a debate on what is arguably the most critical question of our time: the existence of God. The decision one makes regarding this question has implications that reverberate throughout eternity to be sure, but it also affects temporal existence from government policy to the individual. Historically, man’s belief in the transcendent has served as a restraint on his conduct and provided hope for his...

For well over a century now, the idea that something about modernity will ultimately cause religion to wither away has been practically axiomatic among modern, sophisticated Westerners.1 Known in philosophy as Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous story of the madman who runs into the marketplace declaring that “Gott ist tot,” and in sociology as the “secularization thesis,” it is an idea that many urbane men and women no longer even think to question, so self-evident does it appear.2 As people become more educated and more prosperous, the secularist story line goes, they find themselves both more skeptical of religion’s premises and less...

Empirical science and religion differ in some fundamental ways. Scientists look for questions to ask. Priests (preachers, rabbis, etc) just provide answers. Science has theories that are subject to change. In 1896, physicists believed that atoms were the smallest particles of matter. A year latter J.J. Thomson overturned this theory by reporting his discovery that atoms were actually comprised of smaller charged particles he called "protons", "electrons" and "neutrons". Later research demonstrated that Thomson's particles were comprised of even smaller particles. Religion has truths that are to be accepted without question. Those who question these truths may be treated as...

I have seen so much discussion of "this church is wrong because...". Perhaps we can have a general discussion about what everyone does believe. Whether your Christian, Pagan, Jewish, or what have you, would like to know what others believe. I know. I could just study World Religions, but I like to have a personal aspect on things. What do you believe? Have you always believed in your religion or convert from something else?