Free Republic

The empty tomb is a historical fact leaving only six real possibilities to explain it (see Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ") - 1. Jesus' death was a hoax. 2. The disciples stole Jesus' body. 3. The resurrection accounts are legendary. 4. The disciples saw hallucinations of Jesus. 5. The disciples talked themselves into the resurrection. 6. Jesus was raised from the dead. Which is the best explanation that can explain the facticity of the early church? ...

Could the disciples have stolen Jesus' body at night and snuck by Roman guards and moved that huge stone without waking anyone up? Well, this was the very argument of the opponents of the early Church for some 25 years (see Matthew 28:11-15). No one was denying the facticity of the empty tomb ...

Robert von Dassanowsky, the director of Film Studies at the University of Colorado, acutely noticed back in 2001 that James Cameron's epic movie Titanic is based on the German mountain films that Riefenstahl starred in. Although largely ignoring Riefenstahl's compromised relationship with the Nazis, von Dassanowsky makes a compelling case that Cameron's Titanic is a German mountain film set upon the sea ice of the North Atlantic. Von Dassanowsky even went so far to strongly suggest that the heroine in the Titanic, Rose, is actually based on Riefenstahl's personal character. He then intimates that Cameron may have indeed directed the...

Adolf Hitler once proclaimed, “we will not only create a Germany of power, but also a Germany of beauty.” Much earlier, and spoken at a time when Germany had been financially suffering for many years from what they deemed to be the international crisis of capitalism foisted upon them by the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler once simplified the purpose of the National Socialist movement, “I have the ambition to make the German people rich and Germany beautiful.” While scholar after scholar has spilled a lot of ink describing Nazi Germany’s political power and the Third Reich’s economy, relatively few have...

Civilization – Niall Ferguson’s brilliant, impeccably right-wing analysis of why it is that the West is going to hell in a handcart just gets better and better. In the latest episode, he explored how the roots of the Holocaust lay in a dry run genocide carried out by the Germans (who else?) in German South-West Africa (now Namibia) in the 1900s against the Herero and Namaqua natives. Around 80 per cent of the former tribe and 50 per cent of the latter were brutally massacred with many of the survivors sent to concentration camps where their racial characteristics were studied...

Having grown up under western civilization’s strong Christian foundations, modern man has imbibed deeply from the biblical-eschatological view of history in spite of his secularity, “we of today, concerned with the unity of universal history and with its progress toward an ultimate goal or at least toward a better world, are still in the line of prophetic and messianic monotheism – however little we may think of ourselves in those terms.” Christian theology about the apocalypse has been transposed into secular progressive ideologies like Socialism, Marxism, and even Nazism as well. As Christianity receded behind the wave of naturalism and...

The "evidence has only grown stronger" that climate change is responsible for an increasing number of health ills, including asthma, diarrheal disease, and even deaths from extreme weather such as heat waves, said Georges Benjamin, MD, executive director of the APHA. For one, rising temperatures can mean more smog, which makes children with asthma sicker, explained pediatrician Perry Sheffield, MD, MPH, assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics and the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, in New York ...

The world’s largest energy megaproject has begun. Desertec will spend the better part of a trillion dollars on solar energy plants in North Africa, the electricity from which will be transmitted via undersea cables to Europe. The notion that this project is an eco-fantasy is quickly felled by investigating the heavyweight European businesses involved in the Desertec Industrial Initiative. Broadening the investigation into other media and activist groups involved yields useful insights into environmentalism. For instance: During the early years of the Climate Change campaign, the Holtzbrincks (a family of impeccable German-aristocratic and Nazi pedigree) purchased Scientific American and Nature...

Genghis Khan's Mongol invasion in the 13th and 14th centuries was so vast that it may have been the first instance in history of a single culture causing man-made climate change, according to new research out of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, reports Mongabay.com. Unlike modern day climate change, however, the Mongol invasion cooled the planet, effectively scrubbing around 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere. So how did Genghis Khan, one of history's cruelest conquerors, earn such a glowing environmental report card? The reality may be a bit difficult for today's environmentalists to stomach, but Khan...

You’ll note from that “whoulda thunk?” that I am not altogether surprised by the Nazi connections with the green movement and AGW theory. That’s because, during my research for Watermelons, I discovered how intimately they were bound. The Nazi obsession with “Blut und Boden” (”Blood and Soil”) and the quest for Lebensraum did not die with Hitler in his bunker in 1945: in only slightly changed form they continue to permeate green ideology ...

Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Chairman David A. Keenelast night announced Tom McCabe of Olympia, Washington, as the 2011 recipient of the Ronald Reagan Award, an honor given annually to a conservative leader fighting in the trenches for the principles embodied by Ronald Reagan. The award was presented during the conference's annual Ronald Reagan Banquet for which Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels was the keynote speaker. In presenting the award,Chairman Keene said, "Tom McCabe ...

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is a rising star in the Republican Party, forcing him to constantly deny that he will run for president in 2012. His stardom has just hit a bump though, as he is under fire for embracing Muslims with Islamist ties. The controversy began when Governor Christie nominated Sohail Mohammed, the general counsel to the American Muslim Union (AMU), to become a Superior Court judge. The Investigative Project on Terrorism has discovered that the AMU is not a moderate group, as its online newsletter has told readers that a “Zionist commando orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks...

Here is another great article posted just today on the Ireland Indepedent that describes Phelim McAleer and Ann Mcelhinney's latest Robert Redford eco hypocrisy documentary - but this time pointing out that they have a Hollywood hit list that they will be targeting for quite some time. Unfortunately the Indepedent does not allow the Free Republic to link up with them, but here is the URL so that you can check it out - http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/the-irish-filmmaker-whos-stirring-up-a-green-hornets-nest-in-hollywood-2526505.html.

In 2011, your federal government will spend $10.6 million a day on climate change. Annual expenditures will be about $4 billion on global warming research—now called climate change–despite the fact that there has been no global warming since 1998, says the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a British educational think tank. Billions have been wasted so far, although periods of cooling and warming have occurred naturally throughout history. Fossil fuels—Petroleum, natural gas and coal are the assigned “villains.” Yet, “no conclusive evidence shows that fossil fuels to produce energy have had any significant effect on the earth’s temperature,” GWPF concludes....

This is a critical condensation of Raymond H. Dominick III’s The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871-1971. Highlights: In 1918 Prussia’s Government Nature-care Center sought a directory of major German Nature-protection organizations (ones with notable achievements). They came up with 264 organizations. The Center’s bibliography of German Nature-protection publications listed 10,000 titles. The German conservation movement counted 100,000 active participants and was led by hundreds of aristocrats. German forestry, ornithology and ecology academies were created in the 19th century as auxiliaries of the conservation movement. The German conservation movement was overwhelmingly and durably aligned with Nazism. The Third...

Here’s a fact that I suspect most people don’t know: Wherever we humans have gone in the past two centuries, we have increased local and regional biodiversity. Biodiversity, in this case, is defined as increasing species richness. Yet, “the popular view [is] that diversity is decreasing at local scales,” Brown University biologist Dov Sax and University of California, Santa Barbara biologist Steven Gaines report. Ample scientific evidence shows that this popular view is wrong, however ...

In his seminal essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” published in Science magazine in 1967, historian Lynn Townsend White, Jr. argues that those Biblical precepts made Christianity, “especially in its Western form,” the “most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.” In stark contrast to pagan animism, Christianity posited “a dualism of man and nature” and “insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.” Whereas older pagan creeds gave a cyclical account of time, Christianity presumed a teleological direction to history, and with it the possibility of progress. This belief in progress was...

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has found another disguise for lining the pockets of “alternative energy” producers with consumers’ dollars directed there not by rational economic choices but by government mandate. Once a supporter of cap and trade, Graham now supports a “Clean Energy Standard” that would require utilities to generate increasingly high percentages of electricity from “renewable” sources like wind, solar, and biofuels, from nuclear, and from coal using “carbon capture and sequestration”—catching the carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted when coal burns and forcing it, under pressure, into deep geological formations for long-term storage to keep it out of the atmosphere....

Over the last decade, many evangelical Christians have embraced the doctrine called creation care, which uses a scriptural basis to promote good stewardship of the earth and its resources. For these believers, problems like climate change threaten to greatly intensify third-world poverty, making actions to reduce global warming emissions an urgent Christian issue. “We are convinced that evangelicals must engage this issue without any further lingering over the basic reality of the problem or humanity’s responsibility to address it,” hundreds of evangelical leaders declared in a 2006 statement on climate change. But while a growing number of local and national...

Over the last decade, many evangelical Christians have embraced the doctrine called creation care, which uses a scriptural basis to promote good stewardship of the earth and its resources. For these believers, problems like climate change threaten to greatly intensify third-world poverty, making actions to reduce global warming emissions an urgent Christian issue. “We are convinced that evangelicals must engage this issue without any further lingering over the basic reality of the problem or humanity’s responsibility to address it,” hundreds of evangelical leaders declared in a 2006 statement on climate change. But while a growing number of local and national...