Free Republic

There is no “right to food”. Food never was any sort of fundamental “right”. Saint Paul already warned us that to those who do not want to work, we shall give no food. You can’t find any clearer evidence that food is not a fundamental right of the person. Of course, charity demands that we feed the hungry. But this is not a subjective right of the hungry, merely the result of the charitable help of those who feed them because – let us say this once again – consider them, in their charity, worthy of being fed. Charity is...

"A steady patriot of the world alone, "The friend of every country -- but his own." George Canning's couplet about the Englishmen who professed love for all the world except their own native land comes to mind on reading Obama's remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. After listing the horrors of ISIS, al-Qaida and Boko Haram, the president decided his recital of crimes committed in the name of Islam would be unbalanced, if he did not backhand those smug Christians sitting right in front of him. "And lest we get on our high horse ... remember that during the Crusades...

Frank Turek's new book is a brilliant and unique contribution to Christian apologetics. "Stealing From God: Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case" is thoughtful and provocative yet a very quick read. I have read many books on Christian apologetics but nothing quite like this book. Not only is much of the content different from that of other books on the subject but so is the approach.By definition, Christian apologetics deals with defending the faith and, in the process, marshaling evidence in support of Christianity's truth claims. "Stealing From God" does that, of course, but it does something else,...

President Obama took to the podium of the National Prayer Breakfast to criticize the “terrible deeds” . . . committed “in the name of Christ” throughout the pass two thousand years or so. "And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ," he said. "In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ." While the president is right that slavery supporters often sought out validation in...

"Let me start with the Civil War — I mean this is a president who — we can excuse him for his ignorance of Islamic theology and Islamic history, you know despite his nominal background in Islam as a child. But excuse me, but the abolitionists were Christians, and the United States literally went to war with itself, unlike any other society before, to extirpate the longstanding, thousand year longstanding evil of slavery in virtually every human civilization. It’s just appalling that he doesn’t even grasp that fundamental decency about this country..."

The Crusades were not brutal wars of colonial oppression or zealous attempts to spread Christianity by the sword. The First Crusade was called in 1095 by Pope Urban II in response to desperate appeals from the Christians of the Middle East, who had lately been conquered and continued to be persecuted by the Turks. And these were only the latest in more than four centuries of attacks on Christian peoples by Muslim powers. At some point Christianity as a faith and as a culture had to defend itself or else be subsumed by Islam. The work of the Crusader, who...

People who wonder why the president does not talk more about race would do well to examine the recent blow-up over his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. Inveighing against the barbarism of ISIS, the president pointed out that it would be foolish to blame Islam, at large, for its atrocities. To make this point he noted that using religion to brutalize other people is neither a Muslim invention nor, in America, a foreign one: Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition,...

resident Obama has hijacked Christianity in an attempt to defend Islam. At the National Prayer breakfast Thursday, he said, “There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency, that can pervert and distort our faith.” And that there will always be people willing to “hijack religion for their own murderous ends.” So we shouldn’t “get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place—remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” Yes, people have done terrible deeds in the name of Christ, but they were against the...

While President Obama attempted to eviscerate a wholly righteous anger in the hearts and minds of the American people earlier this week--he took to chastisement as his verbal bludgeon of choice. But that anger, is an anger that is directed at the Islamic State for more or less living up to the basic tenets of their holy book. Those who do not share a reverence for it, rightfully point out this hypocrisy with concern for the welfare of our own children. The President's choice of venues to express these sentiments was also quite odd. The National Prayer Breakfast was once...

For a little more than 100 years weÂ’ve had standardized IQ tests, and over those 100 years there has been a consistent, linear increase in IQ scores, on the order of 3 points per decade. According to IQ tests, we are getting smarter. Also over the last 100 years, rates of belief in God and religious participation have been decreasing. The decrease in religiosity has been less linear than the rise in IQ, but discounting periods of increased religiosity corresponding to major crises like WWI, the Great Depression and WWII, overall there has been a roughly corresponding decrease in...

Joshua DuBois, former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, appeared yesterday on MSNBC’s “UP with Steve Kornacki,” during which he defended President Obama’s profoundly insulting anti-Christian remarks at last Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast in the Nation’s Capital. The president admonished Christians not to think their faith somehow different than the faith that has produced ISIL (and al Qaeda and Boko Haram and Abu Sayyaf and Hamas and Hezbollah and all too many other Islamic terrorist groups). “Remember,” spake Obama, “during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” And...

Two days ago's Question Time on BBC1 was one of the worst I've ever seen, beating its own record of mendacious and appalling programmes. The panellist George Galloway described fascism as a "Christian phenomenon", whereas it's a well-established historical fact that Nazism was neo-pagan, tried to destroy Christianity in Germany and persecuted Christian clergy and churches. The very symbol of the SS, the SS bolts or Runic "SS" (), consisted of runes, signs popular in Germanic neopaganism. Nazism wanted to replace Christianity with a "völkisch" (folkish or racial) cult, a moral doctrine derived from the pre-Christian, pagan Germanic heritage....

"Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ." These words from the President of the United States, during remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, have caused an uproar in religious circles -- and rightly so -- in spite of the administration's attempts to downplay the nature of his words. You don't have to be a longtime critic of the president to see that his deflecting attention away from modern-day evil during a rare occasion to...

AFP PHOTO / JIJI PRESS On June 8, 1972, a plane bombed the village of Trang Bang in South Vietnam, after the pilot mistook a group of civilians for enemy troops. The bombs contained Napalm, a highly flammable substance which killed and badly burned the people on the ground. The famous black and white photo of children fleeing the burning village won the Pulitzer Prize and was chosen as the "World Press Photo of the Year" in 1972. It became the symbol of the horrors of the Vietnam war, and of every war’s cruelty to children and civilians. The...

Atheist Richard Dawkins has declared, "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. ... DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music." But Dawkins doesn't act like he actually believes that. He recently affirmed a woman has the right to choose an abortion and asserted that it would be "immoral" to give birth to a baby with Down syndrome. According to Dawkins, the "right to choose" is a good thing and...

The number one issue at President Obama’s private meeting with Muslim leaders on Wednesday was the rise of Islamophobia in America, not the threat of Islamic terrorism, according to sources in the room with the president. Comedian Dean Obeidallah wrote that he attended the event and found the main topic to be discrimination against Muslims by their fellow Americans. “In fact, it was clearly the No. 1 issue raised: The alarming rise in anti-Muslim bigotry in America,” Obeidallah wrote for the Daily Beast. “My point was that while bigotry from certain Republicans is nothing new, I’m alarmed about the Democratic...

There is a difference, Mr. President, between Christian extremism and Muslim extremism. Christian extremism was in the 1400s. Muslim extremism was Wednesday. One is a dark era in the history books, the other is a threat to modernity as we know it. At the National Prayer Breakfast yesterday, after bowing to the Dalai Lama, President Obama – apologist in chief for Islam – talked about protecting the reputation of the Muslim world. Then he minimized the evil of militant Islam by bringing up the Spanish Inquisition and even Jim Crow, citing them as counterbalancing examples of Christian terrorism. In his...

President Obama has never been one to go easy on America. As a new president, he dismissed the idea of American exceptionalism, noting that Greeks think their country is special, too. He labeled the Bush-era interrogation practices, euphemistically called “harsh” for years, as torture. America, he has suggested, has much to answer given its history in Latin America and the Middle East. His latest challenge came Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast. At a time of global anxiety over Islamist terrorism, Obama noted pointedly that his fellow Christians, who make up a vast majority of Americans, should perhaps not be...

If you were to engage in a debate about religious violence with your average high school senior, you might encounter the claim that the modern scourge of religiously-inspired barbarity attributable to those who consider themselves Muslims is no historical anomaly. They might contend that the Christian world engaged in its own form of fundamentalism at the turn of the first millennium when the medieval European world embarked on a campaign to liberate the Middle Eastern territories conquered by Muslim armies. Having erected a dubious moral equivalency, your interlocutor is likely to then insist that it is hypocritical for Westerners to...

Walker's views disturb Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation."It is frightening that the highest executive in our state suffers from the delusion that God dictates his every move," she says. "Consider the personal and historic devastation inflicted by fanatics who think they are acting in the name of their deity."The dogmatic unwillingness of Wis. Gov. Scott Walker to negotiate or to compromise with Democrats or unions has surprised many people in the state. One explanation for his attitude may be found in his religious convictions. In a talk to the Christian Businessmen's Committee in Madison on...