Free Republic

Consider the mindset of your stereotypical Silicon Valley computer nerd: hyper-intelligent, introverted, socially awkward, often weird. Consider also what they are tasked to do for their day jobs. They dissect the ambiguous statements of natural language into the deterministic logic that a machine can “understand.” The resulting tangles of logic are often huge, more than any human mind can contemplate at once. So a large part of the job is organizing that logic into hierarchies so a human can focus on manageable chunks at a time. And even then, the more chunks one can hold at a time, the better....

Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, special envoy of King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain, met with Pope Francis on November 25 and invited the Pontiff to visit the Arab nation. Sheikh Khalid, who was Bahrain’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2005 to 2020, praised the Pope’s commitment to interreligious dialogue and noted King Hamad’s support for the Document on Human Fraternity, signed by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar in Abu Dhabi in 2019. The Pope said that the invitation manifested Bahrain’s “character as a role model for openness and coexistence among all components of...

The Northeastern part of the United States, once known as a bulwark of Puritans and other strict Christian sects, now dominates the top 10 list of the most “post-Christian” cities, according to a report by the Barna Group. For the report, released Wednesday, Barna drew from data based on interviews with 21,378 adults conducted over a 10-year period that concluded in April 2018, with a sampling error of plus or minus 0.7 percentage points.The cities were listed in geographic area classifications known as Designated Market Areas, a term developed by The Nielsen Company to define a local media market.Springfield-Holyoke, Massachusetts,...

It may come as no surprise that the influence of Christianity in the United States is waning. Rates of church attendance, religious affiliation, belief in God, prayer and Bible-reading have all been dropping for decades. By consequence, the role of religion in public life has been slowly diminishing, and the church no longer functions with the cultural authority it held in times past. These are unique days for the church in America as it learns what it means to flourish in a new “Post-Christian” era. Barna has developed a metric to measure the changing religious landscape of American culture. We...

The Surprising Reason Why More Americans Are Not Going To ChurchThe standard narrative of American religious decline goes something like this: A few hundred years ago, European and American intellectuals began doubting the validity of God as an explanatory mechanism for natural life. As science became a more widely accepted method for investigating and understanding the physical world, religion became a less viable way of thinking—not just about medicine and mechanics, but also culture and politics and economics and every other sphere of public life. As the United States became more secular, people slowly began drifting away from faith.Of course,...

The Fulbright scholarships are prestigious awards, funded by Congress, to hundreds of US academics and others to provide opportunities for study abroad. It is administered by the US State Department. A reader recently underwent a short course preparing incoming Fulbright scholars for their overseas deployment. He is going to study in a developing country. He tells me he was shocked by the instruction in gender ideology his group was put through as part of their briefing. They were instructed, he said to think about how they can be “an ally” to sexual minorities abroad. He reports that his group sat...

Fewer Americans say they believe in God or pray regularly — yet more people believe in an afterlife nonetheless, a new study finds. It's a generational thing, with millennials the least likely generation to say they're religious or to take the Bible literally, the team at San Diego State University, Florida Atlantic University and Case Western Reserve University found. "In recent years, fewer Americans prayed, believed in God, took the Bible literally, attended religious services, identified as religious, affiliated with a religion, or had confidence in religious institutions," the team wrote in the journal Sage Open. "The large declines in...

Political elections are as much about those doing the electing as it is about those eventually elected. If each vote represents what a voter believes and hopes for, then the person elected is really a magnification of the desires voters happen to have. This is why national elections are so fascinating. Every four years, Americans collectively paint and present to the world a picture that communicates their aspirations and fears. It is a picture that enables us to see the character of a nation.

A POST-CHRISTIAN era has dawned in Britain, with most white Britons now saying they have no religion, according to a new survey. The increase is most pronounced among those aged under 40 and comes amid claims that they feel alienated from the church’s conservative social values. The poll, conducted by YouGov last month with a sample of 1,500 across the whole population, including recent immigrants, found almost half (46%) have no religion, up from 42% in February 2015 and from 37% in January 2013. This rises to more than 50% among white British.

Moral decline (or degeneration) refers to the process of declining from a higher to a lower level of morality. The condition of moral decline is seen as preceding or concomitant with the decline in quality of life, as well as the decline of nations. In the words of British lawyer and jurist Judge Devlin (1905 -1992), "an established morality is as necessary as good government to the welfare of society. Societies disintegrate from within more frequently than they are broken up by external pressures."[1] Contents[] 1 Moral standards2 Causality 2.1 Biblical theology2.2 Secular ideology 3 Examples of development and decline...

The United States Supreme Court may soon liberate the biblically conservative church from old "prejudices" that should have long ago been "jettisoned," forcing it into "rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity," in the words of a recent writer in The New York Times. Homosexuality must be removed from the "sin list" and, according to an MSNBC commentator, traditional marriage proponents must be forced "to do things they don't want to do." Sadly, this crusade will be like the Marxist "liberation" movements that promised to "free" people, but really were about control and suppression. The culmination may come as the...

The way in which we behave this Easter weekend is as good an indicator as any that this Britain is now an all but totally secular society. How many people have you heard describe the past six days as Holy Week — even though that was what everyone, atheist or Christian, used to call it. I can recall in my teens listening to an edition of Radio Four’s Any Questions on Good Friday. On the panel was a bishop, and a novelist and commentator called Marghanita Laski, an intellectual lady who made no secret of her atheist views.

The Washington Post has produced six massively detailed maps showing the religious make-up of America. The main map is above – if you want to enlarge it you'll have to click through to the Post's report here. The author/analyst, Niraj Chokshi, has uncovered some fascinating material – most of it lurking in the 2010 US Religion Census (data submitted by congregations, not the official US Census) but so much more surprising set out in map form. And here's an example. Did you know there are – possibly – now more religious Muslims than religious Jews in Florida? I know, it...

In an attempt to combat dwindling attendance levels and add new members to their shrinking congregations, some churches in the U.S. are starting to think outside the box -- by embracing the bottle. Church-in-a-pub is a Forth Worth, Texas congregation that enjoys craft beer with Sunday evening services. The meetings are described as "salvation and everlasting life with really good beer." Church-in-a-pub is unique, but not alone in its quest to combine spirituality with suds. Beer-serving, religion-focused events now exist in New York, Atlanta, Boston and New York thanks to a group called Theology-on-Tap, and in Allendale, Michigan, members of...

In case you didn't notice, there is a concerted war on serious biblical faith in our post-Christian society. And that's why, any day now, you can expect Sarah Palin to be asked a question designed to knock her right out of the race for the vice presidency. It won't be a question about the Bush Doctrine. It won't be a question about her teenage daughter. It won't be a question about Alaska state troopers. It won't even be a question about abortion. None of those questions threaten to deliver a killer blow to her bid to be the first woman...

Authorities in Ulysses continue to investigate the death of a seven month old girl who was left in a car during a hot day Thursday. Kynadee Boese passed away Thursday after being left in a car parked at Bob Wilson Memorial Hospital in Ulysses. The infant's funeral was yesterday in Ulysses. Ulysses Police Chief Alan Olson says results of Friday's autopsy are not complete. The Ulysses Police Department, Kansas Bureau of Investigation, and Grant County Attorney's Office are investigating.yesterdays report: The Ulysses Police Department, Kansas Bureau of Investigation, and Grant County Attorney's office are investigating the death of an infant...

We are now living in what some scholars call the "post-Christian West."By this they mean that Christianity no longer influences culture in Europe or in North America in a way that it once did. Of course there are many inherited influences still evident in the law, but for the past 50 years Europe, then the United States, has jettisoned Christian influences in arts and entertainment, politic, and education.It is becoming, some scholars say, an "ABC moment" -- "Anything But Christian."While well over 90 percent of Americans still say they believe in God, and many still identify as "Christian," the values...

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...

This is the continent where some leading thinkers are talking about a "post-Christian Europe." And this is the country of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who infamously quipped, "God is dead." So some may be surprised at the receptivity in Germany this week to visiting Pope Benedict XVI's message: Europe needs to rethink the thesis that secularism and economic progress go hand in hand. Coincidentally, some of Europe's stalwart secularists are challenging the idea that religious reasoning inevitably retreats from the public sphere as countries modernize. Germans themselves are modeling a growing acceptance of religion's role in shaping society: • Head of...