Free Republic

To some critics, America’s founding generation adhered to a profound misconception of human nature. The Enlightenment’s attachment to secular rationality rejected mankind’s fundamental hunger for religion. Human beings need a faith, and the secular world will never truly divorce itself from dogma. There is an essential truth in that, and it may be most evident today in the forms that environmental activism takes. It must be said at the outset that climate change is real and observable, and the consensus that human activity contributes to that change (though to what degree has not yet firmly been established) is all but...

De Mattei: Dare, Monsignore! TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER... Twenty-five years ago, on 8 February 1994, the European Parliament voted on a resolution that invited the nations of Europe to promote and give legal protection to homosexuality. In his Angelus address on 20 February 1994, the Holy Father Pope John Paul II appealed to public opinion worldwide, affirming that “the legal approbation of active homosexuality is not morally admissible [...]. The Resolution of the European Parliament has called for the legitimization of a moral disorder.The Parliament has unduly given institutional value to deviant behaviors, which do not conform to God’s plan”....

Weakening of the family generally occurs in an environment of weakening of religion. As France is gripped by civil disorder, many commentators identify, quite correctly, as the culprit the outsized burden that France's bloated welfare state places on its citizens. According a recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the highest tax burden in the industrialized world is in France — 46.1 percent of GDP. In the United States, it is 27 percent, which includes taxes paid at all levels of government — federal, state and local. Welfare state spending in France is 32 percent of GDP,...

Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society. By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods). Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is...

Half a century on from the publication of Schaeffer’s seminal books The God Who Is There and Escape from Reason (1968), our culture spins ever faster into irrationality. Schaeffer predicted that plunging below the “line of despair” would lead to social collapse just as surely as the Roman Empire collapsed amid decadence, self-indulgence, and immorality. Others (both Christian and non-Christian) sounded alarms as well. Philip Rieff warned in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) that a society released from all restraints would implode. Christopher Lasch argued in The Culture of Narcissism (1979) that no community can flourish where every individual...

The Left’s Religious War Against America What’s really driving leftist anger and hatred. October 12, 2018 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism. 69% of progressives are ashamed to be Americans, but 63% are proud of their political ideology instead. The majority don’t attend religious services, but 73% list politics as their preoccupation. Religiously unaffiliated voters are the most excited about attending political rallies and marches. Numbers from one poll showed that, "religiously unaffiliated Democrats were more than twice as likely...

The voters who are most amped for the 2018 elections look elite in nearly every way. They are Democrats, college-educated, and largely secular. They are likely to be women, but they’re not necessarily white or particularly young. These are the people who might post rants about Donald Trump on Facebook or harass their friends to donate to Planned Parenthood. They may sign petitions on Change.org or follow the Facebook page of the U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, even though they don’t live in Texas. Maybe they attended the Women’s March two years ago, or the March for Our Lives this...

Imagine you’re the president of a European country. You’re slated to take in 50,000 refugees from the Middle East this year. Most of them are very religious, while most of your population is very secular. You want to integrate the newcomers seamlessly, minimizing the risk of economic malaise or violence, but you have limited resources ... What do you do? Well, you make your best guess and hope the policy you chose works out. But it might not. ... You can, however, experiment like that with virtual people. And that’s exactly what the Modeling Religion Project does. An international team...

LEICESTER, United Kingdom - In the wake of Ireland’s May 25 referendum legalizing abortion in the country, the Irish Labour Party has started a petition seeking a referendum to end religious schools in the country.Unlike in the United States, the government funds religious schools in Ireland, and about 96 percent of elementary schools in the country are under the patronage of a religious group, and approximately 90 percent of these schools are run by the Catholic Church.“It’s time for a national conversation about how we achieve a modern, secular and equality-based education system for the Ireland of today, and what...

Remarks by French President Emmanuel Macron that he wanted to repair church-state ties caused uproar Tuesday, sparking charges he was tampering with France’s longstanding secular tradition. The Church and the state were for centuries virtually indistinguishable in France, but the 1789 Revolution marked the first step by republicans to exclude religion from government affairs, codified in a 1905 law separating the two. But tensions have persisted, with conservative politicians often accusing officials of denying France’s cultural heritage — as seen in efforts to install nativity scenes at town halls during Christmas. Macron, who prides himself on tackling difficult issues head-on,...

In "Why God? Explaining Religious Phenomena", sociologist Rodney Stark writes that these godless movements do not count as religions because "without the existence of a conscious divine being ... these 'Godless religions' can offer no otherworldly rewards, no miracles, not even any reason for prayer or worship." (Skip) ... he makes the following proposition: "The everlasting basis for religion will be the human conviction and hope that life has meaning." Is this not exactly the point of Marxism: that instead of the endless cycle of exploitation of man by man, we are entering an era in which workers of the...

“I hope the irony is not being lost on anyone that three liberal atheists are being sponsored, their event is being sponsored, by the most conservative groups on campus,” Dr. Peter Boghossian said. That statement kicked off an hour-long discussion (plus an hour of Q & A) on the question “Is Intersectionality a Religion?” The discussion took place at Portland State University a couple weeks ago, just days after another group hosted a talk with former Google engineer James Damore. Almost exactly a year ago I pointed out a piece by Andrew Sullivan (yes, that Andrew Sullivan) on the same...

A new academic chair intended to promote the study of the interaction between Christian and secular thought was established on Thursday, as part of the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences By Christopher WellsOn Thursday, the John Paul II Pontifical Theological Institute for Marriage and Family Sciences solemnly inaugurated the “Gaudium et spes” Chair, dedicated to studying “the interaction between Christian and secular thought.”The new academic Chair was established as part of the Pontifical Institute, itself a new foundation, brought into being in September of last year with the motu proprio “Summa familiae cura.”Letter of...

Today, however, there seems to be an inversion of these priorities, resulting in significant distortions: The sequence is not priest, prophet, and king with the accent on service, but king, prophet, and priest with the accent on ecclesial authority, Christ being largely absent. The long history of papal triumphalism in the name of Christ came to a symbolic end with Paul VI’s retirement of the papal tiara (now on display at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C.). Papal leadership in defense of Christendom also symbolically ended with Pope Paul’s return of the Turkish battle flag captured by Christians at...

Salon Magazine has called Norway one of the “eight best countries to be an atheist,” along with Sweden, Denmark, Japan and the Czech Republic, suggesting that Norway’s “socially just government” has effectively taken the place of God for many Norwegians. In 2012, Norway eliminated Lutheranism as the official state church. “The Evangelical Lutheran religion will no longer be the state’s official religion,” parliament wrote in a statement, which meant that the church would receive public financing “on par with other religious and belief-based societies.” Norway’s decline in religiosity has been constant. A year ago the number of Norwegian atheists equaled...

"Gunman who took hostages at Louisiana bank posted chilling Facebook messages" SNIPPET: "The gunman who took three hostages at a Louisiana bank Tuesday -- killing one of them before being shot and killed by police -- recently posted chilling messages on Facebook, including a cartoon strip about hostages.   In a post on Sunday, 20-year-old Fuaed Abdo Ahmed displays a cartoon strip that focuses on an apparent hostage situation." SNIPPET: "Ahmed's final post, made Tuesday just hours before the hostage standoff began, is of a photo of a man with a sword attacking a tank.Under the photo is a quote...

The anti-Trump demonstrations we now see in the streets are not just examples of the immaturity of many modern secular liberals, who seem to think that everyone else is somehow obligated to agree with them. They’re also a symptom of the distorted influence politics now exercises over our culture. But in addition to being a symptom of our culture, the dominance of politics in every aspect of life is also a consequence of liberalism itself. The tendency of liberalism has always been to politicize everything. Thanks to liberalism, we have a politicized media that has abandoned journalistic standards in a...

Time and again in the Gospels, Jesus warned His listeners, "For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it" (Matt. 16:25). This applies directly to our Christian colleges, universities, and seminaries. If we try to "save our lives" by capitulating to worldly standards, we will "lose our lives" in the process.More than 20 years ago, a fellow-Old Testament scholar talked with me about the challenges his seminary was facing. At that time, there was a dispute about women in ministry, and his school was receiving some pressure over the...

"...I’d urge you to read a fascinating article in this Sunday’s New York Times. It turns out that America’s less religious citizens are far more likely to believe in things such as ghosts and UFOs than people who attend church. The author, psychology professor Clay Routledge, locates this phenomenon in the quest for meaning..."For instance, my colleagues and I recently published a series of studies in the journal Motivation and Emotion demonstrating that the link between low religiosity and belief in advanced alien visitors is at least partly explained by the pursuit of meaning. The less religious participants were, we...

The Mayor of Chevigny-Saint Sauveur has announced that he will ban alternative school lunch menus that exclude pork, to promote secularism. Mayor Michel Rotger is a French conservative who is saying ‘NO’ to accommodating Islamic tyranny, insisting secular values be upheld in public schools in Chevigny- Saint Sauveur. From Breitbart: Mayor Michel Rotger, a member of the conservative Republican party, said the move would promote secularism but would also save the local government money saying ‘alternative menus’ led to too much waste, L’Express reports. “We are putting an operation in place so the children eat everything and their diets are...