Free Republic

Last week Democrats selected Joe Biden as their nominee for president. Both Trump and Biden are positioning themselves as deliverers of our nation and positioning each other as the destroyers of America and American values. The Democratic convention allowed us to hear Trump’s opponents accuse him of trashing everything from Christianity to the Constitution. Trump’s supporters do see him as a great deliverer, recovering the nation from the leftist ideologies destroying America. They remember the words of Barack Obama, who said just days from his election: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”In today’s...

The economic indicators all show the economy is booming. Unemployment is at record lows. The stock market is seeing record highs. Wages are up, and taxes are down. Stifling regulations are being lifted. Everything seems to be working just fine. There is much truth in this perception of a boom. Part of this can be attributed to less government interference and taxation. Unnecessary government regulation and spending always hurt the economy. When markets are freer, profits tend to come galloping back. And much has galloped back. However, beneath the surface, major problems threaten the boom. These problems have long plagued...

Catholic Eastern Europe Bastion of freedom Catholicism in Western Europe is atrophying and it's not secular forces that are the cause. It's because Catholics are abandoning and perverting the Faith. Meanwhile, Eastern Europe has become the bastion of Catholicism and culture, protecting and passing on what the rest of Europe has cast away. The bishops of Germany are gathering for their own synod and, as indicated by the working documents outlining the assembly's discussions, the prelates are seeking to redefine Church teaching on the ordination of women, homosexuality, masturbation and contraception. But this week, Ukranian bishops wrote a letter to their German...

Today the U.S. Supreme Court hears a case that could determine whether parents and taxpayers have any choices about the kind of religion American children are taught with taxpayer funds. Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue concerns whether private donations may support schools that make their religious beliefs explicit. It could also undo a century of U.S. court and legislative decisions that used animus between Protestants and Catholics to attack the faith of both kinds of Christians’ children over the last century.Five years ago, Montana’s legislature enacted a tiny school choice program that allows residents to deduct up to...

There was a wicked kingdom in which there lived a large number of slaves. The kingdom fought wars, built cities and was extremely successful in growing its economy. Its achievements were the envy of all the other kingdoms. The slaves did well, too. They were not given low jobs or manual labor. Instead, they were “helping” slaves. Their task was to help the people of the Kingdom get by. If life in the kingdom became empty and meaningless, the slaves would cheer the people up and help them continue with their lives. When people began to doubt that the kingdom...

America has betrayed our founders!America has betrayed our God! Christians escaped religious persecution in Europe and with God’s divine intervention, created our great nation. Ten-plus miracles by God sustained our founders during our Revolutionary War. We were outnumbered 10 to 1 by a well-trained and disciplined British army, but by God’s grace we won! It was an amazing miracle. Miracles persisted throughout the war. George Washington led in battle, often within 50 yards of the British! He had four bullet holes in his coat and two horses shot from under him. He did not get a scratch. Praise God! George...

Full uncut uncensored AG Bill Barr Speech to Notre Dame on the battle between Christianity and Secularism.

Attorney General William Barr in a speech Friday bemoaned the "moral upheaval" of religious values in the United States, saying it has brought "suffering and misery." Barr made the comments during an address at the University of Notre Dame Law School. He said the deterioration of religion in the country is an "organized destruction" by secularists in an "unremitting assault on religion and traditional values," according to CNN. "Among the militant secularists are many so-called progressives. But where is the progress?" Barr asked. This "upheaval" has led to growing illegitimacy rates, drug use and "angry, alienated young males," CNN reported...

During the French Revolution, France set aside Christianity and in public forum denounced the God of Heaven. “The world for the first time heard an assembly of men, born and educated in civilization, and assuming the right to govern one of the finest of the European nations, uplift their united voice to deny the most solemn truth which man’s soul receives, and renounced unanimously the belief and worship of a Deity.” On October 23, 1793, just nine days after Queen Marie Atoinette was executed, the Republican Calendar was decreed. Pierre Sylvain Maréchal, who originally proposed the change, declared: “the calendar...

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...