Free Republic

How Long Before Small Boys Here Ask: A Church? What’s That, Grandad? PETER HITCHENS I had hoped to have a sort of Christmas truce this week, but the controversy just keeps on raging, drowning out the choirs and bells. And one of the problems is Christmas itself. How much longer will it exist in the form we know today? I fear it won’t be much longer. Many of its traditions are visibly dying. Teachers complain that children don’t know the carols any more, because their parents don’t know them either. Dying tradition? Members of the Royal Family attend the Christmas...

The American Mainstream media and Washington D.C. are dominated today by a Leftist, Secular and Godless mindset. That isn't any secret. Not even the unregenerate (unbelievers) will disagree with that. As Lucifer (Satan) controls more and more of the Media today - with these Godless surrogates and talking heads - his agenda is moving along quite rapidly and increasing exponentially. Never in the history of this nation has the Main Stream Liberal Media pushed and supported a President’s leftist agenda as this one we have today. Today Lucifer’s American Leftist Media is ram-rodding, bulldozing, redefining and cultivating the U.S. ground...

A Republican lawmaker with a mission to save Christmas is aiming his latest salvo at President and first lady Obama, who've followed in a recent tradition to eliminate the mention of Christmas in the White House holiday cards. The card selected by the Obamas announces: "Season's Greetings." Inside, it reads: "May your family have a joyous holiday season and a new year blessed with hope and happiness." But Rep. Henry Brown, R-S.C., said abandoning Christmas at Christmas is just plain wrong. On Tuesday, he introduced a resolution calling for the protection of the sanctity of Christmas. So far, 44 lawmakers,...

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 27, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - President Obama's brief proclamation of Thanksgiving Day on November 26 was unique among all recorded Thanksgiving proclamations by his predecessors: it is the first one that fails to directly acknowledge the existence of God. The beneficence shown by God to America is a theme that traditionally defines the Thanksgiving holiday, and this theme is strongly emphasized in the original Thanksgiving Day proclamations and consistently acknowledged even by modern presidents. Obama's unprecedented proclamation, however, only makes indirect mention of God by quoting George Washington, stating: "Today, we recall President George Washington, who proclaimed our...

Atheist Student Groups Flower on College Campuses ASSOCIATED PRESS November 21, 2009 AMES, Iowa (AP) -- The sign sits propped on a wooden chair, inviting all comers: ''Ask an Atheist.'' Whenever a student gets within a few feet, Anastasia Bodnar waves and smiles, trying to make a good first impression before eyes drift down to a word many Americans rank down there with ''socialist.'' Bodnar is the happy face of atheism at Iowa State University. Once a week at this booth at a campus community center, the PhD student who spends most of her time researching the nutritional traits of...

Hartford, Conn. - A new study of the 34 million American adults who do not identify with any particular religious group finds that they now largely mirror the wider population in other aspects. However, the group tends to be young, male, politically independent and of Irish ancestry. The number of “Nones” grew greatly in the 1990s. In 1990 they made up 8.2 percent of the population and grew to 14.2 percent by 2001. In 2008 they made up 15 percent. The Nones were the only group to have increased in every state and region of the country during the past...

HARTFORD, CT - A new report finds that American adults who claim no religious affiliation increased from 14 million in 1990 to 34 million in 2008. The new profile of America's "No Religion Population" takes a deeper look at data collected for the American Religious Identification Survey 2008, which was released by Trinity College. The new report says those who don't claim any religious affiliation are more likely to be male, young, living in the West and politically independent.

According to a new study from Trinity College, 15% of Americans don't associate with a religious denomination. Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/2009/09/22/2009-09-22_new_study_americans_are_losing_their_religion_choosing_to_be_nones_instead_of_nu.html#ixzz0SDnQoSOr

HARTFORD, CN - A new survey suggests that the number of American Jews who consider themselves religiously observant has dropped by more than 20 percent over the last two decades. The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found that around 3.4 million American Jews call themselves religious, out of a general Jewish population of about 5.4 million. Those who call themselves only culturally Jewish rose from 20 percent in 1990 to 37 percent last year according to the study, which also found Jews more likely to be secular than other Americans.

Go West, young man! For most evangelicals, Jesus instruction in Matthew 28:19 to ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations … ’ is a serious command, and it is an integral part of the mission statement of most churches. A great many churches take up special offerings and allocate funds towards missionaries they support. The western world countries (where Christianity once flourished) are still where the majority of missionaries are supported from, often by the prayers and small monthly donations from faithful Christians that want to be the ‘hands and feet of Jesus’ in countries they will probably...

July 25, 2009 Huge public support for change in law to allow the right to die Rosemary Bennett, Social Affairs Correspondent Overwhelming public support for a change in the law to allow medically assisted suicide is revealed in a poll for The Times. Almost three quarters (74 per cent) of people want doctors to be allowed to help terminally ill patients to end their lives. Support is particularly strong among those aged 55 to 64. Six out of ten people also want friends and relatives to be able to help their dying loved ones to commit suicide without fear of...

I begin by referring to a story that some of you may have heard. A couple of years ago a crematorium in Devon removed its crosses on the basis that they did not "want to cause offence" to non-Christians and in particular Muslims. The subject of this crematorium was subsequently discussed in the House of Lords during the debate on the 2006 Equality Bill, when various speakers discussed ways of making crematoriums "Muslim-friendly". Two points are worthy of note during this debate. First, hardly anyone discussed the offence caused to Christians by the removal of the crosses. Second, absolutely nobody...

It's the Christian Coalition's worst nightmare. Gay and lesbian marriage, prostitution, marijuana, abortion on demand, physician-assisted suicide -- all are part of everyday reality in the Netherlands, and completely legal. What's more, the Dutch are happy with it, and the experiments are spreading elsewhere in Europe, as described by journalist Gilbert Charles in the December 7 issue of the French weekly news magazine L'Express. Beginning April 1, gays and lesbians have been able to marry. No "domestic partnerships" here -- these are full-fledged marriages indistinguishable from heterosexual marriages, and bearing all the same rights, including the right of adoption. ...

Sometimes it seems that an atheistic tsunami has hit. Anti-Christian books land high on bestseller lists. Polls purportedly show a decline in belief. Newsweek this spring had one of its traditional Easter cover stories on "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." Whenever the conventional wisdom points in a particular direction it's good practice to ask: What if the opposite is true? What if nominal Christian affiliation is declining but serious biblical belief is actually on the rise? What if Christianity in America is not dying, but instead getting its second wind—or maybe its sixth wind? After all, the American...

Forty years ago the major Catholic universities in the U.S. decided that the Catholic Church needed to reform her teachings, especially that of sexual morality, to conform to the times, and that they should lead that reform. In 1967, at Land O'Lakes, Wisconsin, they declared their independence from the Church, exchanged the faith of their founders for an evolutionary heresy, proclaimed themselves to be an alternate magis­terium, and transferred control from their founding religious orders to secular boards of trustees. Not coincidentally, by these actions they qualified themselves for lucrative financial grants from foundations controlled by leaders of the Culture...

Commentary The Notre Dame Brand BY Patrick LencioniMay 17-23, 2009 Issue | Posted 5/8/09 at 10:57 AM   Lest anyone think that the current graduation speaker controversy at the University of Notre Dame is merely a matter of partisan politics and media hype, it is worth a closer look. What is happening right now in South Bend, Ind., is not simply a critical moment of truth for a vaunted institution; it is also one of the greatest case studies ever about organizational identity and core principles.When Jerry Porras and Jim Collins published their classic book Built to Last almost...

Thank God For Our Dinner? Cambridge Students Axe Tradition Of Saying Grace Before Dinner As It Is 'Too Religious' By Daily Mail Reporter 14th May 2009 Students lucky enough to have won a place at Cambridge have plenty to be thankful for. So it is not surprising that grace is said before formal dinners at the university's Newnham College. However, the Christian content of the prayer has proved too much for some students and they have brought in a secular version. Enlarge All change: Newnham College, Cambridge, where undergraduates think saying grace is 'too religious' Their only concession is that...

Pope Benedict XVI will tonight attack the rise of aggressive secularism in western societies, warning them that they risked drifting into a 'desert of godlessness'. The Bavarian-born Pontiff will use his Good Friday meditations to compare deliberate attempts to purge religion from public life to the mockery of Jesus Christ by the mob as he was led out to be crucified. He will say said that 'religious sentiments' were increasingly ranked among the 'unwelcome leftovers of antiquity' and held up to scorn and ridicule. 'We are shocked to see to what levels of brutality human beings can sink,' he will...

Do you regard the Easter weekend as a religious festival rather than just an opportunity to pick up bargains at the mall and stuff yourself with chocolate? Do you attend church on a Sunday rather than just lounging in bed? Do you sometimes pray or read the Bible? And do you believe in God or life after death? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, then, according to some of the greatest minds that Europe has produced, you really ought not to exist. From the 18th century onwards a succession of European sages predicted that modernization would...

The End of Christian America The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now—and what, as a nation, we are about to become. By Jon Meacham | NEWSWEEK Published Apr 4, 2009 It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert Mohler Jr.—president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth—read over the document after its release in March,...