Free Republic

SALT LAKE CITY — A message that has been showing up on city streets around the world recently popped up in Salt Lake City. It’s a mysterious image known as a Toynbee Tile, a small square containing a cryptic message for the public. The image has been painted onto roadways for decades, but to date, no one has been able to figure out who is behind it all. Recently, one appeared at the intersection of State Street and 200 South, conveying a message that read, “House of Hades. Tiles made from the ground bones of dead journalists.” The quote has...

American Evangelical theologian William Lane Craig is ready to debate the rationality of faith during his U.K tour this fall, but it appears that some atheist philosophers are running shy of the challenge. This month president of the British Humanist Association, Polly Toynbee, pulled out of an agreed debate at London’s Westminster Central Hall in October, saying she “hadn’t realized the nature of Mr. Lane Craig’s debating style.” Lane Craig, who is a professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, Calif., and author of 30 books and hundreds of scholarly articles, is no stranger to the...

This battle will be won, make no mistake. It will be won before my generation, the baby boomers, go to our graves, just as we made sure no one could discriminate against us in middle age. We will refuse to be forced to depart life through the torture chambers of terminal diseases for lack of the right to die at the right time of our own choosing. It will be won because 80% of the public support it - and have done consistently in polls for the past 25 years. The power of the religious lobby that has such a...

It is the Anglo-American cultural elites' insecurity about their own values that encourages their frenzied attacks on religion. The verdict of my son's 10-year-old mates was that it was 'not bad', but a little bit 'boring'. Maddie, a sassy nine-year-old, said it was 'okay for young kids' but it was not in the same league as King Kong. In a few years' time, these kids will recall the unexceptional film that was Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and wonder why it attracted so much adult controversy. The intense and venomous attacks on the Disney-produced Narnia...

The Lion, the Witch, and the Great Insult by James Tonkowich Last week, the movie Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe opened to critical acclaim. Needless to say, though, not every critic loved the film. At least one was, let's just say, less than enthusiastic about it: "Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion," ran the headline of an article in the British newspaper The Guardian. The author, Polly Toynbee, warns her readers that "adults who wince at the worst elements of Christian belief may need a sickbag handy for the most religiose scenes."...

Blair has appeased and prevaricated. Now, as the death cult strikes again, he must oust religion from public lifeTwo weeks on, London is stricken once more. The death cult strikes again, unstoppable in its deranged religious mania. This time no deaths but a savage reminder of the unknown waves of demented killers lining up to murder in the name of God. Whatever they intended, the message was loud and clear: they can and will do this whenever they want and it does indeed spread very real terror. The police have said there are many more of them. The security services...

Aslan the lion shakes his mighty mane and roars out across Narnia and eternity. Christ is risen! However, not many British children these days will get the message. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens this week to take up the mantle left by The Lord of the Rings. CS Lewis's seven children's books, The Chronicles of Narnia, will be with us now and for many Christmases to come. .... US born-agains are using the movie. .... children may puzzle over the lion and ask embarrassing questions. .... The sins of this "son of Adam" can only be redeemed...

Caught this interesting post on a British Blog {start of post snipped} Welcome to the new media world, Polly*. Up until now, an information elite has been able to misrepresent and manufacture fact with virtual impunity - sometimes accidentally, sometimes as a deliberate means of pushing a chosen agenda. For example, if a newspaper polemicist wanted to contend that "Scandinavian countries are best of all" at overcoming obesity, it was unlikely that many would notice and connect the fact that: "Norway has the highest percentage of overweight men in Europe, according to a new report by the World Health Organization...

'War without the UN is unthinkable," huffed The Guardian's Polly Toynbee a year ago, just before it happened. For a certain type of person, any action on the international scene without the UN is unthinkable. And, conversely, anything that happens under the UN imprimatur is mostly for the unthinking. No matter how corrupt and depraved it is in practice, the organisation's sunny utopian image endures. Say the initials "UN" to your average member of Ms Toynbee's legions of the unthinking and they conjure up not UN participation in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia, nor the UN refugee extortion racket in...

Fraudsters have discovered that folly and greed are not so rare In the revolting world of spam, among the penis enlargements and worse, are the money laundering frauds so palpably absurd you might think only idiots would fall for them. An innocent Scottish chemist's shop is the latest to be caught up in these Nigerian frauds. Victims were promised they would inherit an oil company in return for an up-front fee. The fraudsters used the pharmacy's address, pretending it was a bank, and now dupes from Norway, New Zealand and the US have been turning up in Thurso to try...