Religion

Donald Trump is not a popular president. His approval ratings are the lowest for a first-year president in all the time approval ratings have been tracked.

Former Obama White House staffer Michael Wear has caused a stir while promoting his recent book Reclaiming Hope. In an interview with Emma Green for the Atlantic, Wear commented on the fact that 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. Wear lamented that the Democrats, in his view, did not make much of an effort to reach out to people of faith.

Ruth Graham, writing for Slate, looks at the demise of the religious right and wonders about the prospects for a different religious and political alignment.

In the previous two posts, we've looked at David French's argument for a God-given right to self-defense. Taking the same approach as 19th-century supporters of slavery, French gathered a set of proof texts that appeared to support his case.

In the previous post I looked at some of David French's arguments for a biblical right to self defense. French has combed the Bible and marshalled a handful of isolated verses that he believes give him the right to use deadly force. When examined in context, his first three verses failed to make the case.

French next turns to the book of Esther. For the first time, French finds two verses in the same Bible book.

Journalist and blogger David French believes passionately that the constitutional "right to bear arms" is rooted in a more ancient God-given right. "It is quite clear," says French, "that God has not merely sanctioned the right of self defense but has explicitly approved even the use of deadly force to protect human life."

The cosmic calendar is a way of visualizing natural history by compressing the entire history of the universe into a single year. In this calendar, the Big Bang occurred at midnight on January 1, and the present time is the last milliseconds of December 31. The Milky Way galaxy was formed in mid-May, and our solar system in September. Multicellular life appeared in early December, the first vertibrates on December 22, dinosaurs on Christmas Day, humans in the late night hours of New Year's Eve.

If you're not familiar with the Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, count yourself lucky.

There's no question that the GOP presidential hopefuls are worried about ISIS. From the sixth primary debate earlier this month, in which ISIS was mentioned 38 times, to Sarah Palin's rambling endorsement last week of Donald Trump, in which she promised Trump would send U.S.

The roots of the modern Religious Right persecution complex run deep, right back to the beginning of Christianity. Jesus often warned his first followers that they would face hardship, and would even be persecuted by people who didn't understand their mission.