The 522

Mickey's Mantle of Faith

2006-10-19T09:05:00.000-07:00

From WorldNetDaily ... Mickey's Mantle of Faith: Yankee great, who would be 75 tomorrow, committed life to Christ prior to death. In full ...

It's October – World Series time.

During much of his Hall of Fame baseball career, Mickey Mantle was a fixture in the Fall Classic.

He was known as a great baseball slugger.

He was known as the fastest man in the major leagues.

And he was known as a hell-raiser off the field.

But two of Mickey Mantle's closest friends – Bobby Richardson and Pat Summerall – say that's not how he died 11 years ago. And, had he lived to see his 75th birthday tomorrow, the world would have a much different picture of the New York Yankee great.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Mickey Mantle's name was synonymous with baseball.

Beginning in 1951, he played for New York Yankee teams that appeared in the World Series 12 of the next 14 years.

Inheriting the centerfield position from the legendary Joe DiMaggio, he won three American League Most Valuable Player awards and the coveted Triple Crown in 1956.

Mantle's former New York teammate, and later the Yankee team manager, Billy Martin, once said, ''No man in the history of baseball had as much (baseball hitting) power as Mickey Mantle.'' Mantle was inducted into Major League Baseball's Hall of Fame five years after his retirement from the major circuit in 1969.

But despite all the triumphs and accomplishments, Mantle's baseball career was hobbled by injuries and the ever-present real fear of an early death.

His father, Mutt, an alcoholic, died in his 40s of Hodgkin's disease – a plague with a virulent family history.

From the mid-1950s until his death in 1995, Mantle developed a strong relationship with two professional athletes that would later have a profound effect on his life. One of those athletes was Bobby Richardson, the Yankee second baseman and Mantle’s teammate from 1955 to 1966. Richardson had strong Christian convictions. He also had some outstanding years with the New York team, including winning the World Series MVP in 1960. Richardson described his friendship with Mantle as ''one that lasted a lifetime.''

Richardson always had the ear of his good friend Mantle.

''On numerous occasions Mickey would help me with various (outside) interests I was involved in,'' Richardson told WND. Mantle participated ''in sports banquets, fund-raisers (for the YMCA) and even a baseball instructional film event'' from the University of South Carolina, where Richardson was head baseball coach in the 1970s.

During their years with the Yankees, Richardson had many opportunities to share his faith with Mantle. It appeared at the time, though, that Mantle never really took Richardson's words of spiritual advice seriously. Most everyone closely associated with Mantle knew he had a reputation for playing hard and partying even harder. He also struggled with alcohol.

While Richardson never got discouraged in sharing his faith with his friend, he noticed that Mantle, with the realization of his own mortality, finally asked the questions that revealed he was open to spiritual things. In a television interview with Bob Costas long after he retired from the game, Mantle said he had ''a void in his heart and an emptiness inside'' after the 1985 death of his friend and former Yankee great Roger Maris.

In the 1950s, Mantle used the same locker stall as another New York professional athlete, Pat Summerall, but during different seasons. Summerall was the place kicker and tight end of the NFL's New York Giants. Summerall recalled that he first met Mantle when they played minor league baseball together. Over the years, Summerall and Mantle ''played a lot of golf and interacted socially.''

When Summerall entered the Betty Ford Center for Alcohol in the early 1990s, Mantle showed interest in the center. Summerall told WND, ''Mickey was concerned about his own alcohol consumption.''

After many long question-and-answer sessions with the Hall of Fame baseball player, Summerall challenged Mantle to enter the clinic. Summerall was thrilled when his friend agreed to enter the facility, and did so on a day not normally reserved for new patients.

It was the policy of the Betty Ford Center to disallow outgoing telephone calls during a patient's one-month stay. Summerall remembers fondly how Mantle somehow got on the phone and called him a number of times, sometimes late at night. While this was a difficult period in Mantle's life, both Richardson and Summerall agree their friend was later to become an outstanding spokesman for people everywhere who were suffering from alcoholism.

By 1995, Mantle's health took a turn for the worse when it was discovered he had cancer – that on top of liver problems associated with alcoholism. While hospitalized, it didn't take long for Mantle to call Richardson and ask him to pray for him.

Richardson vividly remembers visiting Mantle a few weeks before his death Aug. 13, 1995. One of the first things Mantle wanted to tell his former teammate was that he ''now trusted in Christ as his Lord and Savior.'' Mantle assured him by quoting to Richardson and his wife one of the more famous verses from the Bible, John 3:16: ''For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.''

Years later, Richardson found out that Mantle, while in the hospital, somehow listened to a Focus on the Family testimonial tape of NBA Hall of Famer Pete Maravich. Commenting on how this tape was instrumental in leading Mantle to Christ, Focus Vice President Kurt Bruner told WND that ''after achieving nearly everything that the world has to offer and finding that something was still lacking, Pete discovered Jesus Christ and never looked back.'' Richardson felt that his former teammate identified with similar aspects of the basketball player's life.

Now, 11 years after Mantle's death, both Richardson and Summerall are more grateful than ever for their friendship with the former Yankee centerfielder.

Mantle is still adored by fans across America. His family still operates several ''Mantle's'' restaurants, and his baseball memorabilia is popular as ever.

Iraq’s Christians Flee as Extremist Threat Worsens

2006-10-18T11:21:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times ... Iraq’s Christians Flee as Extremist Threat Worsens. Join me in praying for our brothers and sisters in Iraq. In full ...

The blackened shells of five cars still sit in front of the Church of the Virgin Mary here, stark reminders of a bomb blast that killed two people after a recent Sunday Mass.

In the northern city of Mosul, a priest from the Syriac Orthodox Church was kidnapped last week. His church complied with his captors’ demands and put up posters denouncing recent comments made by the pope about Islam, but he was killed anyway. The police found his beheaded body on Wednesday.

Muslim fury over Pope Benedict XVI’s public reflections on Islam in Germany a month ago — when he quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor as calling Islam “evil and inhuman” — has subsided elsewhere, but repercussions continue to reverberate in Iraq, bringing a new level of threat to an already shrinking Christian population.

Several extremist groups threatened to kill all Christians unless the pope apologized. Sunni and Shiite clerics united in the condemnation, calling the comments an insult to Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. In Baghdad, many churches canceled services after receiving threats. Some have not met since.

“After the pope’s statement, people began to fear much more than before,” said the Rev. Zayya Edward Khossaba, the pastor of the Church of the Virgin Mary. “The actions by fanatics have increased against Christians.”

Christianity took root here near the dawn of the faith 2,000 years ago, making Iraq home to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities. The country is rich in biblical significance: scholars believe the Garden of Eden described in Genesis was in Iraq; Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees, a city in Iraq; the city of Nineveh that the prophet Jonah visited after being spit out by a giant fish was in Iraq.

Both Chaldean Catholics and Assyrian Christians, the country’s largest Christian sects, still pray in Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

They have long been a tiny minority amid a sea of Islamic faith. But under Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s million or so Christians for the most part coexisted peacefully with Muslims, both the dominant Sunnis and the majority Shiites.

But since Mr. Hussein’s ouster, their status here has become increasingly uncertain, first because many Muslim Iraqis framed the American-led invasion as a modern crusade against Islam, and second because Christians traditionally run the country’s liquor stories, anathema to many religious Muslims.

Over the past three and a half years, Christians have been subjected to a steady stream of church bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and threatening letters slipped under their doors.

Estimates of the resulting Christian exodus vary from the tens of thousands to more than 100,000, with most heading for Syria, Jordan and Turkey.

The number of Christians who remain is also uncertain. The last Iraqi census, in 1987, counted 1.4 million Christians, but many left during the 1990’s when sanctions squeezed the country. Yonadam Kanna, the lone Christian member of the Iraqi Parliament, estimated the current Christian population at roughly 800,000, or about 3 percent of the population. A Chaldean Catholic auxiliary bishop, Andreos Abouna, told a British charity over the summer that there were just 600,000 Christians left, according to the Catholic News Service.

At the Church of the Virgin Mary, Father Khossaba showed a visitor the baptism forms for parishioners leaving the country who need proof of their religious affiliation for visas. Some weeks he has filled out 50 of the forms, he said, and some weeks more.

Attendance on Sundays has dwindled to four dozen or so, he said; it used to be more than 500 on average, and on Easter Sundays, before the collapse of the Hussein government, more than 1,500. Not all the missing members have left, of course; some simply stay at home on Sundays because of fears for their safety.

Many Christians have relocated, changing neighborhoods or even cities. About a thousand Christian families, from Mosul, Baghdad, Basra and elsewhere, have taken refuge in Ain Kawa, a small town outside the Kurdish city of Erbil, which has become an oasis for Christians, said the Rev. Yusuf Sabri, a priest at St. Joseph’s Chaldean Catholic Church there.

A Christian man with Baghdad license plates on his car who asked not to be identified said he had just arrived in Ain Kawa to inquire about moving there. A leaflet had been left at his home demanding he leave in three days. It bore the signature of Muhammad’s Army, a Sunni insurgent group.

“They regarded me as an agent for the crusaders,” he said.

Asaad Aziz, a 42-year-old Chaldean Catholic, is one of those trying to leave the country. After the ouster of Mr. Hussein, he bought a liquor store in a mostly Shiite neighborhood. Nine days after he opened, the store was bombed. Mr. Aziz was hospitalized for a month.

The employees rebuilt the store. But several months later, a note slipped under the door gave Mr. Aziz 48 hours to close.

“Otherwise, you will blame yourself,” it said.

Mr. Aziz closed. But after an unsuccessful stint at a friend’s printing company, he returned to the business he knew best, opening a liquor store in a mostly Christian neighborhood. Last month, a gunman riddled the new storefront with bullets as Mr. Aziz cowered in a back room.

He told another story: the teenage daughter of another Christian family he knows was kidnapped recently. The captors initially demanded a ransom, but later sarcastically said the pope was the only one who could release her. She was eventually killed.

“When the pope gave his statement, it destroyed any last hope that we had here,” said Mr. Aziz, who has forbidden his daughters, one in high school and the other in college, to return to school.

He recently went to the Turkish Embassy to inquire about a visa but was rebuffed. At this point, he said, he will go anywhere.

“We cannot practice our rituals and we cannot bring food home to our families,” he said. “That’s why I want to leave the country.”

Mosul, near the historic heart of Christianity in Iraq, has also become increasingly dangerous. The recently murdered priest, the Rev. Boulos Iskander Behnam, is just the latest member of the Christian community to be kidnapped or killed there.

Conditions have been especially bleak for Christians in Basra, the southern city that is dominated by radical Shiite militias. Christian women there often wear Muslim head scarves to avoid harassment from religious zealots trying to impose a strict Islamic dress code. After the pope’s statement, an angry crowd burned an effigy of him.

In Baghdad, Juliet Yusef attends St. George’s, the country’s lone Anglican church. She, too, now wears a head scarf anytime she ventures outside her neighborhood. “I am afraid of being attacked,” she said.

Dora, a neighborhood in southern Baghdad that was once heavily populated by Christians and has been plagued by sectarian violence, has now been mostly emptied of them. Christians were singled out there by insurgents who accused them of being friendly with the occupying Americans.

“They are Christian, we are Christian,” said one holdout, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Suzan. “They think most likely we know each other well.”

Two priests were kidnapped over the summer in Dora, although both were released, one after nearly a month.

Oddly, before the pope’s comments, as sectarian violence has escalated in Baghdad in the past year, some said the situation might have actually improved for Christians as Muslim militants turned their attention on one another.

Canon Andrew White, the Anglican vicar of Baghdad, who lives in Britain but visits Iraq frequently, said his driver was kidnapped recently but was promptly released after his Sunni Arab captors discovered he was a Christian. He said his captors apologized by saying, “We thought he was Shiite.”

“It must be the only occasion when being a Christian actually helped in this country,” he said.

Over 35,000 Christians Have Fled Iraq

2006-10-13T10:48:00.000-07:00

From the Jerusalem Post ... Over 35,000 Christians Have Fled Iraq. Join me in praying for our Christian brothers and sisters in the Middle East. In full ...

More than 35,000 Iraqi Christians have fled to Syria to escape the violence in their country, the leader of an Iraqi Christian group said Thursday.

Christians, who make up three percent of Iraq's 26 million people, are leaving because of individual threats from Muslim extremists and the general deterioration of security in Iraq, said Emmanuel Khoshaba, the Syrian head of the Assyrian and Democratic Movement.

His figure indicates an increase of 75% from the 20,000 Iraqi Christians who were said to have moved to Syria in 2004, the year after US-led forces invaded Iraq and began the conflict.

One Iraqi Christian refugee, Bassam Najjari, 29, said he arrived in Syria last month; 40 days after gunmen shot and injured him in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, as police looked on.

"I decided to leave Baghdad with my family," said Najjari, who is staying in a camp near the Syrian capital, Damascus, with his parents and brothers.
His brother, Wissam, said he plans to start his own business in Syria.

"There is no hope of going back home as the security situation is very bad and there is no indication that it would get better soon," Wissam said.

"We want to live in safety. We don't want to be killed. We love life," said another Christian refugee, Saddallah Mardini, 43.

Mardini said US forces should leave Iraq now.

"The occupation has brought destruction to Iraq," he said.

His wife, Wissam, 25, complained of shortages of electricity and water in Iraq.

"My kids go to school now (in Syria), which is something they were deprived of in Iraq," she said.

Syria's relaxed visa rules for Arabs, as well as its border and cultural proximity to Iraq, have attracted thousands of Iraqi refugees, Muslims as well as Christians. But a disproportionate number of the refugees are Christian.

The violence in Iraq has hit Christians as it has targeted Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims.

Seven Christians were killed in 2004 when suspected Islamic militants set off bombs in five churches in Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul. It was the first major assault on Iraq's Christians since Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled in April 2003.

More recently, the Rev. Hanna Saad Sirop, the director of the Theology Department at Babel University, central Iraq, was abducted Aug. 15 as he left a Baghdad church after a mass celebrating the Assumption.

Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers

2006-10-06T10:39:00.000-07:00

From the NY Times ... Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers. In full ...

Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning the faith in droves.

At an unusual series of leadership meetings in 44 cities this fall, more than 6,000 pastors are hearing dire forecasts from some of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement.

Their alarm has been stoked by a highly suspect claim that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of teenagers will be “Bible-believing Christians” as adults. That would be a sharp decline compared with 35 percent of the current generation of baby boomers, and before that, 65 percent of the World War II generation.

While some critics say the statistics are greatly exaggerated (one evangelical magazine for youth ministers dubbed it “the 4 percent panic attack”), there is widespread consensus among evangelical leaders that they risk losing their teenagers.

“I’m looking at the data,” said Ron Luce, who organized the meetings and founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, “and we’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing.”

The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing 60 denominations and dozens of ministries, passed a resolution this year deploring “the epidemic of young people leaving the evangelical church.”

Among the leaders speaking at the meetings are Ted Haggard, president of the evangelical association; the Rev. Jerry Falwell; and nationally known preachers like Jack Hayford and Tommy Barnett.

Genuine alarm can be heard from Christian teenagers and youth pastors, who say they cannot compete against a pervasive culture of cynicism about religion, and the casual “hooking up” approach to sex so pervasive on MTV, on Web sites for teenagers and in hip-hop, rap and rock music. Divorced parents and dysfunctional families also lead some teenagers to avoid church entirely or to drift away.

Over and over in interviews, evangelical teenagers said they felt like a tiny, beleaguered minority in their schools and neighborhoods. They said they often felt alone in their struggles to live by their “Biblical values” by avoiding casual sex, risqué music and videos, Internet pornography, alcohol and drugs.

When Eric Soto, 18, transferred from a small charter school to a large public high school in Chicago, he said he was disappointed to find that an extracurricular Bible study attracted only five to eight students. “When we brought food, we thought we could get a better turnout,” he said. They got 12.

Chelsea Dunford, a 17-year old from Canton, Conn., said, “At school I don’t have a lot of friends who are Christians.”

Ms. Dunford spoke late last month as she and her small church youth group were about to join more than 3,400 teenagers in a sports arena at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for a Christian youth extravaganza and rock concert called Acquire the Fire.

“A lot of my friends are self-proclaimed agnostics or atheists,” said Ms. Dunford, who wears a bracelet with a heart-shaped charm engraved with “tlw,” for “true love waits,” to remind herself of her pledge not to have premarital sex.

She said her friends were more prone to use profanity and party than she was, and added: “It’s scary sometimes. You get made fun of.”

To break the isolation and bolster the teenagers’ commitment to a conservative lifestyle, Mr. Luce has been organizing these stadium extravaganzas for 15 years. The event in Amherst was the first of 40 that Teen Mania is putting on between now and May, on a breakneck schedule that resembles a road trip for a major touring band. The “roadies” are 700 teenagers who have interned for a year at Teen Mania’s “Honor Academy” in Garden Valley, Tex.

More than two million teenagers have attended in the last 15 years, said Mr. Luce, a 45-year-old, mop-headed father of three with a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard and the star power of an aging rock guitarist.

“That’s more than Paul McCartney has pulled in,” Mr. Luce asserted, before bounding onstage for the opening pyrotechnics and a prayer.

For the next two days, the teenagers in the arena pogoed to Christian bands, pledged to lead their friends to Christ and sang an anthem with the chorus, “We won’t be silent.” Hundreds streamed down the aisles for the altar call and knelt in front of the stage, some weeping openly as they prayed to give their lives to God.

The next morning, Mr. Luce led the crowd in an exercise in which they wrote on scraps of paper all the negative cultural influences, brand names, products and television shows that they planned to excise from their lives. Again they streamed down the aisles, this time to throw away the “cultural garbage.”

Trash cans filled with folded pieces of paper on which the teenagers had scribbled things like Ryan Seacrest, Louis Vuitton, “Gilmore Girls,” “Days of Our Lives,” Iron Maiden, Harry Potter, “need for a boyfriend” and “my perfect teeth obsession.” One had written in tiny letters: “fornication.”

Some teenagers threw away cigarette lighters, brand-name sweatshirts, Mardi Gras beads and CD’s — one titled “I’m a Hustla.”

“Lord Jesus,” Mr. Luce prayed into the microphone as the teenagers dropped their notes into the trash, “I strip off the identity of the world, and this morning I clothe myself with Christ, with his lifestyle. That’s what I want to be known for.”

Evangelical adults, like believers of every faith, fret about losing the next generation, said the Rev. David W. Key, director of Baptist Studies at the Candler School of Theology of Emory University, in Atlanta.

“The uniqueness of the evangelical situation is the fact that during the 80’s and 90’s you had the Reagan revolution that was growing the evangelical churches,” Mr. Key said.

Today, he said, the culture trivializes religion and normalizes secularism and liberal sexual mores.

The phenomenon may not be that young evangelicals are abandoning their faith, but that they are abandoning the institutional church, said Lauren Sandler, author of “Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement” (Viking, 2006). Ms. Sandler, who calls herself a secular liberal, said she found the movement frighteningly robust.

“This generation is not about church,” said Ms. Sandler, an editor at Salon.com. “They always say, ‘We take our faith outside the four walls.’ For a lot of young evangelicals, church is a rock festival, or a skate park or hanging out in someone’s basement.”

Contradicting the sense of isolation expressed by some evangelical teenagers, Ms. Sandler said, “I met plenty of kids who told me over and over that if you’re not Christian in your high school, you’re not cool — kids with Mohawks, with indie rock bands who feel peer pressure to be Christian.”

The reality is, when it comes to organizing youth, evangelical Christians are the envy of Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants and Jews, said Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, who specializes in the study of American evangelicals and surveyed teens for his book “Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual lives of American Teenagers” (Oxford, 2005).

Mr. Smith said he was skeptical about the 4 percent statistic. He said the figure was from a footnote in a book and was inconsistent with research he had conducted and reviewed, which has found that evangelical teenagers are more likely to remain involved with their faith than are mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews and teenagers of almost every other religion.

“A lot of the goals I’m very supportive of,” Mr. Smith said of the new evangelical youth campaign, “but it just kills me that it’s framed in such apocalyptic terms that couldn’t possibly hold up under half a second of scrutiny. It’s just self-defeating.”

The 4 percent is cited in the book “The Bridger Generation” by Thom S. Rainer, a Southern Baptist and a former professor of ministry. Mr. Rainer said in an interview that it came from a poll he had commissioned, and that while he thought the methodology was reliable, the poll was 10 years old.

“I would have to, with integrity, say there has been no significant follow-up to see if the numbers are still valid,” Mr. Rainer said.

Mr. Luce seems weary of criticism that his message is overly alarmist. He said that a current poll by the well-known evangelical pollster George Barna found that 5 percent of teenagers were Bible-believing Christians. Some criticize Mr. Barna’s methodology, however, for defining “Bible-believing” so narrowly that it excludes most people who consider themselves Christians.

Mr. Luce responded: “If the 4 percent is true, or even the 5 percent, it’s an indictment of youth ministry. So certainly they’re going to want different data.”

Outside the arena in Amherst, the teenagers at Mr. Luce’s Acquire the Fire extravaganza mobbed the tables hawking T-shirts and CD’s stamped: “Branded by God.” Mr. Luce’s strategy is to replace MTV’s wares with those of an alternative Christian culture, so teenagers will link their identity to Christ and not to the latest flesh-baring pop star.

Apparently, the strategy can show results. In Chicago, Eric Soto said he returned from a stadium event in Detroit in the spring to find that other teenagers in the hallways were also wearing “Acquire the Fire” T-shirts.

“You were there? You’re a Christian?” he said the young people would say to one another. “The fire doesn’t die once you leave the stadium. But it’s a challenge to keep it burning.”

Lest We Forget, Part XVII

2006-10-04T18:13:00.000-07:00

From the Voice of the Martyrs blog ... A Christian Under Persecution Asks for Prayer. In full ...

Prisoner Alert has updated their website with a new prisoner that we can all pray for and be an advocate for. All we have to do is take a few minutes to pray and then act. My prayer is that all of you reading this take the time to act. Make it a family event that you can do with your children, or you can involve your bible studies or Sunday School classes. Whatever you do, please try.

The picture you're looking at is Issa Motamedi who was arrested on false charges of drug trafficking. It is suspected that because Issa and his wife, Parvah, attempted to register the birth of their son, Micah, who was born in January, with the civil population bureau. Selecting such a Biblical name may have caused the authorities to begin investigating this Christian family.

At the time of his July 24th arrest the convert was told he must renounce Christianity or face years in jail and possible execution for his apostasy. Under Iran’s judicial system based on Islamic law, anyone who leaves Islam for another religion has committed a capital offense. Lakan Prison officials reportedly tried for days to force him to confess to being involved in illegal drug trafficking.

Using strong psychological pressures, including threats to kill his family and other Christian believers, Issa was interrogated by secret service agents and a professor of Islamic theology, who urged him to recant his Christian faith and return to Islam. Issa refused to do so.

Iranian court authorities in the Northern city of Rasht have released Issa. He was granted bail August 24th, but the judge introduced new accusations against him at this hearing. According to unnamed “confidential witnesses,” the judge said, the convert’s eight-year-old daughter, Martha, allegedly had been trying to lead other children to the Christian faith.

He was reunited with his wife, Parvah, and his two children following his release. He has moved his family to an undisclosed location, but is subject to be recalled to court. Issa converted to Christianity seven years ago. He asks, “Pray for me, that I would be stronger in my faith.” Issa told other believers that the calmness and protection God gave him during his time in prison were miraculous.

South Park Creators Say 'Open Season on Jesus,' but Not Mohammed

2006-10-04T17:40:00.000-07:00

From the Christian Post ... South Park Creators Say 'Open Season on Jesus,' but Not Mohammed. Give Matt and Trey credit, they're crude and immature -- but they recognize hypocrisy when they see it. In full ...

A Christian religion and media expert agreed with the creators of “South Park” that the Christian response to disrespectful portrayal of Jesus has been “far tamer” than the response from depictions of Mohammed.

“The Christian response to the disrespect shown for Jesus has been far tamer obviously than the response of sacrilegious depiction of Mohammed,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center and director of the Religion & Media program on Thuesday.

“While Christians are bothered by these depictions of Jesus, you don’t see anybody issuing threats of violence and if there are any protests they are protests of non-violent form – namely boycotting products or something like that,” Cromartie noted. “But it is never the case that these people threaten violence because we do believe in freedom of speech and freedom of expression.”

South Park, a hit animation on Comedy Central which has been described as crude and disgusting, has poked fun at a wide range of religious figures, politicians, and celebrities including Jesus, Mohammed, President Bush, and Tom Cruise.

The creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, were recently interviewed on ABC “Nightline” about the show and its upcoming 10th season.

“That’s where we kind of agree with some of the people who’ve criticized our show,” said co-creator Matt Stone on Sept. 22. “Because it really is open season on Jesus. We can do whatever we want to Jesus, and we have.

“We’ve had him say bad words. We’ve had him shoot a gun. We’ve had him kill people. We can do whatever we want. But Mohammed, we couldn’t just show a simple image.”

The creators said when Mohammed was supposed to air on the screen, Comedy Central replaced the cartoon with a black screen that read: “Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Mohammed on their network.”

Following the Mohammed cartoon uproar earlier this year, several networks had refused to air images of Mohammed, even during coverage of the Denmark cartoon riots, claiming to observe religious tolerance, said the South Park creator.

“No you’re not,” Stone countered during the interview. “You’re afraid of getting blown up. That’s what you’re afraid of. Comedy Central copped to that, you know: ‘We’re afraid of getting blown up.’”

Most recently, more than ten churches in Nigeria were burned or destroyed in late September over a dispute between a Muslim and Christian woman, according to Voice of the Martyrs sources in Nigeria. Muslims had accused the Christian woman of blasphemy against the Muslim Prophet Mohammed.

Barnabas Fund’s International director, Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, had said he hopes that “Muslims [will] have the courage now to address this part of their faith and stop these attacks on Christians,” following the Nigeria church attacks.

Viewing God as Male 'Contributes to Domestic Abuse'

2006-10-04T16:22:00.000-07:00

From WorldNetDaily ... Viewing God as male 'contributes to domestic abuse'. Join me in praying for the Church of England. In full ...

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is backing a Church of England report that claims viewing God in masculine terms can validate "overbearing and ultimately violent patterns of behavior" in intimate relationships and "contributes to domestic abuse," the London Daily Mail reports.

The document, entitled "Responding to Domestic Abuse, Guidelines for Pastoral Responsibility," is a response to a motion passed by the church's General Synod in July 2004 for guidelines to assist dioceses in working with other agencies and "speak[ing] out against the evil of domestic violence."

The report encourages churches to provide pastoral counsel to victims of domestic abuse and to provide information about relevant agencies and support services to those in need.

"Domestic abuse in all its forms is contrary to the will of God and an affront to human dignity," reads the forward co-signed by Williams. "All need to play their part in preventing or halting it."

But it is not the church's focus on the problem of domestic abuse that is drawing attention – it's the report's assertion that traditional church teaching reinforces abuse - intentionally or unintentionally.

"Deficient" and "perverse," the document charges, is the belief in "self-denial," which can be used to urge a victim to forgive without taking action to end the abuse.

"I think of the experience, not least of some victims themselves who can be locked into a belief that they deserve the punishment that they receive and they link that with the theology that they hear in church where Christ is victim," said the Rt. Rev. Graham James, Bishop of Norwich. "... maybe even that they think their suffering has redemptive quality to it which justifies it in some way."

The document points to "misguided" or distorted conceptions of God derived from the Bible and the Christian tradition that portrays divine power in "unhealthy and oppressive" ways. Among them are attributing violent actions and attitudes to God, primarily from the Old Testament – scripture that requires "careful" interpretation, the report warns.

Viewing man's relationship with God in terms of domination and submission and "uncritical use of masculine imagery," the report says, can validate "overbearing and ultimately violent patterns of behavior" responsible for domestic abuse.

This is not the first time the archbishop of Canterbury has raised eyebrows. In 2004, Williams publicly backed a new version of the Bible that promotes fornication and flatly contradicts traditional core Christian beliefs on sex and morality.

Liberals Don't Have Very Many Kids

2006-10-03T17:42:00.000-07:00

Lord Ron has some thoughts on his blog about a recent USA Today article entitled Liberals Don't Have Very Many Kids. Enjoy.

"We Had Abortions"

2006-10-03T15:51:00.000-07:00

From the Associated Press via Breitbart.com ... The 'We Had Abortions' Petition. In full ...

At a pivotal time in the abortion debate, Ms. magazine is releasing its fall issue next week with a cover story titled "We Had Abortions," accompanied by the names of thousands of women nationwide who signed a petition making that declaration.

The publication coincides with what the abortion-rights movement considers a watershed moment for its cause. Abortion access in many states is being curtailed, activists are uncertain about the stance of the U.S. Supreme Court, and South Dakotans vote Nov. 7 on a measure that would ban virtually all abortions in their state, even in cases of rape and incest.

"All this seems very dire," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, which publishes Ms.

"We have to get away from what the politicians are saying," she said, "and get women's lives back in the picture."

Even before the issue reaches newsstands Oct. 10, anti-abortion activists have been decrying it. Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, wrote in a commentary that when she saw a Ms. announcement of the project, "the evil practically jumped right off the page."

Ms. executive editor Katherine Spillar said more than 5,000 women have signed the petition so far _ heeding its appeal to declare they are unashamed of the choice they made. The magazine itself had room for only 1,016 names, she said Tuesday, but all of them will be viewable online as Ms. encourages other women to continue adding their signatures.

Ms. says it will send the petition to Congress, the White House and state legislators.

The signatories include Ms. founder Gloria Steinem, comedian Carol Leifer, and actresses Kathy Najimy and Amy Brenneman, but most are not famous names.

Tyffine Jones, 27, of Jackson, Miss., said she had no hesitation about signing _ although she lives in a state where restrictions on abortion are tough and all but one abortion clinic has been closed.

Jones said she got an abortion 10 years ago _ enduring harassment from protesters when she entered the clinic _ in order to finish high school. She went on to become the first member of her family to graduate from college, and hopes at some point to attend law school.

"I wanted to do something bigger with myself _ I didn't want to be stopped by anything," she said in a telephone interview.

Another signatory, Debbie Findling of San Francisco, described her difficult decision last year to have an abortion after tests showed that she would bear a son with Down syndrome.

"I felt it was my right to make the decision, but having that right doesn't make the decision any easier," she said. "It was the hardest decision I've ever made."

Findling, 42, is married, with a 5-year-old daughter, and has been trying to get pregnant again while pursuing her career as a philanthropic foundation executive.

She says too many of her allies in the abortion-rights movement tend to minimize, at least publicly, the psychological impact of abortion.

"It's emotionally devastating," she said in a phone interview. "I don't regret my decision _ but I regret having been put in the position to have to make that choice. It's something I'll live with for the rest of my life."

Findling strongly supports the Ms. petition, and believes women who have had abortions need to be more open about their decisions. She has written an essay about her own experience, and plans to include it in an anthology she hopes to publish next year.

Ms. mounted this kind of petition drive when it was first published. Its debut issue in 1972 included a manifesto signed by 53 women _ many of them well-known _ declaring that they had undergone abortions despite state laws outlawing the procedure.

The next year, the Supreme Court issued its Roe v. Wade decision establishing abortion rights nationwide. Some abortion-rights activists are concerned that Roe could be overturned, either by the current court or if President Bush has the opportunity to appoint one more justice.

Smeal said Ms. staffers called the women who signed the petition to verify their information and be sure they were willing to have their names in print.

"The women thanked us for doing this," Smeal said. "They wanted to tell their stories."

Modern Eugenics: Our Brave New World

2006-10-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

From American Vision ... Modern Eugenics: Our Brave New World. In full ...

The New York Times has seen the future. According to a recent, ominously titled article, “Couples Cull Embryos to Halt Heritage of Cancer,” it will not be long before a parent can choose her child the way a diner chooses her meal at a restaurant. “Soon...prospective parents may be able to choose between an embryo that could become a child with a lower risk of colon cancer who is likely to be fat, or one who is likely to be thin but has a slightly elevated risk of Alzheimer’s, or a boy likely to be short with low cholesterol but a significant risk of Parkinson’s, or a girl likely to be tall with a moderate risk of diabetes.”

What the article does not emphasize is that if the tall girl with a risk of diabetes is chosen, the other three will likely be left to die.

Many newspapers are reporting that preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or P.G.D., is growing in popularity. P.G.D. is a process that begins with in vitro fertilization, where eggs are removed from the mother’s body and fertilized by sperm in a petri dish, creating a set of human embryos. When these embryos are three to five days old they consist of eight cells. One of those cells is removed and genetically tested for diseases, such as colon cancer, breast cancer, Down syndrome, or cystic fibrosis. Scientists can also determine whether the tiny embryo is a boy or a girl. Based on this information, parents can decide which embryos they want to keep, abandoning the rest.

With this technology, we usher in a dangerous new eugenics movement. The theory of eugenics was developed by Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), who was Charles Darwin’s half-cousin. Natural selection, which drives Darwin’s evolution, says that the strong, fit, and well-adapted survive in nature, while the weak and sickly die off. Therefore, the strong pass their healthy genes to the next generation, and the evolutionary tree grows up and up.

In human societies, Galton noticed, evolution is thwarted. Whereas natural selection requires that the weak die early, leaving few, if any, children, society actually protects the poor and the sickly. This compassion for the weak works against evolution and creates a “reversion towards mediocrity.” Galton, and many others at that time, believed that, by practicing selective breeding, human societies could weed out those who were prone to illness or other undesirable traits, thus putting evolution back on track. After all, who wouldn’t want an improved genetic pool?

The eugenics movement was big in the United States in the early 20th century. It took the form of forced sterilizations, reduced immigration quotas for those from “inferior stock”, and marriage laws that prevented the “epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded” from marrying. It was also big in Nazi Germany, where it took the form of the Holocaust.

After facing the grim reality of the Holocaust, eugenics lost its public appeal...for a time. Still, the hope of an improved gene pool seems too tempting for some to resist.

Modern eugenics seeks to project a kinder, gentler visage. Today’s eugenics isn’t about government officials in state offices determining who can or cannot marry. Its proponents maintain it is about mothers and fathers who want to protect their children from debilitating family diseases. Who wouldn’t want their baby boy or girl to be as healthy as possible?

Unfortunately, this understandable desire has led to the destruction of numerous embryonic human beings. With genetic screening, parents now know before their child is born whether or not it has undesirable handicaps, like Down syndrome. A 2002 study found that, when tests determine that a pre-born child has Down syndrome, the parents choose abortion 91-93% of the time. Our desire for healthy children is leading us to destroy those with actual or potential handicaps.

With P.G.D., children are created in a lab, tested, and graded. Those who fail the test are destroyed. In the New York Times article, a teacher named Denise Toeckes, who has a genetic mutation that puts her at a higher risk for breast cancer, says, “It’s like children are admitted to a family only if they pass the test...It’s like, ‘If you have a gene, we don’t want you; if you have the potential to develop cancer, you can’t be in our family.’ “

Articles about P.G.D. often imply that, thanks to the technology, a child is saved from a genetic disease, but that simply is not the case. As many handicapped and at-risk children are conceived today as ever before. The only difference is that now, when the handicap or risk is detected, the unborn child is likely to be discarded or destroyed.

Cynics respond, “Who cares?” If Darwin was right, maybe all these genetically unhealthy people really do just pollute the gene pool. Maybe they are the source of unnecessary suffering, for their families, for the state, and even for themselves. Perhaps they really are “lives unworthy of life,” a category of people targeted for destruction by Hitler’s euthanasia program.

Such cynicism runs counter to Judeo-Christian values. The Scriptures teach that human beings have worth, value, and dignity because they are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–27). We have been redeemed not merely with silver and gold but with the “precious blood of Christ” (1 Peter 1:18, NIV). Our worth is not determined on the basis of what we can do, or how we look, or how smart we are. It is based on who we are and what God has done for us.

God loves us notwithstanding our diseases, handicaps, and sin. Christ never shrank from reaching out to the blind, the lame, or the leper—and neither should we.

Revival in India?

2006-10-03T12:01:00.000-07:00

From the BBC ... 'Miracles' boost Indian Christians. In full ...

More than 100 years after the first waves of a great Welsh religious revival reached faraway north-eastern India, Christian church leaders are claiming a religious reawakening in the region.

Leaders of the Presbyterian Church in the north-eastern Indian states of Meghalaya and Mizoram - sandwiched between Muslim Bangladesh and Buddhist Burma - say there have been miracles occurring.

A church at Malki, in Meghalaya's capital Shillong, has been receiving a steady stream of devotees ever since word spread that a cross here has been glowing and radiating the image of Lord Jesus.

This, combined with recent reports of several school students "convulsing, behaving abnormally and even fainting", has prompted the talk of a revival.

"The Holy Spirit is here to reawaken people," says Reverend Laldawngliana, a spokesman for the Presbyterian Church of India in Shillong.

Special prayers

He says similar religious experiences proclaimed the beginning of a reawakening in the region in 1906, just two years after the last great revival in Wales.

The Presbyterian Church celebrated the centenary of the revival with special congregations and prayer services in April.

Reverend Laldawngliana says reports of students fainting started pouring in a couple of weeks after the centenary celebrations.

Theologian Reverend Chuauthuama says similar reports have come in from Mizoram too.

All the seven north-eastern states have a significant population of Christians and at least three states in the region - Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland - are Christian majority.

Christianity came to the northeast in early 19th century when the British conquered Assam and slowly muscled their way into the rest of the region.

The Presbyterian Church of India was founded in 1841 by a Welsh missionary, Reverend Thomas Jones, in Meghalaya (then a part of Assam).

'A boost'

"The revival in 1906 gave a fillip to the evangelical works of Welsh missionaries in both Meghalaya and Mizoram," says Rev Vanlalchhuanawma, an expert in the history of Christian revivals.

"Christianity came to the region in a western garb. Now if a revival really occurs in the region, we will be very happy. It will possibly give a boost to our efforts to get rid of the 'foreign religion tag'," he says.

Christian leaders in Mizoram and Meghalaya say a revival here may help the church in Wales, the seat of the Presbyterian Church.

Though Wales witnessed some 15 major revivals in the 18th and 19th centuries, the region has of late been going through a religious crisis.

According to a 2001 study, not even one in 10 people in Wales regularly go to church.

The Presbyterian Church of India sent two priests - Rev Hmar Sankhuma and Rev John Colney - to Wales a few months back to fill the "spiritual void" there.

"We owe a lot to the Church in Wales. We have to do our bit when our parent church is in crisis," says Rev Chuauthuama.

'Bogus attempt'

The claims of miracles in Meghalaya have gone largely unchallenged.

But Bengal-based rationalist Prabir Ghosh dismisses the phenomenon as a "bogus attempt" by the Church to draw converts.

Earlier, Mr Ghosh had challenged the basis for Mother Teresa's beatification. He argued that she should be conferred sainthood on the basis of her great work amongst Calcutta's poor rather than over miracles attributed to her.

"The Pope has said this will be the century of Christianity, so churches all over are seeking large-scale conversions and the miracles are part of the exercise," says Mr Ghosh.

The governments of the north-eastern states have maintained a studied silence on the issue.

"We are keeping a close watch on the situation," is all that they will say officially.

US Invaded Iraq to Stop Islamic Messiah, al Sadr Claims

2006-10-03T11:56:00.000-07:00

From the Times Online UK ... Waiting for the imam's return to Earth. In full ...

The followers of Moqtada al-Sadr believe that the US invaded Iraq to prevent the return to Earth of their sect’s messiah-like figure, the Mahdi, or 12th imam.

Hojatoleslam al-Sadr claims that his militia is preparing for the day when the Mahdi, the last direct descendent of the revered Shia figure Ali, reappears. Shia believe that the Mahdi, who disappeared in 868, will bring justice to Earth.

At a prayer service in the central Iraqi city of Kufa on September 15, the cleric told a crowd of thousands that the Americans were collecting a dossier on the Mahdi to prevent his return. “Did you ever ask yourself about why all of this, the bloodshed and the prisons? Why are the brothers fighting each other for a political game planned by the Americans? This all happened because they (the Americans) are waiting for the Mahdi. This planning started ten years ago. They have a big file for Imam Mahdi and they just need his picture to complete it.”

Hojatoleslam al-Sadr and his advisers are convinced that the Americans want to destroy Islam and stop the Mahdi. “The Americans are trying to hijack Islamic movements. They think that these are serving the Mahdi’s interests. Whatever they did in Afghanistan and Iraq are all attempts to hijack the Mahdi’s return.”

Lest We Forget, Part XXVI

2006-09-29T12:53:00.000-07:00

Boy Slave 'Crucified' by Sudanese Muslim: Now a youth, he tells Voice of the Martyrs he's forgiven attacker. From World Net Daily, via Persecution.com, in full ...

A Sudanese slave who was assigned to watch his Muslim master's camels was "crucified" when he was caught sneaking out to attend a Christian church, according to reports from Voice of the Martyrs.

The aid organization that helps persecuted Christians worldwide said the reports come from witnesses in the Sudan who were in contact with the youth, now about 15.

Damare Garang was seven when the attack happened, officials said. He had been captured by Islamic soldiers when his Sudanese village was attacked, and then sold as a slave to a Muslim family in Tuobon, Bahr el Gazel.

His duties were to tend the master's camels, but one day one fled.

"How could you do this? You will surely have to pay! You stupid slave, I should just kill you now," he was told.

However, the child escaped any injuries at that point.

Then the following day Damare, who had been raised in a Christian family, sneaked away for a time to a small church service across the village.

His master was waiting when he returned.

"Where have you been?" he was asked, and partly from fear and partly from not having another answer, he said, "to church."

"You have made two grave mistakes," the slave master said. "Yesterday you lost one of my camels, and today you worship with infidels!"

The master went to a barn and returned with a large board, some rusty spikes and a hammer, the report said.

"Frozen in fear, Damare was dragged out to the edge of his master's compound where he was forced to the ground with his legs over the board," the VOM report said. "The savage brutality of the master was unleashed as he proceeded to drive the long nails through Damare's knees and then nail his feet securely onto the board."

While Damare was screaming in agony, the slave master simply walked away.

The boy's help arrived in the form of a Good Samaritan who happened by, and saw the small boy. The man sneaked into the compound and carried the boy to a hospital where the board and nails were removed.

Damare later was released to the custody of his helper, with whom he lived for the next 18 months.

Once again, then, there was a militia attack on his village, and he was separated from his protector. When the Islamic army soldiers were driven off, a commander of village forces recognized Damare's speech as being of the Dinka tribe, and took charge of him.

That commander eventually adopted Damare, who now lives in Mario Kong.

He remains disappointed he is unable to run quickly like other boys, but he says he's forgiven his attacker, because Jesus was nailed to a cross to forgive all sins.

"Before leaving, we gave Damare a care package with mosquito netting, soap, new clothing, shoes, a hat, a new Bible, a soccer ball, and a fishing line and hooks," said the VOM report by Tom Zurowski.

"Please tell the Christian children in America to remember to pray for the children of Sudan," Damare told his visitors.

Suicide bombers follow Quran, concludes Pentagon briefing

2006-09-28T15:51:00.000-07:00

From World Net Daily ... Suicide bombers follow Quran, concludes Pentagon briefing. In full ...

With suicide bombings spreading from Iraq to Afghanistan, the Pentagon has tasked intelligence analysts to pinpoint what's driving Muslim after Muslim to do the unthinkable.

Their preliminary finding is politically explosive: it's their "holy book" the Quran after all, according to intelligence briefings obtained by WND.

In public, the U.S. government has made an effort to avoid linking the terrorist threat to Islam and the Quran while dismissing suicide terrorists as crazed heretics who pervert Islamic teachings.

"The terrorists distort the idea of jihad into a call for violence and murder," the White House maintains in its recently released "National Strategy for Combating Terrorism" report.

(Story continues below)

But internal Pentagon briefings show intelligence analysts have reached a wholly different conclusion after studying Islamic scripture and the backgrounds of suicide terrorists. They've found that most Muslim suicide bombers are in fact students of the Quran who are motivated by its violent commands – making them, as strange as it sounds to the West, "rational actors" on the Islamic stage.

Palestinian child pretends he's a suicide bomber

In Islam, it is not how one lives one's life that guarantees spiritual salvation, but how one dies, according to the briefings. There are great advantages to becoming a martyr. Dying while fighting the infidels in the cause of Allah reserves a special place and honor in Paradise. And it earns special favor with Allah.

"Suicide in defense of Islam is permitted, and the Islamic suicide bomber is, in the main, a rational actor," concludes a recent Pentagon briefing paper titled, "Motivations of Muslim Suicide Bombers."

Suicide for Allah a 'win-win'

"His actions provide a win-win scenario for himself, his family, his faith and his God," the document explains. "The bomber secures salvation and the pleasures of Paradise. He earns a degree of financial security and a place for his family in Paradise. He defends his faith and takes his place in a long line of martyrs to be memorialized as a valorous fighter.

"And finally, because of the manner of his death, he is assured that he will find favor with Allah," the briefing adds. "Against these considerations, the selfless sacrifice by the individual Muslim to destroy Islam's enemies becomes a suitable, feasible and acceptable course of action."

The briefing – produced by a little-known Pentagon intelligence unit called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA – cites a number of passages from the Quran dealing with jihad, or "holy" warfare, martyrdom and Paradise, where "beautiful mansions" and "maidens" await martyr heroes. In preparation for attacks, suicide terrorists typically recite passages from six surahs, or chapters, of the Quran: Baqura (Surah 2), Al Imran (3), Anfal (8), Tawba (9), Rahman (55) and Asr (103).

CIFA staffs hundreds of investigators and analysts to help coordinate Pentagon security efforts at U.S. military installations at home and abroad.

The Pentagon unit is especially concerned about a new wave of suicide bombings hitting Afghanistan.

Suicide bombings have killed more than 200 people in Afghanistan this year, up from single digits two years ago. On Tuesday, a suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest and killed 18 outside an Afghan government compound. Last week, a suicide bomber riding a bike killed at least four NATO soldiers. And earlier this month, a suicide car bomber rammed into a U.S. military convoy near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, killing 16 people, including two American soldiers.

500 suicide bombers in reserve

The U.S. command in Afghanistan now warns that a suicide bombing cell is operating inside the Afghan capital. Meanwhile, the Taliban's top military commander told ABC News he has 500 suicide bombers at his disposal.

"We have so many of them that it is difficult to accommodate and arm and equip them," Mullah Dadullah Akhund said. "Some of them have been waiting for a year or more for their turn to be sent to the battlefield."

The emergence of a suicide cell in Kabul troubles military analysts because suicide attacks are the most effective weapon Muslim terrorists can use against the West. The Rand Corp. predicts they'll pose a serious and constant threat to the U.S. for years to come.

The U.S. intelligence community is growing increasingly worried, as well.

"Most jihadist groups will use suicide attacks focused primarily on soft targets to implement asymmetric warfare strategy," warns the just-declassified executive summary of the National Intelligence Estimate on the global terror threat. "Fighters with experience in Iraq are a potential source of leadership for jihadists pursuing these tactics."

Many scholars and media pundits, however, insist Muslim suicide bombers are not driven by religion.

"Beneath the religious rhetoric with which [such terror] is perpetrated, it occurs largely in the service of secular aims," claims Professor Robert A. Pape of the University of Chicago. "Suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than a product of Islamic fundamentalism."

He says U.S. foreign policy is more a factor than faith.

"Though it speaks of Americans as infidels, al-Qaida is less concerned with converting us to Islam than removing us from Arab and Muslim lands," Pape said.

But what about the recent video by Adam Gadahn, the American al-Qaida, warning fellow Americans to convert to Islam before al-Qaida attacks again?

"He never mentions virgins or the benefits Islamic martyrs receive in Heaven," Pape asserted.

In fact, Gadahn notes 36 minutes into his speech that Allah reserves the highest rewards – "honors and delights" – for martyrs in Paradise.

"[He] promised the martyr in his path the reward over and above the reward of the believer," Gadahn said. "He has promised them honors and delights too numerous to go into here."

The 9/11 hijackers and the London bombers made martyrdom videos. In their last testaments, they recite the Quran while talking of their "love of death" and "sacrificing life for Allah." Seven martyrdom videotapes also were recovered by British authorities in the foiled transatlantic sky terror plot.

Before the 9/11 attacks, the hijackers shaved and doused themselves with flower water in preparation for their weddings with the beautiful virgins in Paradise. "Know that the women of Paradise are waiting, calling out 'Come hither, friend of Allah,'" according to a four-page letter circulated among them titled "THE LAST NIGHT." "They have dressed in their most beautiful clothing."

But are the virgins scriptural or apocryphal? French documentarian Pierre Rehov, who interviewed the families of suicide bombers and would-be bombers in an attempt to find out why they do it, says it's not a myth or fantasy of heretics.

He says there's no doubt the Quran "promises virgins" to Muslim men who die while fighting infidels in jihad, and it's a key motivating factor behind suicide terrorism.

"It's obviously connected to religion," said Rehov, who features his interviews with Muslims in a recently released film, "Suicide Killers." "They really believe they are going to get the virgins."

He says would-be Muslim suicide bombers he's interviewed have shown him passages in the Quran "in which it's absolutely written that they're going to get the girls in the afterlife."

Muslim clerics do not disavow the virgins-for-martyrs reward as a perverted interpretation of the Quran.

And even Muslim leaders in the West condone suicide bombings. British scholar Azzam Tamimi recently told 8,000 Muslims in Manchester, England, that dying while fighting "George Bush and Tony Blair" is "just" and "the greatest act of martyrdom." Earlier, he said it's "the straight way to pleasing Allah."

And the founder of an allegedly mainstream Muslim group in Washington – the Council on American-Islamic Relations – also has given his blessing to suicide bombings.

Addressing a youth session at the 1999 Islamic Association for Palestine's annual convention in Chicago, CAIR founder Omar Ahmad praised suicide bombers who "kill themselves for Islam," according to a transcript provided by terror expert Steve Emerson's Investigative Project.

"Fighting for freedom, fighting for Islam, that is not suicide," Ahmad asserted. "They kill themselves for Islam."

Osama bin Laden has encouraged "Muslims brothers" to defeat the U.S. and U.K. with suicide attacks.

"I tell you to act upon the orders of Allah," he said in 2003, "be united against Bush and Blair and defeat them through suicide attacks so that you may be successful before Allah."

Killing Disabled Newborns is Acceptable

2006-09-26T14:24:00.000-07:00

"Bioethicist" Peter Singer states that Killing Disabled Newborns is Acceptable. Give him credit. Unlike most pro-deathers, at least he's consistent. In full ...

Princeton University's Peter Singer, widely known for his founding of the Great Ape Project to grant apes the same rights as humans, said Sept. 11 he would kill a disabled baby “if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole.”

“Many people find this shocking, yet they support a woman’s right to have an abortion,” Singer, a professor of bioethics, said in a question and answer article in The Independent, a British newspaper. “One point on which I agree with opponents of abortion is that, from the point of view of ethics rather than the law, there is no sharp distinction between the fetus and the newborn baby.”

Singer’s position is the "logical extension of the culture of death," LifeSiteNews.com, a pro-life news agency, asserted. He contends there is no inherent dignity in man and no sanctity of human life. Singer rejects the idea that man was created in the image and likeness of God, the site noted, and therefore believes man deserves no special treatment.

“Once again Singer is making distinctions between human beings he would consider normal and those he would consider not normal, thus he is deciding who is a person and who is not,” Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, told LifeSiteNews.com. “Non-persons are allowed to be killed.”

In the same article, Singer was asked a question about giving rights to animals that can’t understand those rights: “Isn't it contradictory to ascribe human-based rights to animals? Surely it is absurd to apply a purely human concept to an animal who has no hope of ever understanding such a thing.”

Singer said the idea of giving human-based rights to animals was not at all absurd.

“Anyone who ascribes rights to babies or humans with intellectual disabilities must be willing to attribute rights to beings who can't understand the concept,” Singer said. “It's the moral agents, the ones who are acting, who need to understand the concept. Those to whom we attribute rights do not need to understand these concepts.”

Another question dealt with what Singer would do if he were forced to decide between “shooting 10 healthy cows and one healthy human.”

“I've written that it is much worse to kill a being who is aware of having a past and a future, and who plans for the future,” Singer said. “Normal humans have such plans, but I don't think cows do. And normal humans have family and friends who will grieve their death in ways more vivid and longer-lasting than the way cows may care about other cows. (Although a cow certainly misses her calf for a long time, if the calf is taken from her. That's why there is a major ethical problem with dairy products.) If I really had to make such a decision, I'd kill the cows.”

When asked whether there are moral absolutes, Singer said there is only one.

“The only moral absolute is that we should do what will have the best consequences for all those affected by our actions,” he said.

In a question and answer article for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida published Sept. 14, Singer again addressed the issue of euthanasia.

“You've written about Terri Schiavo,” reporter Susan Aschoff said. “You say people have the right to end their lives or those of their loved ones. Where do you draw the line?”

“You have to distinguish cases,” Singer said, “where people are competent to make their own decisions and cases where human beings are not competent, and who should then make those decisions. If it's a newborn baby, it's really the parents.

“When we talk about decisions that are made in utero, most people would agree that a pregnant woman who has a fetus with a severe abnormality ought to be able to terminate the pregnancy,” he added. “Most people, including Catholic hospitals, don't say you have to do everything to keep a newborn infant alive.”

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., has written commentaries on Singer’s radical views several times, including in 2005 when Mohler said the very fact that Singer and others seriously make such arguments about the value of human life indicates that the culture of death is growing in assertiveness.

“Once we accept any moral distinction between a human being and a human person, we embrace the logic of death and inch our way toward an inevitable embrace of murder. It doesn't get much scarier than this,” Mohler wrote.

The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege

2006-09-26T11:26:00.000-07:00

A book review of The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege from the Sunday New York Times. In full ...

So much for the power of prophecy. If the great prophets of the 19th and early 20th centuries agreed on anything, whether they were utopians like Marx or pessimists like Weber, it was that God was on his deathbed. Religion was a fading force; society was secularizing; and theology, once the queen of the sciences, was headed for irrelevance.

Six years into the 21st century, fanatics are strapping on suicide belts and blowing themselves to smithereens in the name of God. The onward march of religion is not confined to Islam or the left-out bits of the globe. In much of the developing world, Christianity is doing a much better job of harvesting souls than Islam. In the only remaining superpower, the United States, hot religion is triumphing at the expense of cool religion (the mainline has long since passed to the sideline); and the religious revival is spreading from the masses to the intelligentsia.

“The Theocons” is a study of a group of Roman Catholic thinkers who, by their own lights at least, have been at the heart of this intellectual revival — Michael Novak, George Weigel, Robert P. George and, most important of all, Richard John Neuhaus, a former Lutheran pastor who converted to Catholicism in 1990. Damon Linker clearly wants to capitalize on the infamy of the neocons — a groupuscule that is recognized and reviled the world over — and he has half a point. The theocons come from a different generation from Irving Kristol and company: they reached maturity in the 1960’s rather than the 1950’s. But the parallels are striking.

They started life as left-wing radicals: Neuhaus looked forward to a social conflagration, and Novak called for the destruction of “the idol of inhibition, repression and shame.” They broke with their radical past, dismissing the 1960’s as what Neuhaus calls a “slum of a decade,” feuding with their former friends and moving smartly to the right. And they eventually found a comfortable home in the bosom of the conservative establishment. Novak is a cardinal in the papal college of neoconservatism, the American Enterprise Institute.

Linker is a disillusioned theocon who cut his journalistic teeth working for Neuhaus’s magazine, First Things. But his tone is admirably restrained, dispassionate and scholarly when it could so easily have been rank and recriminatory, and he uses his insider’s knowledge to build up a detailed account of the movement. The result, for anybody who wants to understand the growing public role of American religion, is a book to reckon with.

Linker tells the story of how the theocons advanced on several fronts at once: establishing links with conservative foundations, forging an alliance with evangelicals and trying to redirect Roman Catholicism (Novak’s “Spirit of Democratic Capitalism” remains the most ambitious attempt to reconcile Catholicism with Reagan-style capitalism). He argues that these maneuvers involved convolutions and compromises. As Americans, the theocons were treated with some suspicion in Rome; as Roman Catholics, they were treated with suspicion by both the evangelicals, who dominated the religious right, and the secular Jews, who wielded growing influence on the intellectual right.

In telling his tale Linker scores some good points against his former bedfellows, without abandoning his dispassionate tone. First Things, he reminds us, once ran an issue seriously discussing the case for resisting the American “regime” because of its support for abortion. He also convicts the theocons of cafeteria Catholicism — as strict as you can get when it comes to contraception and euthanasia but willing to second guess the Vatican when it comes to war in the gulf. The best passages in the book deal with a schizophrenia that has them demonizing “the people” when they vote for Bill Clinton and sanctifying them when they vote for George W. Bush. “This is the permanent theocon dynamic,” Linker writes, “hurtling wildly from theological affirmation of the country to theocratic denunciation and back again.”

But Linker overestimates the importance of his subject matter: the theocons are pale imitations of the neocons and the evangelicals when it comes to exercising influence in the Earthly City. The evangelical movement is the engine of the Republican majority, after all. The bearer of the Republican standard has talked about Jesus changing his heart. (Neuhaus deeply dislikes the evangelicals’ “overly confident claims to being born again,” as well as their “forced happiness and joy” and their “awful music.”)

In the end, the theocons are just too eccentric to exercise the sort of influence on America that Linker ascribes to them. Again and again — in their deference to papal authority, in their belief that American ideals and institutions derive from Catholic principles, in their willingness to sanction civil disobedience — the theocons come across not as harbingers of a conservative revolution but as a rather eccentric intellectual clique. Secular America has more potent enemies to worry about than the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus and his colleagues.

The Reality of Religion

2006-09-26T11:13:00.000-07:00

Michael Ledeen from the National Review online enters the fray with a profound overview of the Pope kerfuffle. The Reality of Religion. In full ...

It’s notable, I think, that religion — not so long ago pronounced irrelevant by most everyone in proper society — now dominates the global debate. Even a Communist like Hugo Chavez used religious terms to denounce W., perhaps because he is now in a tag team with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who speaks for a theocracy. But despite the fundamental importance of religion, most of our sages and scribblers are poorly equipped to deal with it, as you can see from the awkward coverage of the pope’s speech at Regensberg. It was, as you’d expect from a pope, a religious text, but the religious content was rarely reported, aside from Benedict’s remarks about Islam — themselves a part of a broader religious message aimed primarily at Europeans. A big part of his message was that Greek philosophical thought is central to Roman Catholicism, and that Catholicism evolved in Europe, in the constant interplay between faith and reason. It’s almost impossible to find that in the discussion.

The stuff about Islam was predictably discussed in the usual context of political correctness, according to which it is always wrong to criticize another person’s beliefs, and very wrong to criticize the beliefs of a foreign “culture.” They seemed unable to comprehend that, in ultimate issues, this sort of total tolerance doesn’t work. And the pretense that violently conflicting views of the world can be smoothed over in pleasant conversation only has the effect of intensifying the conflicts. We have arrived at the present unhappy situation not so much because we challenged those with different worldview, but because we ceased to assert our own values and advance our world view. In my graduate-student days, I met a fine New York editor by the name of Howard Fertig. Howard edited the books written by my boss, the great historian George L. Mosse, and from time to time I got to have lunch with him in Manhattan, usually at a long-gone German restaurant, Luchow’s. At one of these lunches Howard shook his head sadly — we’re talking 1963 or 64 — and pronounced the death of America. Why? Because, he said, we had adopted the view that everyone is entitled to one hang-up. Yes, so-and-so was a child molester, but hey, that’s his hang-up. This attitude used to be applied to great artists and writers, like Ezra Pound, whose hang-up was the embrace of fascism.

The combination of this crackpot toleration with a general contempt for religion made it difficult for us to comprehend the nature of the current war. Everyone from W. on down has been at great pains to assure us and themselves that we have no basic conflict with Islam, that our battle is with some lunatics who say falsely that they speak in the name of Islam. So we feel quite uncomfortable when the pope — quite deliberately — poses a question about Islam itself: Is it capable of responding to reason, or is it, as he put it, completely transcendent, beyond the reach of man, and hence unchallengeable by man under any circumstances?

It’s a big question, not easily reduced to newspeak like “did the pope anticipate the reaction?” Or “did the pope go too far?” That sort of banter is embarrassingly silly. Of course the pope anticipated the reaction, he’s one of the smartest and most learned men in the world, and he’s spent a lot of time studying Islam. He wanted to draw a line. He is not prepared to extend total, blind toleration to people who use violence in the name of faith, and he’s challenging the Muslims to answer the real questions. That quotation he chose — the one that asks, Is there anything positive that has emerged from the expansion of the domain of Islam? — wasn’t generated at random. He picked it quite wittingly. Of course he knows that, for several centuries, Islam conserved the wisdom of the West, the same “Greek” wisdom he invoked as the indispensable partner of Christian faith. He’s defying the Muslims to admit that, because he knows that the jihadis don’t want to hear about it, and that an open debate about it may undermine the sway of so many dogmatic mosques, schools, TV stations, and Internet sites.

And a surprising number of Europeans understood it, and responded positively. Did you notice that the former archbishop of Canterbury weighed in with a statement even tougher than anything the pope said? Lord Carey said that our problem was not with a minority of Muslims but with Islam itself, whereas the pope left the question open, and called for dialogue. Even the famously wimpy Spanish President Zapatero had words of support, an amazing spectacle for a man who has delighted in flaunting his laicism and challenging numerous Catholic doctrines.

But I’m afraid that we’re not engaging this debate, because our leaders are afraid to do so, and poorly equipped to participate. Our educational system has long since banished religion from its texts, and an amazing number of Americans are intellectually unprepared for a discussion in which religion is the central organizing principle. I learned from a teacher at one of the best private high schools in this area that it was virtually impossible for him to teach the Reformation properly, since the major metaphors came from the Book of Daniel, and virtually none of his students was familiar with the text.

Ignorance of things religious is terribly damaging for other reasons as well, not least of all because it prevents us from understanding the nature of our most dangerous enemies. Michael Rubin wrote a fine piece in the Wall Street Journal the other day, listing some of the lies produced by the Islamic Republic of Iran, and noting that there was actually a provision in sharia that made such lying to infidels completely acceptable and on occasion admirable. Yet the Europeans, who preen themselves on their cultural superiority, continue to be gulled by the Iranians, and W. has now completely swallowed the notion that if the Iranians ignore one ultimatum, we must not act, but simply set a new deadline. Down this path lies ruin. Yet the self-proclaimed “realists” always color themselves “surprised” when the Iranians do it.

In their latest attempt at realistic appeasement, the Council on Foreign Relations hosted President Ahmadinejad, obviously hoping to begin that “dialogue” so dear to their hearts. But, at least according to the New York Times, it didn’t go well at all. “He is a master of counterpunch, deception, circumlocution,’’ Brent Scowcroft said, shaking his head. Robert Blackwill emerged from the conversation wondering how the United States would ever be able to negotiate with this Iranian government...”If this man represents the prevailing government opinion in Tehran, we are heading for a massive confrontation with Iran,” he said.

As usual, the most surprising thing about the likes of Scowcroft and Blackwill is that they are surprised. But then, these are the folks who gave us the debacle of the first Bush presidency — the desperate attempt to prevent the fall of the Soviet empire, the last-minute rescue of Saddam, etc. Let’s hope they don’t convince the second President Bush to follow in their tiny footsteps.

God's Boot Camp?

2006-09-26T09:44:00.001-07:00

More on the documentary Jesus Camp ... from the LA Times ... God's Boot Camp? In full ...

"Jesus Camp," a documentary feature film that follows evangelical Christian children at a religious summer camp, won prizes and critical praise on the summer festival circuit, but it wasn't until its quiet opening in the Midwest two weeks ago that a news clip about the film hit YouTube.com, inciting a whirlwind of controversy.

Already, the movie, which opens in L.A. this week, has split the Christian community and horrified those who fear the ascendance of the religious right on the national stage. "Jesus Camp" opened Friday in New York and will open in 20 more cities nationally Oct. 6.

Bloggers of all stripes have been so disgusted by the bits of the film they have seen on the Web that the film's central subject, camp founder Pastor Becky Fischer, has become a public figure, bombarded with hateful e-mails and bracing for her media appearances next week, including a scheduled appearance on ABC's "Good Morning America." The A&E Indiefilms/Magnolia Pictures film follows Rachael, now 10, Levi, now 13, and Tory, now 11, engaging and articulate children from Midwestern towns who attend Fischer's "Kids on Fire" Bible camp in Devils Lake, N.D., in 2005. The filmmakers, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, take a straightforward look at their subjects.

The film's cherub-faced children cheer when asked if they'd be willing to give up their lives for Jesus, pray over a cardboard cutout of President Bush and sob as they plead for an end to abortion. One is home-schooled by a mother who teaches that "science doesn't prove anything."

'This is war!'

At one point in the film, Fischer shouts to the children, "This is war! Are you part of it or not?" She proudly compares her work to the indoctrination of young boys by extremist Muslims in Pakistan and elsewhere. The film intersperses footage of Fischer and the children with clips of radio talk-show host Mike Papantonio, a liberal Methodist, excoriating conservative Christians like Fischer.

Fischer is disappointed by the way she appears in the film. "I do understand they're out to tell a story and they felt they found it with some of the political things," she said by phone from her home in Bismarck, N.D. "And they're out to show the most dramatic, exotic, extreme things they found in my ministry, and I'm not ashamed of those things, but without context, it's really difficult to defend what you're seeing on the screen."

More controversy over the film erupted last week when the Rev. Ted Haggard — whose constituency at the National Assn. of Evangelicals is 30 million strong — took a public stance against it, claiming that the film makes evangelicals look "scary." His condemnation apparently chilled the film's opening in 13 theaters in Colorado, Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri on Sept. 15.

Even before its release, lurid fascination with the film's trailer bloomed on the Internet. A Sept. 17 ABC News report on the movie turned up on YouTube.com shortly after it aired, and by the next day, the segment was the website's most-viewed clip, with about 200,000 downloads in a matter of hours.

When Fischer arrived home Tuesday after a few days touring with the filmmakers, her e-mail inbox was loaded with hate mail. She spent the next two days writing lengthy explanations to the most common accusations — "How dare you brainwash those kids!" and "Are you raising up Christian terrorists or another Hitler Youth movement?" — then posted them on her website Thursday.

"I've gotten thousands of hits on my website from those people," she said. "I'm wearing sunglasses in the airports. It's really making me nervous."

Haggard — who appears in the film noting that when evangelicals vote, they determine an election — acknowledged he "hated" the film and called it "propaganda" for the far left. He said the filmmakers take the charismatic, evangelical jargon too literally and portray the children's and Fischer's "war talk" as violent and extremist, when it's just allegorical.

"It doesn't mean we're going to establish a theocracy and force people to obey what they think is God's law," he said. "None of that's clarified in the movie."

Word about the film initially spread online after the Tribeca Film Festival screening in New York in April and then again in June, after former Talking Heads lead singer David Byrne saw it at the AFI/Discovery Silver Docs Film Festival in Washington, D.C., and mentioned it on his blog.

"I kept saying to myself, 'OK, these are the Christian version of the Madrassas (those Islamic religious instructional schools in Pakistan and elsewhere, often financed by Saudi oil money) … so both sides are pretty much equally sick," he wrote.

It garnered even more attention in early August when Michael Moore refused to honor a request by Eamonn Bowles, the head of Magnolia Pictures, to cancel the film's screening at Moore's Traverse City Film Festival to avoid alienating conservative Christian audiences.

Bowles hoped to build interest among conservative Christians for the film's opening with a word-of-mouth campaign generated by faith-based publicity firm A. Larry Ross in Carrollton, Texas. Instead, only handfuls of people turned out.

"We were getting good feedback from a lot of Christian groups interested in the film," Bowles said. After Haggard's statements, he said, "it was almost like a switch was flipped and the people who were going to support it the day before were like, 'Oh no. We're not going to support the film.' "

The New York-based Ewing and Grady said they want the film to make a broad statement about how politics and faith have become inexorably intertwined in America. Yet the conversations that have been sparked by the movie are less about the stark differences between people with different ideologies and more about the interest in bridging them. "No one's going anywhere and no one's going to change their minds," Grady said. "So some sort of compromise has to happen, or we're just going to become more and more divided."

All the controversy surrounding the film, Grady said, "speaks to the fact that this is a conversation that people are dying to have."

A political turn

Grady and Ewing, who last year won awards for their documentary "The Boys of Baraka" about a group of inner-city American kids attending a school in Africa, said everyone was enthusiastic about participating in the project. But as Fischer explained, no one, including the filmmakers, expected the film to become so overtly political. But after Sandra Day O'Connor resigned from the Supreme Court during their filming, leaving a spot open for a more conservative judge, the evangelical community galvanized around the selection of a replacement, and Fischer's children chanted, "Righteous judges!" Ultimately, though, Fischer said, "no one was more shocked or horrified when they told me that was the turn the film was making." That's because, like many evangelical Christians, Fischer doesn't see what she does as political.

The Bible, she said, instructs people to "pray for those in authority over us and in government positions so we can live a peaceful life." And Fischer said she's "dumbfounded" that people would find her anti-abortion lessons disturbing when she sees them as a way to teach children to value human life.

Despite her reservations about the film, Fischer said she's still helping to promote it and considers Ewing and Grady friends. She's also grateful for the national attention the movie and its controversy have granted her. "I couldn't have paid for this kind of advertising," she said.

Young, Restless, Reformed

2006-09-23T17:21:00.000-07:00

From Christianity Today ... Young, Restless, Reformed. If you can't read the t-shirt on the cover, it says: "Jonathan Edwards is my homeboy." In full ...

Nothing in her evangelical upbringing prepared Laura Watkins for John Piper.

"I was used to a very conversational preaching style," said Watkins, 21. "And having someone wave his arms and talk really loudly made me a little scared."

Watkins shouldn't be embarrassed. Piper does scare some people. It's probably his unrelenting intensity, demanding discipline, and singular passion—for the glory of God. Those themes resound in Desiring God, Piper's signature book. The pastor for preaching and vision at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis has sold more than 275,000 copies of Desiring God since 1986. Piper has personally taken his message of "Christian hedonism" to audiences around the world, such as the Passion conferences for college-age students. Passion attracted 40,000 students outside Memphis in 2000 and 18,000 to Nashville earlier this year.

Not all of these youth know Piper's theological particulars. But plenty do, and Piper, more than anyone else, has contributed to a resurgence of Reformed theology among young people. You can't miss the trend at some of the leading evangelical seminaries, like Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, which reports a significant Reformed uptick among students over the past 20 years. Or the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, now the largest Southern Baptist seminary and a Reformed hotbed. Piper, 60, has tinged the movement with the God-exalting intensity of Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century Puritan pastor-theologian. Not since the decades after his death have evangelicals heaped such attention on Edwards.

Reformed theology often goes by the name Calvinism, after the renowned 16th-century Reformation theologian John Calvin. Yet even Edwards rejected the label, saying he neither depended on Calvin nor always agreed with him. Still, it is Calvin's followers who produced the famous acrostic TULIP to describe the "doctrines of grace" that are the hallmarks of traditional Reformed theology: Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, and Perseverance of the saints. (See "It's All About God.")

Already, this latest surge of Reformed theology has divided Southern Baptist churches and raised questions about the future of missions. Its exuberant young advocates reject generic evangelicalism and tout the benefits of in-depth biblical doctrine. They have once again brought the perennial debate about God's sovereignty and humans' free will to the forefront.

The evidence for the resurgence is partly institutional and partly anecdotal. But it's something that a variety of church leaders observe. While the Emergent "conversation" gets a lot of press for its appeal to the young, the new Reformed movement may be a larger and more pervasive phenomenon. It certainly has a much stronger institutional base. I traveled to some of the movement's leading churches and institutions and talked to theologians, pastors, and parishioners, trying to understand Calvinism's new appeal and how it is changing American churches.

God Starts the Party
A pastors' conference is the wrong place to schedule a private meeting with Joshua Harris. He didn't even speak at the conference I attended, but we still struggled to find a quiet spot to talk at his hotel. Slight and short, Harris doesn't stick out in crowds. But that doesn't stop pastors from recognizing him and introducing themselves. The unassuming 31-year-old took time to chat with each of them, even as our interview stretched late into the night.

Harris was a leader among his generation even before he published I Kissed Dating Goodbye in 1997. But the bestseller introduced him to a wider evangelical audience, earning many fans and at least as many detractors. Now he pastors Covenant Life Church, a congregation of 3,800 in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Harris grew up as a youth leader in a seeker-sensitive church and later joined a charismatic congregation. Neither place emphasized doctrine. "Even just thinking doctrinally would have been foreign to me," he explained. He knew enough to realize he didn't like Calvinism, though. "I remember some of the first encounters I had with Calvinists," Harris told another group of pastors during Mark Driscoll's Reform and Resurge conference in Seattle in May. "I'm sorry to say that they represented the doctrines of grace with a total lack of grace. They were spiteful, cliquish, and arrogant. I didn't even stick around to understand what they were teaching. I took one look at them and knew I didn't want any part of it."

Harris's response is anything but uncommon in evangelical history. Reformed theology has periodically boomed and busted. Calvinists have always inspired foils, such as Jacob Arminius. The Dutch theologian argued that God frees up human will so people can accept or reject God's offer of salvation. That debate prompted his critics to respond with TULIP. Reformed theology waned during the Second Great Awakening. Most recently, Calvinism has played second fiddle to the charismatic and seeker-sensitive/church-growth movements, all of which downplay many theological distinctives.

For Harris, things started changing when he read Piper describe God's glory and breathtaking sovereignty. Later, C. J. Mahaney, a charismatic Calvinist and founding pastor of Covenant Life, took Harris under his wing and groomed him to take over the church. Mahaney, 51, turned Harris on to his hero, Charles Spurgeon, the great 19th-century Calvinistic Baptist preacher in London. Mahaney assigned him a number of texts, such as Iain H. Murray's Spurgeon vs. Hyper-Calvinism. "I would have been reading Christian comic books if left to myself," Harris told me, flashing the characteristic self-deprecating humor he shares with Mahaney.

The theological depth attracted Harris. "Once you're exposed to [doctrine]," he said, "you see the richness in it for your own soul, and you're ruined for anything else."

He notices the same attraction among his cohorts. "I just think there's such a hunger for the transcendent and for a God who is not just sitting around waiting for us to show up so that the party can get started."

Passion conferences also inspired Harris to trust in a God who takes the initiative. Harris first attended Passion in 1999 and sought the help of conference founder Louie Giglio to plan a similar event, from which blossomed Harris's New Attitude conferences. "Someone like Louie is saying, 'You know what, it's not about us, it's about God's glory, it's about his renown.' Now I don't think most kids realize this, but that's the first step down a pathway of Reformed theology. Because if you say that it's not about you, well then you're on that road of saying it's not about your actions, your choosings, your determination."

Passion's God-exalting focus keeps Piper coming back to speak year after year. He attributes the attraction of Reformed theology to the spirit of Passion—namely, pairing demanding obedience with God's grandeur. "They're not going to embrace your theology unless it makes their hearts sing," Piper said.

More Than a 'Crazy Guy'
During the weekend when I visited Piper's church, the college group was learning TULIP. The student teacher spent about 30 minutes explaining unconditional election. "You may never feel the weight, you will never feel the wonder of grace, until you finally relinquish your claim to have any part of your salvation," he said. "It's got to be unconditional."

Following that talk, I met with a group that included Laura Watkins, a recent graduate of the University of Minnesota. Like Harris, Watkins grew up in an evangelical church that downplayed doctrine. Calvinism certainly wasn't much of a draw for Watkins as she searched for a church in college. "The only exposure I had was high-school textbooks that teach about John Calvin as this crazy guy who burned people," she said.

Yet she stayed for the spiritual maturity and depth she noticed in the church. Now she's as articulate an advocate of Calvinism as I met. She unwittingly paraphrased Spurgeon as she explained her move toward Reformed theology. "When you first become a believer, almost everyone is an Arminian, because you feel like you made a decision," Watkins said.

Watkins didn't stop with election. An enlarged view of God's authority changed the way she viewed evangelism, worship, and relationships. Watkins articulated how complementary roles for men and women go hand in hand with this type of Calvinism. "I believe God is sovereign and has ordered things in a particular way," she explained. Just as "he's chosen those who are going to know him before the foundations of the earth," she said, "I don't want to be rebelling against the way God ordered men and women to relate to one another."

Piper no longer scares Watkins. He's more like a father in the faith, though she says they have never spoken. Privately, Piper contrasts sharply with his authoritative pulpit persona. I dare say he's even a little meek, if relentlessly serious. We mused on Reformed theology in his home in February following one of the last sermons he delivered before undergoing surgery for prostate cancer. He reflected on the rebellion he has unrepentantly fomented.

"One of the most common things I deal with in younger pastors is conflict with their senior pastors," Piper said. "They're a youth pastor, and they've gone to Trinity or read something [R. C.] Sproul or I wrote, and they say, 'We're really out of step. What should we do?'"

He tells them to be totally candid and ask permission to teach according to their newfound convictions, even if they are in Wesleyan-Arminian churches. Of course, he tells the young pastors to pray that their bosses would come to share their vision.

Baptist and Reformed
Starting in 1993, the largest Protestant denomination's flagship seminary quickly lost at least 96 percent of its faculty. SBC inerrantists had tapped 33-year-old Al Mohler to head the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, which until then had remained open to moderate and liberal professors. Mohler addressed the faculty and re-enforced the school's confession of faith, derived from the landmark Reformed document, the Westminster Confession.

"I said, in sum, if this is what you believe, then we want you to stay. If not, then you have come here under false pretenses, and you must go," Mohler, now 45, said. "As they would say, the battle was joined."

Indeed, television cameras and news helicopters made it difficult for Mohler to work for a while. He still isn't welcome in some Louisville churches. That's not surprising, since no more than 4 faculty members—from more than 100—stayed with Southern after Mohler arrived.

Now it's hard to believe that less than 15 years ago, Southern merited a reputation as a liberal seminary. Mohler has attracted a strong faculty and spurred enrollment to more than 4,300 students—which makes it the largest Southern Baptist seminary. But SBC conservatives may have gotten more than they bargained for in Mohler. The tireless public intellectual freely criticizes perceived SBC shortcomings, especially what he considers misguided doctrine. Oh, and Mohler is an unabashed Calvinist. His seminary now attracts and turns out a steady flow of young Reformed pastors.

"This generation of young Christians is more committed, more theologically intense, more theologically curious, more self-aware and self-conscious as believers because they were not raised in an environment of cultural Christianity," Mohler said. "Or if they were, as soon as they arrived on a university campus, they found themselves in a hostile environment." Mohler explained that Calvinism offers young people a countercultural alternative with deep roots.

Mohler's analysis brought to mind one Southern seminarian I met in Louisville. Bradley Cochran grew up attending a mainline church with his family in rural Kentucky. He hated Sunday mornings, and by age 15 he had racked up a police rap sheet and developed a drug problem. But Cochran's troubles softened his heart to the gospel, and he fled his hometown to enroll at Liberty University. While there, he eagerly shared the Good News and earned an award for his evangelistic enthusiasm. A classmate loaned him some Sproul books, where he learned about predestination. He grew to accept this doctrine, but he said other students criticized his Calvinism before he even understood what the term meant. They couldn't understand how he squared God's sovereign choice with evangelism. Those challenges only intensified his study of Reformed theology. He became emboldened to persuade others.

"I felt like Calvinism was more than abstract points of theology," said Cochran, 25. "I felt you would get a much bigger view of God if you accepted these things, an understanding of justice and grace that would so deepen your affections for God, that would make you so much more grateful for his grace."

Cochran bolstered his arguments by boasting that he had never even read Calvin. Indeed, the renowned reformer appears not to be a major figure among the latest generation to claim the theology he made famous. Centuries ago, George Whitefield, the Calvinistic Methodist evangelist of the First Great Awakening, similarly argued: "Alas, I never read anything that Calvin wrote; my doctrines I had from Christ and his apostles; I was taught them of God."

The relationship of theology to evangelism has become a flash point among Southern Baptists. SBC Life, the journal of the SBC's executive committee, published two articles on Calvinism in April. In one, Malcolm Yarnell, associate professor of systematic theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, argued that Southern Baptists generally reject any notion that God "arbitrarily chooses individuals to be damned before they are born."

"[T]he greatest tragedy is when adherence to TULIP leads to division in churches and prevents them from cooperation in, and urgency for, a passion toward fulfilling the Great Commission," Yarnell wrote. He concluded, "Southern Baptists are first, last, and always followers of Jesus Christ, not John Calvin."

The most provocative comments in the SBC may belong to Steve Lemke, provost of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. In April 2005, he presented a paper on "The Future of Southern Baptists as Evangelicals." Lemke warned, "I believe that [Calvinism] is potentially the most explosive and divisive issue facing us in the near future. It has already been an issue that has split literally dozens of churches, and it holds the potential to split the entire convention."

Lemke noted that Calvinism has periodically waxed and waned among Southern Baptists. "However, the number of Calvinist faculty dramatically increased [starting in the 1980s and] over the next 20 years." Lemke and many others explained to me that Calvinists like Mohler earned leadership roles during the SBC's inerrancy battles due to their reliably conservative theology. Their academic and biblical rigor suited them for seminary positions. Now, Lemke said, their influence has made the "newest generation of Southern Baptist ministers … the most Calvinist we have had in several generations."

Lemke doubts that Calvinism has yet reached its high-water mark in the SBC. But he is no fan of this trend. Baptism and membership figures, he said, show that the Calvinist churches of the SBC's Founders Ministries lack commitment to evangelism. According to Lemke, the problem only makes sense, given their emphasis on God's sovereign election.

"For many people, if they're convinced that God has already elected those who will be elect … I don't see how humanly speaking that can't temper your passion, because you know you're not that crucial to the process," Lemke explained.

Evangelicals who adhere to Reformed theology have long chafed at such charges. They remind their critics that Whitefield, one of history's most effective evangelists, believed God elects his church. In addition, Edwards defended the First Great Awakening's revivals with Religious Affections. More recently, J. I. Packer's Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (1961) showed persuasively that there is no contradiction between those two ideas.

"I think the criticism of Reformed theology is being silenced by the mission and justice and evangelism and worship and counseling—the whole range of pastoral life," Piper said. "We're not the kind who are off in a Grand Rapids ghetto crossing our t's and dotting our i's and telling the world to get their act together. We're in the New Orleans slums with groups like Desire Street Ministries, raising up black elders through Reformed theology from 9-year-old boys who had no chance."

Deep into Doctrine
Calvinistic Baptists often told me they have less of a problem with churches that don't teach election than with churches that downplay doctrine in general. An SBC Life piece published in April by Daniel Akin, a former Southern professor and current president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, presented this perspective. "Let us be known for being rigorously biblical, searching the Scriptures to determine what God really says on [God's sovereignty] and other key doctrinal issues," Akin wrote. "For the most part, we are not doing this, and our theological shallowness is an indictment of our current state and an embarrassment to our history!"

The young people I talked to want churches to risk disagreement so they can benefit from the deeper challenges of doctrine. Joshua Harris said years after he graduated from high school, he bumped into his old youth pastor in the grocery store. The pastor seemed apologetic as they reminisced about the youth group's party atmosphere, focused more on music and skits than Bible teaching, Harris said. But the youth pastor told Harris his students now read through Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology.

"I think there's an expectation that teens can't handle that, or they'll be repulsed by that," Harris told me. "[My youth pastor] is saying the exact opposite. That's a dramatic change in philosophy in youth ministry."

Pastor Kent Hughes senses the same draw for students who cross the street from Wheaton College to attend College Church. "If there's an appeal to students, it's that we're not playing around," Hughes said. "We're not entertaining them. This is life and death. My sense is that's what they're interested in, even from an old man."

Perhaps an attraction to serious doctrine brought about 3,000 ministry leaders to Louisville in April for a Together for the Gospel conference. The conference's sponsors included Mohler and Mahaney, and Piper also spoke. Most of the audience were in their 20s and 30s. Each of the seven speakers holds to the five points of TULIP. Yet none of them spoke of Calvinism unless I asked about it. They did express worry about perceived evangelical accommodation to postmodernism and criticized churches for applying business models to ministry. They mostly joked about their many differences on such historically difficult issues as baptism, church government, eschatology, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. They drew unity as Calvinist evangelicals from their concerns: with seeker churches, church-growth marketing, and manipulative revival techniques.

Roger Olson, professor of theology at Truett Seminary, Baylor University, said more than just Calvinists worry about these problems. "A lot of us evangelical Arminians agree with them in their criticisms of popular folk religion," Olson said. "I agree with their basic theological underpinnings—that doctrine is important, that grace is the decisive factor in salvation, not a decision we make."

If Olson is right, co-belligerency on these concerns could forestall further conflict, at least on the Calvinist-Arminian debate.

A Passion for Puritans
Mark Dever hasn't sold books to the degree Piper has. And he doesn't head a flagship institution like his longtime friend Mohler. He doesn't even pastor a megachurch. But oh, how strategic his church is. Hop off Washington, D.C.'s Metro on the Capitol South stop. Head north past the Library of Congress and the Capitol. Turn right and bear east before you reach the Supreme Court. A couple blocks later you'll see Capitol Hill Baptist Church, which Dever has led for 12 years, beginning when he was 33.

Yet location isn't what makes Dever's church so strategic. Maybe it's all the political maneuvering in the air, but Dever networks effectively. He conceived Together for the Gospel and otherwise works to connect conservative evangelicals who worry about the same things. Dever's church also trains six interns at a time, imprinting his beliefs about how a local church should run through a related ministry, 9 Marks.

I visited Capitol Hill Baptist in January. The church kicked off with Sunday school, which really should have been called Sunday seminary. Class options included a survey of the New Testament, spiritual disciplines, and a systematic theology lesson on theories of the Atonement.

Such rigor can be expected from a church led by Dever, who earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge studying the Puritans. He embodies the pastoral theologians who are leading young people toward Reformed theology. He has cultivated a church community in the Puritan mold—unquestionably demanding and disciplined. And the church attracts a very young crowd. Its 525 members average 29 years old. Dever mockingly rejected my suggestion that they aim to attract an under-30 crowd. "Yes, that's why we sing those hymns and have a [55-minute] sermon." Dever smiled. "We're seriously calibrated for the 18th century."

Dever and others have turned a young generation onto some old teachers. He organizes his study around a canon of renowned church leaders that includes Augustine, Luther, Calvin, John Owen, John Bunyan, B. B. Warfield, Martin Lloyd-Jones, and Carl Henry. It's mostly Puritans who have fueled this latest resurgence of Calvinism. Leaders like R. C. Sproul and J. I. Packer have for decades told evangelicals they have something to learn from this post-Reformation movement. During the late 1950s, Banner of Truth starting reprinting classic Reformed works, including many from Puritans.

Among the Puritans, Edwards is most popular. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School professor and Edwards scholar Douglas Sweeney said his seminary includes many more Calvinists than 20 years ago. Not unrelated, he said among evangelicals "there is more interest in Edwards today than there has been since the first half of the 19th century."

Garth Rosell, church history professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, has noticed his students' increased interest in Puritan studies, especially Edwards. He suspects young evangelicals gravitate toward the Puritans looking for deeper historic roots and models for high-commitment Christianity.

That's at least what Jordan Thomas, a 28-year-old church planter, told me about the Puritans. "I don't read them to find out what these guys say about Calvinism," Thomas told me in Piper's church. "It's their big-hearted love for Christ. They say things about their devotion to him that I'm just like, I wonder if I know the same Jesus these guys love."

Scripture Trumps Systems
Evangelicals have long disagreed on election and free will. The debate may never be settled, given the apparent tension between biblical statements and the limits of our interpretive skills. In addition, some will always see more benefit in doctrinal depth than others.

Those fearing a new pitched battle can rest easy. That's not because the debate will go away—for the foreseeable future, the spread of Calvinism will force many evangelicals to pick sides. And it's not because mission will trump doctrine—young people seem to reject this dichotomy.

It's because the young Calvinists value theological systems far less than God and his Word. Whatever the cultural factors, many Calvinist converts respond to hallmark passages like Romans 9 and Ephesians 1. "I really don't like to raise any banner of Calvinism or Reformed theology," said Eric Lonergan, a 23-year-old University of Minnesota graduate. "Those are just terms. I just like to look at the Word and let it speak for itself."

That's the essence of what Joshua Harris calls "humble orthodoxy." He reluctantly debates doctrine, but he passionately studies Scripture and seeks to apply all its truth.

"If you really understand Reformed theology, we should all just sit around shaking our heads going, 'It's unbelievable. Why would God choose any of us?'" Harris said. "You are so amazed by grace, you're not picking a fight with anyone, you're just crying tears of amazement that should lead to a heart for lost people, that God does indeed save, when he doesn't have to save anybody."

Jesus Camp: Children's Boot Camp for the Culture Wars

2006-09-22T17:35:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times ... Jesus Camp: Children's Boot Camp for the Culture Wars. In full ...

“Extreme liberals who look at this should be quaking in their boots,” declares Pastor Becky Fischer with jovial satisfaction in the riveting documentary “Jesus Camp.” Ms. Fischer, an evangelical Christian, helps run Kids on Fire, a summer camp in Devils Lake, N.D., that grooms children to be soldiers in “God’s army.”

A mountainous woman of indefatigable good cheer, Ms. Fischer makes no bones about her expectation that the growing evangelical movement in the United States will one day end the constitutional ban separating church and state. And as the movie explores her highly effective methods of mobilizing God’s army, that expectation seems reasonable.

Ms. Fischer understands full well that the indoctrination of children when they are most impressionable (under 13 and preferably between 7 and 9) with evangelical dogma is the key to the movement’s future growth, and she compares Kids on Fire to militant Palestinian training camps in the Middle East that instill an aggressive Islamist fundamentalism. The term war, as in culture war, is repeatedly invoked to describe the fighting spirit of a movement already embraced by 30 million Americans, mostly in the heartland.

At Kids on Fire we see children in camouflage and face paint practicing war dances with wooden swords and making straight-armed salutes to a soundtrack of Christian heavy metal. We see them weeping and speaking in tongues as they are seized by the Holy Spirit. And we see them in Washington at an anti-abortion demonstration.

Filmed during the Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the movie visits a church at which the congregation prays in front of a life-size cardboard cutout of President Bush. Justice Alito’s eventual approval is hailed as another step forward in the movement’s eventual goal of outlawing abortion, the No. 1 issue on its agenda.

“Jesus Camp” is the second film by the documentary team of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady to explore the molding of young minds. The first, “The Boys of Baraka,” followed a group of “at-risk” African-American boys from a decaying Baltimore middle school to an austere wilderness school in rural Kenya. Removed from a toxic urban environment, they flourish, until tribal conflict in the region forces the school to suspend operation.

The majority of the children in “Jesus Camp” are home-schooled by evangelical parents who teach them creationism and dismiss science. Handsome 12-year-old Levi, who wears his hair in a mullet, is being groomed as a future evangelical preacher. Already exuding star quality, he strides through a group of children, waving his arms and mouthing dogma about how his generation is so important.

Pretty 10-year-old Tory speaks earnestly of dancing “for God” and not “for the flesh.” Nine-year-old Rachael is already an evangelical recruiter who fearlessly approaches adult strangers.

Ms. Fischer speaks of “dead churches” (traditional Protestant churches in which the congregations sit passively and listen to a sermon) and declares these are places that Jesus doesn’t visit. In evangelical churches where people jump, shout, weep and speak in tongues, she contends, the spirit is present.

The great unanswered question is what will happen to these poised, attractive children when their hormones kick in and they venture beyond their sheltered home and church environments.

“Jesus Camp” includes one articulate and alarmed dissenting voice: Mike Papantonio, a talk show personality for Air America. A self-professed Christian of the dead church variety, he engages in a pointed but friendly debate with Ms. Fischer when she calls in to his show. But the only moment of real tension occurs during a side trip to a megachurch in Colorado Springs where the preacher Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals (and a Bush friend), turns to address the camera in a tone of suspicion and hostility. It is the movie’s only glimpse of the evangelical movement’s ugly, vindictive side.

“Jesus Camp” doesn’t pretend to be a comprehensive survey of the charismatic-evangelical phenomenon. It offers no history or sociology and only scattered statistics about its growth. It analyzes the political agenda only glancingly, centering on abortion but not on homosexuality or other items. Because it focuses on the education of children, Ms. Fischer speaks of the evils of Harry Potter. But there is no analysis of Biblical teaching nor mention of “end times” or the rapture.

Who would deny that the movement’s surging vitality is partly a response to the steady coarsening of mass culture, in which the dominant values are commercial and the worldview is Darwinian in its amorality? Spread globally by television, the least-common-denominator brand of “secular humanism” — the evangelicals’ perceived enemy — is indeed repugnant.

It wasn’t so long ago that another puritanical youth army, Mao Zedong’s Red Guards, turned the world’s most populous country inside out. Nowadays the possibility of a right-wing Christian American version of what happened in China no longer seems entirely far-fetched.

“Jesus Camp” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Its frank discussion of politics and religion could upset.

Should the Pope Apologize?

2006-09-22T16:28:00.000-07:00

Muslic Cleric says Pope Should be Crucified

2006-09-22T16:25:00.000-07:00

From the Agence France-Presse ... Pakistanis protest, cleric says Pope should be crucified. In full ...

Hundreds of Pakistani Islamists held street protests to condemn Pope Benedict XVI for remarks they regard as anti-Islamic, with one leader saying the pontiff should be crucified.

Demonstrators Friday poured out of mosques after the main weekly Muslim prayers in Pakistan's largest city Karachi, the eastern city of Lahore, the capital Islamabad and other urban centres.

"If the pope comes here we will hang him on the Cross," Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, a senior leader of Pakistan's main alliance of radical parties, told around 200 noisy demonstrators in Islamabad.

The alliance, called the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal or United Action Front, forms part of the parliamentary opposition and is often heavily involved in street protests in mostly Muslim Pakistan.

Ahmed also said the pope had joined US President George W. Bush's "crusade" against Muslims, referring to Christians who fought against Muslims from the 11th through the 13th centuries.

In Karachi police said at least 100 hardliners shouted slogans demanding an apology from the pope and criticising the United States.

"Religious leaders like the pope should not use (US President George W.) Bush's tone," Merajul Huda, Karachi chief of the hardline Jamaat-i-Islami party, told the rally.

Witnesses said more than 300 people chanted slogans against the pope outside an Islamic school in the central city of Multan. Dozens more massed in Lahore.

Prayer leaders also condemned the pope during Friday sermons around the country.

Anger has gripped the Muslim world since the pope quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who said innovations introduced by the Prophet Mohammed were "evil and inhuman."

The pontiff later said he was "deeply sorry" for the outrage triggered by his speech early this month at a German university, and that the passages quoted by him did not express his personal opinion.

A gathering of hundreds of fundamentalists in Lahore on Thursday said Pope Benedict should be removed from his position for his "blasphemous" comments.

The Pakistani parliament has also condemned the pope's comments and the foreign ministry summoned the Vatican's envoy in Islamabad last week to lodge a protest.

FAQ -- Islam Edition!

2006-09-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

From Hugh Hewitt over at Townhall.com ... FAQ - Islam Edition! In full ...

1) Is Islam a Religion of Peace?

Well, um…No, not really.

2) So all Muslims are violent and bent on war. That’s a hateful and bigoted thing to say. You sicken me. And you’ll never carry Michigan.

That’s not what I said. You asked about Islam - I answered. You then erroneously inferred that I was speaking about all Muslims. I wasn’t. You misunderstood.

3) I don’t understand.

I know you don’t, and it’s not your fault. You’ve been poisoned by the forces of political correctness. You’re the product of a school system that valued sensitivity and self-esteem more than it valued truth and rational inquiry. As a consequence, truths which may be hurtful and disquieting will often flummox you. But you, and the legions of those like you, have to grow up.

4) So what about Islam is not peaceful?

Oh, where to begin. Actually, let’s just limit ourselves to the Koran, which is the revealed word of God and thus not to be trifled with. A few relevant Suras:

Say to the unbelievers, if now they desist from unbelief, their past would be forgiven them; but if they persist, the punishment of those before them is already (a matter of warning for them). And fight them on until there is no more persecution, and religion becomes Allah's in its entirety.... If they refuse, be sure that Allah is your Protector — the Best to protect and the Best to help. And know that out of all the booty that you may acquire (in war), a fifth share is assigned to Allah and his Messenger...

Sura 48:18-20: Allah promiseth you much booty that you will capture, and hath given you this in advance, and hath withheld men's hands from you, that it may be a token for the unbelievers, and that He may guide you on a right path.

Sura 9:5: Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each an ambush....

There is also the fundamental belief that since the laws of the Koran are divinely given, there can be no man-made law that supersedes the Koran’s dictates. That’s what Sharia is all about – no separation of mosque and state, only law by the imams.

5) But aren’t there are things in other religions that, speaking purely rationally, are kind of kooky, too?

I’ll stick to the Old Testament here, since I’m a Hannukah guy and so the first book is my primary area of expertise. Most every ritualistic thing you see that makes Jews seem different comes from man’s interpretation of God’s will. For instance, we fast on Yom Kippur because some guy a few thousand years ago decided that that would be the best way to atone for our sins and show our love for God. But there’s a difference between some guy’s word, regardless of how brilliant and beloved that guy was, and God’s word.

6) So it sounds like you’re saying all Muslims are unpeaceful, no?

No. Muslims are usually born into their faith, just like most Jews and Christians. Judging them from their birth circumstance is unfair, actually racist. But yes, anyone who decides that they’re going to pay special obeisance to the “slay the idolaters” parts of the Koran is unlikely to be a particularly peaceful person.

7) So the key question is what percentage of Muslims fall into that camp, right?

Yes! You’re learning.

8) So, what percentage of Muslims falls into that camp?

How the hell should I know? I spend most of my days typing away at a laptop for the amusement of others. But the information coming in from around the world suggests that we’ve got a much bigger problem than a few random kooks running around Waziristan fantasizing about an American Hiroshima.

9) What information are you talking about?

Well, if there was a real democratic election held in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood would probably win. They’re the ones who killed Sadat; Zawahiri is an alumnus of this group. Philosophically, they’re very much akin to Al Qaeda. If there were ever a real democratic election in Saudi Arabia, whatever group that replaced the House of Saud would be a bunch of Wahabbist nutjobs who would make the Muslim Brotherhood look like America’s Libertarian Party. And, let’s face it, the situation in Iraq and some of the statements coming out of there from the Iraqis’ democratically elected leaders don’t suggest a country entirely ready to join the community of civilized nations.

10) How about the American Muslim community?

That situation is a bit opaque. I wrote lengthy stories on the Islamic Society of Boston for the Weekly Standard. The ISB was joined at the hip with guys like hate-preacher Yussef al Qaradawi (who thinks gays should be killed and is wildly popular in the Middle East). Qaradawi was on the Islamic Society of Boston’s board of directors and helped them raise funds for their new mosque. Still, one of the terror experts I talked to about the story, and believe me this guy has had more fatwas issued demanding his head on a platter than Salman Rushdie, thinks that the ISB rank and file is okay, but that their leadership is, ahem, suspect.

11) Can you follow all the dictates of the Koran and be a good American?

Well, you can’t slay idolaters and be a good American.

12) Why are things different now? Jews and Christians used to live peacefully aside Muslims for millennia?

Well, Jews and Christians lived peacefully besides Muslims when the Jews and Christians agreed to peacefully accept second class citizenship. But your premise is still valid – things are worse now than they’ve been in quite some time.

13) Why?

I’m not sure. I don’t think anyone is, but a lot of people have interesting theories. My opinion is that hundreds of billions of petro-dollars have fueled an Islamic Great Awakening. But the conversation on that topic is really academic. The point is that we have a big problem.

14) How big?

Huge.

15) When Gorbachev became the chief Soviet honcho, Margaret Thatcher said, “He’s someone we can do business with?” Are there any POPULAR leaders of the Muslim world of whom that can be said?

Yes. Sistani and…give me a minute. Sistani. Qadafi wants to do business but he’s not popular and he’s certifiable.

16) It sounds pretty grim.

It is.

17) So how do we win hearts and minds?

I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. Tom Barnett writes brilliantly about integrating third world countries into “the Core” of first world countries. But what if some people, like radical Islamists, have no interest in the Core? What if an 8th century lifestyle is more to their liking?

18) So you foresee a global conflagration?

Not really. A truly global conflagration can only happen if we and our putative allies continue to fund those who intend us harm. At some point, that will have to stop. For instance, I assume we weren’t buying Krupps coffee-makers from Germany in 1943. But I do see lots of blood before this thing is done and the military can happily go back to preparing for a conventional war with China that will never come.

19) Isn’t it a little unfair to focus on Islam’s bloody past while ignoring things like the Crusades?

Not entirely. If America were pondering invading the Middle East to secure the Holy Grail and convert infidels, the Crusades might have more relevance. The reason that Islam’s past is relevant is because the Prophet’s rationale for war is exactly the same as bin Laden’s and others of his ilk. Walid Phares says it’s like Lord of the Rings – bin Laden and his ilk just picked up a “ring” that’s been hanging around for centuries. They didn’t invent anything new.

20) This might be off-topic, but is it true that Jim Geraghty ripped off our much beloved FAQ format?

It wasn’t a rip-off, it was an homage. Besides, it was very well done. Anyway, I’m voting with my feet – I’ve already ordered Jim’s new book “Voting to Kill.” Jim’s one of the smartest guys in the blogosphere. He also gave me my second-ever link, and like the Godfather I never forget a favor.

Jihad, the Lord's Supper, and Eternal Life

2006-09-18T18:07:00.002-07:00

From the Asia Times ... Jihad, the Lord's Supper, and Eternal Life.

Hat tip: Michaelsavage.com

Jihad injures reason, for it honors a god who suffers no constraints on his caprice, unlike the Judeo-Christian god, who is limited by love. That is the nub of Pope Benedict XVI's September 12 address in Regensburg, Germany. It promises to be the Vatican's most controversial utterance in living memory.

When a German-language volume appeared in 2003 quoting the same analysis by a long-dead Jewish theologian, I wrote of "oil on the flames of civilizational war". [1] Now the same ban has been preached from St Peter's chair, and it is a defining moment comparable to Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. Earlier this year, Benedict's elliptical remarks to former students at a private seminar in 2005, mentioned in passing by an American Jesuit and reported in this space, created a scandal. [2] I wrote at the time that even the pope must whisper when it comes to Islam. We have entered a different stage of civilizational war.

The Islamic world now views the pontiff as an existential threat, and with reason. Jihad is not merely the whim of a despotic divinity, as the pope implied. It is much more: jihad is the fundamental sacrament of Islam, the Muslim cognate of the Lord's Supper in Christianity, that is, the unique form of sacrifice by which the individual believer communes with the Transcendent. To denounce jihad on theological grounds is a blow at the foundations of Islam, in effect a papal call for the conversion of the Muslims.

Just before then-cardinal Ratzinger's election as pope last year, I wrote, "Now that everyone is talking about Europe's demographic death, it is time to point out that there exists a way out: convert European Muslims to Christianity. The reported front-runner at the Vatican conclave ... Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is one of the few Church leaders unafraid to raise the subject." [3] The Regensburg address oversteps the bounds of dialogue and verges upon the missionary. A great deal has changed since John Paul II kissed the Koran before news cameras in 1999. The boys and girls of the Catholic youth organization Communione e Liberazione that Ratzinger nurtured for a generation will have a great deal to talk to their Muslim school-fellows about.

No more can one assume now that Europe will slide meekly into dhimmitude.

In that respect [I wrote during the conclave] John Paul II recalled the sad position of Pius XII, afraid to denounce publicly the murder of Polish priests by Nazi occupiers - let alone the murder of Polish Jews - for fear that the Nazis would react by killing even more. It is hard to second-guess the actions of Pius XII given his terrible predicament, but at some point one must ask when the Gates of Hell can be said to have prevailed over St Peter.
Specifically, Benedict stated that jihad, the propagation of Islam by force, is irrational, because it is against the Reason of God. Citing a 14th-century Byzantine emperor to the effect that Mohammed's "decree that the faith he preached should be spread with the sword" as "evil and inhumane" provoked headlines. But of greater weight is the pope's observation that Allah is a god whose "absolute transcendence" allows no constraint, to the point that Allah is free if he chooses to promote evil. The great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig explained the matter more colorfully than did the pope, as I reported three years ago in the cited review:

The god of Mohammed is a creator who well might not have bothered to create. He displays his power like an Oriental potentate who rules by violence, not by acting according to necessity, not by authorizing the enactment of the law, but rather in his freedom to act arbitrarily ... Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah ... despite its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the god's unity, Islam slips back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending heavenful of gods of polytheism.
It is amusing to see liberal Jewish commentators in the United States, eg, the editorial page of the September 16 New York Times, deplore the pope's remarks, considering that Rosenzweig said it all the more sharply in 1920.

Benedict's comments regarding Islam served as a preamble to a longer discourse on the unity of faith and reason. "Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?" Benedict asked, and answered his own question: "I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God." It is not, however, the reasoned side of Benedict's remarks to which Muslims responded, but rather the existential.

Rather than rail at the pope's characterization of Islam, Muslims might have responded as follows: "Excuse me, Your Holiness, but did we hear you say that you represent a religion of reason, whereas Allah is a god of unreason? Do you not personally eat the body and blood of your god - at least things that you insist really are his flesh and blood - every day at Mass? And you accuse us of unreason!" That is a fair rebuttal, but it opens up Islam's can of worms.

True, we are not pottering about in this pilgrim existence to be rational. Today's Germans are irrational, and know that their time has past, and therefore desist from bearing children. What mankind - Christian, Muslim and Jew, and all - demand of God is irrational. We want eternal life! Christians do not want what the Greeks wanted - Socrates' transmigration of souls, nor the shadow existence of Homer's dead heroes in Hades. That is an unreasonable demand if ever there was one.

Before the Bible was written, the Babylonian hero Gilgamesh learned that his quest for immortality was futile. The demigods of Greece, mortals favored by Olympians, suffered a tedious sort of immortal life as stars, trees or rivers. The gods of the heathens are not in any case eternal, only immortal. They were born and they will die, like the Norse gods at the Ragnorak, and their vulnerability projects the people's presentiment of its own death. To whom, precisely, have the gods offered eternal life prior to the appearance of revealed religion? Eternal life and a deathless mortality are quite different things.

But what is it that God demands of us in response to our demand for eternal life? We know the answer ourselves. To partake of life in another world we first must detach ourselves from this world in order to desire the next. In plain language, we must sacrifice ourselves. There is no concept of immortality without some concept of sacrifice, not in any culture or in any religion. That is a demand shared by the Catholic bishops and the Kalahari Bushmen.

God's covenant with Abraham is unique and singular in world history. A single universal and eternal god makes an eternal pact with a mortal that can be fulfilled only if Abraham's tribe becomes an eternal people. But the price of this pact is self-sacrifice. That is an existential mortal act beyond all ethics, as Soren Kierkegaard tells us in Fear and Trembling. The sacraments of revealed religion are sublimated human sacrifice, for the revealed god in his love for humankind spares the victim, just as God provided a ram in place of the bound Isaac on Mount Moriah. Among Jews the covenant must be renewed in each male child through a substitute form of human sacrifice, namely circumcision. [4] Christians believe that a single human sacrifice spared the rest of humankind.

Jihad also is a form of human sacrifice. He who serves Allah so faithfully as to die in the violent propagation of Islam goes straight to paradise, there to enjoy virgins or raisins, depending on the translation. But Allah is not the revealed god of loving kindness, or agape, but - pace Benedict - a god of reason, that is, of cold calculation. Islam admits no expiatory sacrifice. Everyone must carry his own spear.

We are too comfortable, too clean, too squeamish, too modern to descend into the terrible space where birth, death and immortality are decided. We forget that we cannot have eternal life unless we are ready to give up this one - and this the Muslim knows only through what we should call the sacrament of jihad. Through jihad, the Muslim does almost precisely what the Christian does at the Lord's Supper. It is the sacrifice of Jesus that grants immortal life to all Christians, that is, those who become one with Jesus by eating his flesh and drinking his blood so that the sacrifice also is theirs, at least in Catholic terms. Protestants substitute empathy identification with the crucified Christ for the trans-substantiated blood and flesh of Jesus.

Christians believe that Jesus died on the cross to give all men eternal life, on condition that they take part in his sacrifice, either through the physical communion of the Catholic Church or the empathetic Communion of Protestantism. From a Muslim vantage point, the extreme of divine humility embodied in Jesus' sacrifice is beyond reason. Allah, by contrast, deals with those who submit to him after the calculation of an earthly despot. He demands that all Muslims sacrifice themselves by becoming warriors and, if necessary, laying their lives down in the perpetual war against the enemies of Islam.

These are parallel acts, in which different peoples do different things, in the service of different deities, but for the same reason: for eternal life.

Why is self-sacrifice always and everywhere the cost of eternal life? It is not because a vengeful and sanguineous God demands his due before issuing us a visa to heaven. Quite the contrary: we must sacrifice our earthly self, our attachment to the pleasures and petty victories of our short mortal life if we really are to gain the eternal life that we desire. The animal led to the altar, indeed Jesus on the cross, is ourselves: we die along with the sacrifice and yet live, by the grace of God. YHWH did not want Isaac to die, but without taking Abraham to Mount Moriah, Abraham himself could not have been transformed into the man desirous and deserving of immortal life. Jesus died and took upon him the sins of the world, in Christian terms, precisely so that a vicarious sacrifice would redeem those who come to him.

What distinguishes Allah from YHWH and (in Christian belief) his son Jesus is love. God gives Jews and Christians a path that their foot can tread, one that is not too hard for mortals, to secure the unobtainable, namely immortal life, as if by miracle. Out of love God gives the Torah to the Jews, not because God is a stickler for the execution of 613 commandments, but because it is a path upon which the Jew may sacrifice and yet live, and receive his portion of the World to Come. The most important sacrifice in Judaism is the Sabbath - "our offering of rest", says the congregation in the Sabbath prayers - a day of inactivity that acknowledges that the Earth is the Lord's. It is a sacrifice, as it were, of ego. In this framework, incidentally, it is pointless to distinguish Judaism as a "religion of works" as opposed to Christianity as a "religion of faith".

To Christians, God offers the vicarious participation in his sacrifice of himself through his only son.

That is Grace: a free gift by God to men such that they may obtain eternal life. By a miracle, the human soul responds to the offer of Grace with a leap, a leap away from the attachments that hold us to this world, and a foretaste of the World to Come.

There is no Grace in Islam, no miracle, no expiatory sacrifice, no expression of love for mankind such that each Muslim need not be a sacrifice. On the contrary, the concept of jihad, in which the congregation of Islam is also the army, states that every single Muslim must sacrifice himself personally. Jihad is the precise equivalent of the Lord's Supper in Christianity and the Jewish Sabbath, the defining expression of sacrifice that opens the prospect of eternity to the mortal believer. To ask Islam to become moderate, to reform, to become a peaceful religion of personal conscience is the precise equivalent of asking Catholics to abolish Mass.

Islam, I have argued for years, faces an existential crisis in the modern world, which has ripped its adherents out of their traditional existence and thrust them into deadly conflicts. What was always latent in Islam has now come to the surface: the practice of Islam now expresses itself uniquely in jihad. Benedict XVI has had the courage to call things by their true names. Everything else is hypocrisy and self-delusion.

Postscript
Regarding Benedict XVI's statement that the characterization of the Prophet Mohammed did not reflect his "personal opinion": In 1938, at the peak of Stalin's terror, a Muscovite called the KGB to report that his parrot had escaped. The KGB officer said, "Why are you calling us?" The Muscovite averred, "I want to state for the record that I do not share the parrot's political opinions."

Notes
1. See Oil on the flames of civilizational war, December 2, 2003.
2. See When even the pope has to whisper, January 10, 2006.
3. The crescent and the conclave, April 19, 2005.
4. See The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity, by Jon D Levinson (Harvard; Cambridge 1993).

Film Shows Youths Training to Fight for Jesus

2006-09-18T12:05:00.000-07:00

From ABC News ... Film Shows Youths Training to Fight for Jesus.

An in-your-face documentary out this weekend is raising eyebrows, raising hackles and raising questions about evangelizing to young people.

Speaking in tongues, weeping for salvation, praying for an end to abortion and worshipping a picture of President Bush -- these are some of the activities at Pastor Becky Fischer's Bible camp in North Dakota, "Kids on Fire," subject of the provocative new documentary, "Jesus Camp."

"I want to see them as radically laying down their lives for the gospel as they are in Palestine, Pakistan and all those different places," Fisher said. "Because, excuse me, we have the truth."

"A lot of people die for God," one camper said, "and they're not afraid."

"We're kinda being trained to be warriors," said another, "only in a funner way."

The film has caused a split among evangelicals. Some say it's designed to demonize. Others have embraced it, including Fischer, who's helping promote the film.

"I never felt at any point that I was exploited," Fischer said.

"I think there is a push right now in a lot of evangelical churches to definitely keep the teenagers and keep the children in the faith," said Heidi Ewing, co-director of "Jesus Camp." "And this is one version of that attempt."

A Growing Movement

This camp is, by many accounts, a small -- and perhaps extreme -- slice of what some say is a growing, intensifying evangelical youth movement.

Over the past decade and a half, enrollment at Christian colleges is up 70 percent. Sales of Christian music are up 300 percent. Tens of thousands of youth pastors have been trained.

Young people are targeted through Christian music festivals, skateboard competitions and rodeos.

"This is an enormous youth movement," said Lauren Sandler, a secular, liberal feminist from New York City who spent months among the believers researching her new book, "Righteous."

Sandler says the evangelical youth movement will have a negative impact on the country's future, because even the most moderate young evangelicals are inflexible on issues such as abortion and gay marriage.

"It's an absolute, straight-up us-against-them," Sandler said. "It's, you're either with us or you're against us. … Not only are you a sinner, but you are working for the enemy -- the enemy being Satan."

Chap Clark, an associate professor at the Fuller Theological Seminary who's trained youth pastors for decades, said people who see "Jesus Camp" should not come away with the idea that evangelizing to youth consists mainly of political indoctrination.

Clark said youth pastors focus much more on providing meaning to kids who can't find it in a materialistic culture or in their family lives -- "which is going to translate into much healthier adults who are more able to be into respectful dialogue and come alongside people who disagree with them.

"I think this is a very hopeful time because of the youth ministry movement," he added.

There's disagreement about whether this movement is good for the country and whether the movie is an accurate portrayal of the movement.

But there's growing agreement that these children will have a real impact. One child in "Jesus Camp" goes so far as to say, "We're a key generation to bringing Jesus back."

Nun Shot in the Back: "I forgive. I forgive."

2006-09-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

From the Associated Press ... Nun Forgave Somalia Killers. In full ...

Sister Leonella, a nun who devoted her life to helping the sick in Africa, used to joke there was a bullet with her name engraved on it in Somalia. When the bullet came, she used her last breaths to forgive those responsible.

"I forgive, I forgive," she whispered in her native Italian just before she died Sunday in the Somali capital, the Rev. Maloba Wesonga told The Associated Press at the nun's memorial Mass in Nairobi on Monday.

Sister Leonella's slaying raised concerns that she and other foreigners killed in Somalia recently are victims of growing Islamic radicalism in the Horn of Africa country, where a hard-line Muslim militia has been expanding its reach.

The shooting was not a random attack and could have been the Muslim anger over remarks by Pope Benedict XVI linking Islam and violence, said Willy Huber, regional head of the Austrian-financed hospital where the Roman Catholic nun worked.

Several Somalis who witnessed Sunday's attack by two gunmen also speculated the killing was related to the pope. But Abdurahman Mohamed Farah, deputy leader of the Islamic militia, disputed that, blaming it instead on Somali warlords who were driven out of Mogadishu in June.

The nun was the latest victim in a wave of slayings of both foreign workers and moderate Somali intellectuals that has coincided with the rise of the Islamic radicals.

Among them were Swedish journalist Martin Adler, who was killed in June during a demonstration in Mogadishu, and a prominent Somali peace activist, Abdulkadir Yahya Ali, who was murdered a month later. BBC journalist Kate Peyton was shot dead last year.

Sister Leonella, whose birth name was Rosa Sgorbati, had lived and worked in Kenya and Somalia for 38 years, her family said.

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She was shot as she left the Austrian-run S.O.S. hospital. Her bodyguard also was slain. The two were walking the 30 feet from the hospital to the nun's home, where three other nuns were waiting to have lunch with her.

"She had no chance," Huber said. "It was like an execution."

Sister Leonella was aware of the dangers in Somalia and used to joke that there was a bullet with her name engraved on it. "But this never deterred her or discouraged her," said Wesonga, who is secretary of the Catholic archdiocese of Nairobi, capital of Kenya.

Outside the S.O.S. hospital in Mogadishu, Halima Hassan said Sister Leonella was a "kind person who loved mothers and children. We have lost a great person."

Al-Qaeda Threatens Jihad over Pope's Remarks

2006-09-18T11:39:00.000-07:00

From the Times Online UK ... Al-Qaeda threatens jihad over Pope's remarks. In full ...

An Iraqi militant group led by al-Qaeda has threatened to massacre Christians in response to remarks about Islam by Pope Benedict XVI that have caused offence across the Muslim world.

The Pope quoted a 14th Century Byzantine emperor who criticised the teachings of Mohammad for endorsing the use of violence, in a speech to an academic audience at a German university last Tuesday.

Yesterday, after a wave of protests across the Islamic world, Benedict said he was deeply sorry. He said that he had had no intention of causing offence, and stressing that the text he had quoted in no way represented his personal views on the Muslim faith and the doctrine of jihad.

"I hope that this serves to appease hearts and to clarify the true meaning of my address, which in its totality was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect," the pontiff added.

Today an internet statement by the Mujahideen Shura Council, an umbrella group led by Iraq’s branch of al Qaeda, threatened reprisals against "worshippers of the cross" for the Pope's remarks.

"We shall break the cross and spill the wine. ... (you will have no choice but) Islam or death," said the statement, citing a hadith (saying of the Prophet Mohammed) promising Muslims that they would "conquer Rome... as they conquered Constantinople".

"We tell the worshipper of the cross (the Pope) that you and the West will be defeated, as is the case in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya. God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the Mujahideen."

As usual with such statements, the authenticity could not be verified. It was posted on an internet site often used by al-Qaeda and other militant groups. It continued: "The Pope in the Vatican turns in the orbit of Bush. His remarks form part of the mobilisation for a crusade announced by Bush, to raise the morale of the crusader armies."

Two other armed groups in Iraq, Jaish al-Mujahedeen (the Mujahedeen’s Army) and Asaeb al-Iraq al-Jihadiya (League of Jihadists in Iraq), have already threatened the Vatican with reprisals in statements posted on Islamist internet websites.

Another militant group in Iraq, Ansar al-Sunnah, today also vowed to fight Christians in retaliation.

"You will only see our swords until you go back to God’s true faith Islam," it said in a separate statement, which called the Pope "Satan’s hellhound in the Vatican", saying he was "proud today of his hatred towards Muslims".

"The day is coming when the armies of Islam will destroy the ramparts of Rome," it added in the statement addressed to "Crusaders".

The Pope's use of an obscure medieval quotation, without making it clear that he did not agreed with its contents, has outraged Muslims and triggered protests and even attacks on churches in several Arab towns.

Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said today that the pontiff's remarks were the latest "links in the chain" of a US-Israeli conspiracy aimed at creating conflict between religions.

Gholam Hossein Elham, a Tehran government spokesman, said that the Pope had to do more to make amends. "(His) explanations were necessary but not sufficient. He needs to say more clearly that what he said was an error and correct it," he added.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Sunni Muslim, said on al-Jazeera television that he considered the Pope had not apologised yesterday.

Speaking in the name of the "world union of scholars of Islam", Mr al-Qaradawi called on Muslims to hold a day of "peaceful anger" on Friday, the last day of collective prayer before the start of Ramadan. He said this should involve "demonstrations, or sit-ins in the large mosques in the hour following the prayers."

The head of the Islamic Association of China said Benedict had "gravely hurt" their feelings of Muslims, who would voice their "anger and condemnation".

Scores of Indonesians marched through the streets of Jakarta today, some accusing the Pope of fuelling a holy war.

In Indian Kashmir, shops, businesses and schools remained shut in response to a strike call by Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who heads the hardline faction of All Parties Hurriyat Conference, the region’s main separatist alliance.

He rejected the Pope's apology and called for demonstrations to continue. People burnt tyres and shouted "Down with the pope" in several small protests.

Hundreds of angry demonstrators burned an effigy of the Pope in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, saying his remarks had insulted Islam and called for him to be tried by an international court.

There were, however, some signs of relenting. Mohammed Habib, a senior member of Egypt’s opposition Muslim Brotherhood, told AFP they considered the apology a retraction of the pope’s statement.

In India, the powerful All India Muslim Personal Law Board based in the northern city of Lucknow called for an end to protests against the Vatican.

Indonesia’s religious affairs minister and the two largest Islamic organizations, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, said it was time to move on. "We understand the anger and disappointment of Muslims," Religious Minister Maftuh Basyuni said. "But the Pope has apologised, and as Muslims we have to forgive and forget."

Hasyim Muzadi, the leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, agreed. "The apology has already been conveyed, that is enough," he said. "If we continue to be angry, then people will think the Pope was right."

The Vatican meanwhile has launched a diplomatic offensive to explain to Muslim countries the pope’s position on Islam.

Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, told Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper that Vatican ambassadors had been asked to explain to political and religious authorities in Muslim countries the full text of the Pope’s speech, which heretofore had been taken out of context and "heavily manipulated".

In Britain the Archbishop of Canterbury urged calm over the Pope’s remarks and said they needed to be judged against his entire record, where he had spoken very positively about inter-faith dialogue.

The Very Rev Dr Rowan Williams, the head of the worldwide Anglican church, said: "There are elements in Islam that can be used to justify violence, just as there are in Christianity and Judaism."

President Jacques Chirac appeared more critical of the Pope as he warned against "anything that increases tensions between peoples or religions", in an interview on Europe 1 radio.

"We must avoid any confusion between Islam, which is of course a respected and respectable religion, and radical Islamism which is a totally different form of behaviour and which is of a political nature," he said.

The Pope's Full Speech

2006-09-16T11:31:00.000-07:00

The Pope's full speech ... Meeting with the representatives of science at the University of Regensburg ... It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium. I think back to those years when, after a pleasant period at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching at the University of Bonn. That was in 1959, in the days of the old university made up of ordinary professors. The various chairs had neither assistants nor secretaries, but in recompense there was much direct contact with students and in particular among the professors themselves. We would meet before and after lessons in the rooms of the teaching staff. There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a dies academicus, when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of universitas - something that you too, Magnificent Rector, just mentioned - the experience, in other words, of the fact that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason - this reality became a lived experience. The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the "whole" of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole.

This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between - as they were called - three "Laws" or "rules of life": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur'an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole - which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason", I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation (*4V8,>4H - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (F×< 8`(T) is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the 8`(@H". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, F×< 8`(T, with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be interpreted as a "distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.

In point of fact, this rapprochement had been going on for some time. The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and simply declares "I am", already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates' attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy. Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: "I am". This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Ps 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act "with logos" is contrary to God's nature.

In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul - "8@(46¬ 8"JD,\"", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).

This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history - it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.

The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity - a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.

Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.

The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative. When I was a student, and in the early years of my teaching, this programme was highly influential in Catholic theology too. It took as its point of departure Pascal's distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In my inaugural lecture at Bonn in 1959, I tried to address the issue, and I do not intend to repeat here what I said on that occasion, but I would like to describe at least briefly what was new about this second stage of dehellenization. Harnack's central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. Fundamentally, Harnack's goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ's divinity and the triune God. In this sense, historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament, as he saw it, restored to theology its place within the university: theology, for Harnack, is something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific. What it is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and consequently it can take its rightful place within the university. Behind this thinking lies the modern self-limitation of reason, classically expressed in Kant's "Critiques", but in the meantime further radicalized by the impact of the natural sciences. This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology. On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature's capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield ultimate certainty. The weight between the two poles can, depending on the circumstances, shift from one side to the other. As strongly positivistic a thinker as J. Monod has declared himself a convinced Platonist/Cartesian.

This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.
I will return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain theology's claim to be "scientific" would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say more: if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by "science", so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.

Before I draw the conclusions to which all this has been leading, I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.

And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is - as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector - the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought - to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: "It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss". The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

Muslim Anger Over Papal Comments Grows

2006-09-15T21:34:00.001-07:00

From the New York Times ... Muslim Anger Over Papal Comments Grows. In full ...

Pakistan's legislature unanimously condemned Pope Benedict XVI. Lebanon's top Shiite cleric demanded an apology. And in Turkey, the ruling party likened the pontiff to Hitler and Mussolini and accused him of reviving the mentality of the Crusades.

Across the Islamic world Friday, Benedict's remarks on Islam and jihad in a speech in Germany unleashed a torrent of rage that many fear could burst into violent protests like those that followed publication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.

By citing an obscure Medieval text that characterizes some of the teachings of Islam's founder as ''evil and inhuman,'' Benedict inflamed Muslim passions and aggravated fears of a new outbreak of anti-Western protests.

The last outpouring of Islamic anger at the West came in February over the prophet cartoons first published in a Danish newspaper. The drawings sparked protests -- some of them deadly -- in almost every Muslim nation in the world.

Some experts said the perceived provocation by the spiritual leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics could leave even deeper scars.

''The declarations from the pope are more dangerous than the cartoons, because they come from the most important Christian authority in the world -- the cartoons just came from an artist,'' said Diaa Rashwan, an analyst in Cairo, Egypt, who studies Islamic militancy.

On Friday, Pakistan's parliament adopted a resolution condemning Benedict for making what it called ''derogatory'' comments about Islam, and seeking an apology. Hours later, the Pakistani Foreign Ministry summoned the Vatican's ambassador to express regret over the pope's remarks Tuesday.

Notably, the strongest denunciations came from Turkey -- a moderate democracy seeking European Union membership where Benedict is scheduled to visit in November as his first trip as pope to a Muslim country.

Salih Kapusuz, deputy leader of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Islamic-rooted party, said Benedict's remarks were either ''the result of pitiful ignorance'' about Islam and its prophet or, worse, a deliberate distortion.

''He has a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the Middle Ages. He is a poor thing that has not benefited from the spirit of reform in the Christian world,'' Kapusuz told Turkish state media. ''It looks like an effort to revive the mentality of the Crusades.''

''Benedict, the author of such unfortunate and insolent remarks, is going down in history for his words,'' Kapusuz added. ''He is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini.''

Even Turkey's staunchly pro-secular opposition party demanded the pope apologize before his visit. Another party led a demonstration outside Ankara's largest mosque, and a group of about 50 people placed a black wreath outside the Vatican's diplomatic mission.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said the pope should explain and ''tell us what exactly did he mean. ... It can't just be left like that.''

Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi has tried to defuse anger, saying the pope did not intend to offend Muslim sensibilities and insisting Benedict respects Islam. In Pakistan, the Vatican envoy voiced regret at ''the hurt caused to Muslims.''

But Muslim leaders said outreach efforts by papal emissaries were not enough.

''We do not accept the apology through Vatican channels ... and ask him (Benedict) to offer a personal apology -- not through his officials,'' Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon's most senior Shiite cleric, told worshippers in Beirut.

Rashwan, the analyst, feared the official condemnations could be followed by widespread popular protests. Already there had been scattered demonstrations in several Muslim countries.

''What we have right now are public reactions to the pope's comments from political and religious figures, but I'm not optimistic concerning the reaction from the general public, especially since we have no correction from the Vatican,'' Rashwan said.

About 2,000 Palestinians angrily protested Friday night in Gaza City. Earlier, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, of the Islamic militant group Hamas, said the pope had offended Muslims everywhere.

In Cairo, some 100 demonstrators stood outside the al-Azhar mosque chanting: ''Oh Crusaders, oh cowards! Down with the pope!''

The pope quoted from a book recounting a conversation between 14th-century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and a Persian scholar on the truths of Christianity and Islam.

''The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war,'' Benedict said. ''He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'''

The pope did not explicitly agree with nor repudiate the comment.

In Britain, the head of the Muslim Council, a body representing 400 Muslim groups, said the emperor's views quoted by the pope were bigoted.

''One would expect a religious leader such as the pope to act and speak with responsibility and repudiate the Byzantine emperor's views in the interests of truth and harmonious relations between the followers of Islam and Catholicism,'' said Muhammad Abdul Bari, the council's secretary-general.

Many Muslims accused Benedict of seeking to promote Judeo-Christian dominance over Islam.

Even Iraq's often divided Shiite and Sunni Arabs found unity in their anger over the remarks, with clerics from both communities criticizing Benedict.

''The pope and Vatican proved to be Zionists and that they are far from Christianity, which does not differ from Islam. Both religions call for forgiveness, love and brotherhood,'' Shiite cleric Sheik Abdul-Kareem al-Ghazi said during a sermon in Iraq's second-largest city, Basra.

Few in Turkey, especially, failed to pick up on Benedict's reference to Istanbul as Constantinople -- the city's name more than 500 years ago -- before it was conquered by Muslim Ottoman Turks.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended the German-born pope, saying his message had been misunderstood.

''It is an invitation to dialogue between religions and the pope has explicitly urged this dialogue, which I also endorse and see as urgently necessary,'' she said Friday. ''What Benedict XVI makes clear is a decisive and uncompromising rejection of any use of violence in the name of religion.''

In the United States, a Muslim group, the Council for American-Islamic Relations, asked for a meeting with a Vatican representative and urged more efforts at improving understanding between Muslims and Catholics.

''The proper response to the pope's inaccurate and divisive remarks is for Muslims and Catholics worldwide to increase dialogue and outreach efforts aimed at building better relations between Christianity and Islam,'' the group said.

The Pro-Life Generation?

2006-09-03T19:40:00.000-07:00

From Townhall.com ... The pro-life generation? In full ...

One day last January, Jonathan Tonkowich was sitting in math class at Thomas Aquinas College in southern California, daydreaming about how to do something constructive for the pro-life cause. What he came up with was Wash for Life (www.washforlife.org), which will make its debut on Sept. 16.

His idea: Local pro-life youth groups in all 50 states will help raise money for the local crisis-pregnancy centers. The Wash for Lifers already have over 137 groups in 35 states set to wash cars that Saturday morning. "Car washes are the classic way that youth groups raise money for anything," Jon tells me. "It made sense to make it a national day with thousands of youth participating so that youth would get excited, and we could make it into a story that tells that this generation is pro-life."

Is he right? Is his generation pro-life? It could be trending in that direction. In 2004, UCLA's annual poll of U.S. college freshmen found student support for legal abortion at its lowest level (54 percent) since the poll began in 1977. "Glamour" magazine last year noted the "mysterious disappearance of young pro-choice women," pointing to a 2003 CBS/New York Times poll that found only 35 percent of women 18-29 responded that "abortion should be available to anyone who wants it"; in 1993, it had been 50 percent.

"Unbelievably shocking," said Alexander Sanger, head of Planned Parenthood. "Isn't it obvious that young women have to be at the forefront of fighting for their reproductive rights because they're the ones who need them?" It's certainly not obvious to Ingrid Mitchell, who works with Tonkowich on Wash for Life, "I worked for a shelter for unwed mothers for a summer and got to experience the courage these women have, and how much they need support and strength. These centers deserve to be recognized for the amazing help they give to women every day."

Wash for Life brings some much-needed positive attention to the work the crisis-pregnancy centers (CPCs) do, in reaching out to women -- and girls -- who may have no other support. CPCs tend to be full of unnoticed heroes -- brave women and the staff and volunteers who help them get what they need to mother their children.

I get the same encouraging vibe from another young woman, Danielle Huntley, a law student at Boston College. Huntley, president of Students for Life of America, says, "The Wash for Life idea is excellent, because it creates an event that young pro-lifers can nationally unite around. College students are particularly interested in working with CPCs because they see it as a concrete way that they can live out their pro-life convictions. I think many students also view it as a resource that more women on campus need to know about, because CPCs provide the resources -- emotional, spiritual and material -- that women do not receive from their campus health services."

There's no doubt these kids get the life part of "pro-life." They're passionate about saving specific lives. Kristin Hansen, spokeswoman for Care-Net, a coalition of crisis-pregnancy centers whose database Wash for Life has used as a starting ground for making connections, says that in her experience young men and women like Tonkowich and Ingrid are more the rule than the exception: "We are seeing more young pro-lifers move in a similar direction as Wash for Life, with a desire to directly help the woman in need -- and do more than march."

This Sept. 16, young Americans will be getting their hands dirty. No aborted-fetus placards, no empty rhetoric; just good old-fashioned neighborly support for a member of the community. And when you ask them why they're raising their rags to your windows, you might be as impressed and encouraged as I am. Almost 34 years after Roe, we might be getting somewhere -- at least if these kids have anything to say about it.

Hizballah Trains Children to Be Martyrs, Egyptian Paper Says

2006-09-03T19:32:00.001-07:00

From Crosswalk.com ... Hizballah Trains Children to Be Martyrs, Egyptian Paper Says. In full ...

If you're worried about what your kids might be doing at their scout meetings, consider this: Hizballah is training children as young as 10 years old in its affiliated scouts program to become martyrs, according to a report in an Egyptian newspaper.

Hizballah has recruited more than 2,000 children 10-15 years of age to form armed militias. Before the recent Israeli-Hizballah war, they appeared only in the annual Jerusalem Day celebrations. Since then, they are being called "martyrs," the Egyptian weekly Ros Al-Yusuf reported in its Aug. 18 edition.

The Middle East Media Research Institute provided a translation of the article on Thursday.

Roz Al-Yusuf is a well-respected, independent Egyptian paper. Considered an intellectual publication, it opposes the radical Muslim brotherhood in Egypt, as well as all other Islamic fundamentalist groups in the Middle East, one source said.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has acted decisively and some would say brutally in the past against Islamic fundamentalism in his country

The "investigative article" by Mirfat Al-Hakim was accompanied by several pictures, including one of a number of children dressed in military fatigues, standing in military formation and holding what appeared to be real automatic weapons.

"Hizballah has customarily recruited youths and children and trained them to fight from a very early age. These are children barely 10 years old, who wear camouflage uniforms, cover their faces with black [camouflage] paint, swear to wage jihad [holy war] and join the Mahdi Scouts [youth organization]," the paper reported.

"The children are selected by Hizballah recruitment [officers] based on one criterion only: They must be willing to become martyrs," it said.

The children are educated by the Hizballah-affiliated Mahdi Scouts organization on the basic principles of Shi'ite Muslim and Hizballah ideology. The first lesson is about the "disappearance of Israel," the article said.

Quoting from the Mahdi Scouts website (which according to MEMRI is no longer operative), the paper said that 1,491 scouts had undergone training by the end of 2004, and 120 of its members have been ready to become "martyrs."

In its recent foray into southern Lebanon, Israeli troops confiscated material from a Hizballah-affiliated charity used to raise funds for the group, including a kit to be used to indoctrinate children on the ideology of Hizballah, the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center reported.

Hizballah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallh's deputy, Na'im Qasim, was quoted in the Egyptian article extolling the virtues of child martyrdom.

"A nation with child martyrs will be victorious, no matter what difficulties lie in its path," he reportedly said in a radio interview.

According to the paper, the organization aims to train a generation of "exemplary" Muslims based on the principles of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, who are supposed to prepare the way for the coming of the Shi'ite messiah.

Hizballah's patron, Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, believes he is to usher in the coming of this messiah, experts say.

Evangelicals Intensify Calls for Parents to Pull Kids from Public Schools

2006-09-03T13:47:00.000-07:00

From USA Today ... Evangelicals intensify calls for parents to pull kids from public schools.

Public schools take a lot of criticism, but a growing, loosely organized movement is now moving from harsh words to action — with parents taking their own children out of public schools and exhorting other families to do the same.
Led mainly by evangelical Christians, the movement depicts public education as hostile to religious faith and claims to be behind a surge in the number of students being schooled at home.

"The courts say no creationism, no prayer in public schools," said Roger Moran, a Winfield, Mo., businessman and member of the Southern Baptist Convention executive committee. "Humanism and evolution can be taught, but everything I believe is disallowed."

The father of nine homeschooled children, Moran co-sponsored a resolution at the Southern Baptists' annual meeting in June that urged the denomination to endorse a public school pullout. It failed, as did a similar proposal before the conservative Presbyterian Church in America for members to shift their children into homeschooling or private Christian schools.

Still, the movement is very much alive, led by such groups as Exodus Mandate and the Alliance for Separation of School and State. One new campaign aims to monitor public schools for what conservatives see as pro-gay curriculum and programs; another initiative seeks to draw an additional 1 million children into homeschooling by encouraging parents already experienced at it to mentor families wanting to try it.

"Homeschoolers avoid harmful school environments where God is mocked, where destructive peer influence is the norm, where drugs, alcohol, promiscuity and homosexuality are promoted," says the California-based Considering Homeschooling Ministry.

Though the movement's rhetoric strikes public school supporters as extreme, some of its leaders are influential. They include R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who last year said the denomination needed an "exit strategy" from public schools, and the Rev. D. James Kennedy, pastor of 10,000-member Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale and host of a nationally broadcast religious program.

"The infusion of an atheistic, amoral, evolutionary, socialistic, one-world, anti-American system of education in our public schools has indeed become such that if it had been done by an enemy, it would be considered an act of war," Kennedy said in a recent commentary.

Overall, public schools are in no danger of withering away. The latest federal figures, from 2005, show their total K-12 enrollment at 48.4 million, compared to 6.3 million in private schools — most of them religious.

However, the National Center for Education Statistics said private school enrollment has grown at a faster rate than public schools since 1989, and it expects that trend to continue through 2014. Moreover, the private school figures don't include the growing ranks of homeschoolers — there were at least 1.1 million of them in 2003, according to federal figures, and perhaps more than 2 million now, according to homeschool advocates.

According to a federal survey, 72% of homeschooling parents say one of their primary motivations is to provide stronger moral and religious instruction.

The president of the largest teachers' union, Reg Weaver of the National Education Association, says public school critics use increasingly harsh language, "but they're not as successful as they'd like to pretend."

"The overwhelming majority of our folks," Weaver said of his union members, "are not being pulled off the agenda of great public schools for all children."

Charles Haynes of the First Amendment Center, a non-partisan civil liberties group, said public education leaders should work harder to convince parents they aren't against religion by encouraging non-sectarian teaching about the Bible and the formation of student religious clubs.

"School leaders know they're facing the perception that public education has somehow become hostile to religion," Haynes said. "They understand there's no time to be lost."

Some districts have moved proactively to address parents' concerns, he said, "but many more have put their heads in the sand over this, afraid of controversy or litigation."

Haynes says public school critics have gained an audience with shrewd Internet-based communication tactics, quickly spreading anecdotes — real or exaggerated — of incidents perceived as anti-religious or too approving of homosexuality and teen sexual freedom.

For example, word spread among conservatives last year that school officials in the Dallas suburb of Plano had banned students from wearing red and green because the colors represented Christmas. The district sent e-mails to parents denying the "false rumor."

"Parents all over the country get the few bad stories and believe this is what public schools are all about," Haynes said.

Enrollment at conservative Christian schools is overwhelmingly white, as are the ranks of homeschoolers, but faith-based disenchantment with public schools transcends racial boundaries.

Joyce and Eric Burges of Baker, La., founded an association seeking to encourage more black families to follow them into homeschooling.

"African-American children have been beat up so bad in public schools — more parents are looking at the Christian alternative," said Joyce Burges.

Black or white, parents can be financially challenged by a move away from public schools.

Tim Sierer, headmaster of a Christian academy in Brookhaven, Pa., helped launch a website in March — DiscoverChristianSchools.com — to assist parents considering the switch.

"It's not a decision to take lightly," said Sierer, noting that Christian school tuitions in his region range up to $10,000.

Some activists say the financial challenges can be overcome with creativity.

Houston lawyer Bruce Shortt, author of "The Harsh Truth About Public Schools," says some homeschooling parents are forming co-ops to pool their resources. Evangelical churches should offer space for such programs, he says, perhaps with a computer-based component in which students are taught online by accredited teachers.

"There are many new models evolving for Christian education," said Shortt, who homeschools his three sons. "We need to create a new school system, not supported by tax dollars but public in the sense that it's open to anyone."

The head of Christian Educators Association International, which represents devout teachers in public and private schools, urges parents to reflect carefully on their choices. "One size does not fit all," says Finn Laursen, arguing that public, private and at-home education all might be good options.

"Don't just hammer public schools," Laursen said. "Go in there and take them back."

However, Mohler, the Southern Baptist seminary president, says court rulings and government mandates have sharply limited the ability of parents and local school boards to control public education.

It's become a "new normal" for younger parents to consider alternatives, he said. "It's a very different assumption from their parents' generation."

Yet even as he urges an "exit strategy," Mohler says there will be a cost to America if the call is widely heeded.

"One of the great missions of the public schools was to bring together children of divergent backgrounds — I benefited from that," he said. "There is a loss in this."

Pinocchio and Friends Converted to Islam

2006-09-01T15:35:00.000-07:00

From the Telegraph UK ... Pinocchio and friends converted to Islam. In full ...

Pinocchio, Tom Sawyer and other characters have been converted to Islam in new versions of 100 classic stories on the Turkish school curriculum.

"Give me some bread, for Allah's sake," Pinocchio says to Geppetto, his maker, in a book stamped with the crest of the ministry of education.

"Thanks be to Allah," the puppet says later.

In The Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan is told that he cannot visit Aramis. The reason would surprise the author, Alexandre Dumas.

An old woman explains: "He is surrounded by men of religion. He converted to Islam after his illness."

Tom Sawyer may always have shirked his homework, but he is more conscientious in learning his Islamic prayers. He is given a "special treat" for learning the Arabic words.

Pollyanna, seen by some as the embodiment of Christian forgiveness, says that she believes in the end of the world as predicted in the Koran.

Heidi, the Swiss orphan girl in the tale by Johanna Spyri, is told that praying to Allah will help her to relax.

Several more books have been altered, including La Fontaine's fables and Victor Hugo's Les Miserables.

The clumsy insertions by Islamic publishing houses have caused controversy in Turkey, which has been a strongly secular state since the 1920s.

Other books contain insults, slang and rude rhymes which mock the president and the prime minister.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is Turkey's first Islamic premier, has called for swift action to be taken against the publishers.

The education ministry has threatened to take legal action against any publisher which continues to issue such books.

Huseyin Celik, the education minister, said: "If there are slang and swear words, we will sue them for using the ministry logo."

Kiev Schools to Teach Christianity

2006-09-01T15:30:00.000-07:00

From the Moscow Times ... Kiev Schools to Teach Christianity. In full ...

Some public schools in the Ukrainian capital will begin teaching Christian ethics this year in an experimental program aimed at reinforcing the country's thousand-year Christian heritage, Kiev city officials said Thursday.

The course, titled "Christian Ethics in Ukrainian Culture: The Path of Good," raised concern among Kiev's minority Jewish population, and among state education officials, who called its introduction premature.

The class for 6-year-olds will be launched in 100 of Kiev's 527 schools, reaching about 6,000 pupils. Any parent can choose to have a child opt out of the lessons. Next year, city officials aim to have the lessons reach all of the capital's 21,100 first-grade students.

Ukraine, which is predominantly Orthodox Christian, has flirted before with the idea of introducing a religion-based ethics class, but earlier plans ran into opposition from the country's Jews and Muslims. This latest project also sparked some concerns, but the Kiev city administration -- headed by a mayor who once sent a Bible to every Ukrainian lawmaker -- has vowed to go ahead. "There is a path of good and a path of evil, and wherever God acts, the devil also appears," Deputy Mayor Vitaliy Zhuravsky said. "Whoever opposes introducing Christian ethics -- for me, that's devilry."

Ilya Levitas, president of Jewish Council of Ukraine, called it a "very one-sided approach." He noted that Ukraine has numerous other religions, including Judaism and Islam, and also questioned whether the class would have any impact. "If you want to foster belief, you should take children to church," he said.

Kiev officials said the class, built around a textbook written by an Orthodox priest, could help give students a moral base. The titles of the lessons include "The Church is God's Home" and "Resurrection: Victory of Good over Evil." There are also lessons focused on Ukrainian cultural figures and Ukrainian history.

"The goal is to foster moral behavior, spiritual values and a love for the homeland," said Father Bohdan Ogulchansky, author of the textbook.

Ukraine's education minister, Stanislav Nikolayenko, suggested this week that the city government should hold off on the classes, warning that "ill-prepared activity could destroy a good idea."

Zhuravsky disagreed. "We need to act now," he said, and referred to the growing problems of drug abuse and alcoholism among Ukrainian youth. He said that, despite the education ministry's protests, the city administration was prepared to go ahead, noting it was the city that funded the capital's schools.

"Ukraine is a Christian nation, and Christian ethics are part of our culture," he said. Some 97 percent of Ukraine's registered religious communities are Christian, about half of them Orthodox. Protestant churches have a small presence but have been attracting worshippers rapidly. Jews make up about 1 percent of the population.

The Religion of Peace -- at Gunpoint

2006-09-01T12:22:00.000-07:00

From Kathleen Parker over at TownHall.com ... The religion of peace -- at gunpoint. In full ...

"... disbelievers will be cast into an eternal fire. But Allah is also ever merciful, and the West can change its ways and turn to the purifying power of Islam ..." -- Kidnapped Fox reporter Steve ``Khaled'' Centanni, channeling his captors.

We don't often get to watch our media people convert to Islam, so the footage of Fox News' Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig has been riveting.

Some people can't get enough of watching planes fly into the World Trade Center towers; I can't get enough of Centanni and Wiig pledging allegiance to Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him.

The common thread between the two is disbelief. I keep rerunning the tapes, now posted on the Web, trying to read the kidnapped men's body language and translate the meaning of deep breaths and eye movements.

Trying, alas, to imagine being in their place.

As everyone knows, reporter Centanni and cameraman Wiig were released several days ago after being seized in Gaza City by masked gunmen and held hostage for 13 days.

It's not clear exactly who their kidnappers were, whether part of the Holy Jihad Brigades, as claimed, or whether they had ties to Hamas or the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah.

You need a scorecard to keep up with all the region's disaffected. Apparently, when three or more angry Muslims gather in a garage, a new jihadist group is born.

What's perfectly clear is that video is the new weapon of mass destruction. A billion people manipulated into religious frenzy is a formidable force. It is also clear that the West's continued existence -- at least from the perspective of Islamist militants -- depends upon our willingness to bow to Islam.

Those two conclusions are made possible by the images of Centanni and Wiig holding up an index finger and proclaiming allegiance to the Prophet Muhammad.

Says Centanni: ``My name is Steve. I'm an American. After I entered Islam, I changed my name to Khaled. I have embraced Islam and say the word Allah, and my leader is the Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Upon Him.''

Wiig -- new name ``Ya'aqob'' -- repeats the liturgy.

Then the two men proceed to read a script outlining all the reasons why the West is wrong -- from invading Afghanistan and Iraq to the tortures of Abu Ghraib. They also ask that all prisoners be released from Guantanamo and that President Bush cease referring to Islamic fascists as ``Islamic fascists.''

It's not nice, and it makes the kidnappers mad.

``Yeah, they were very angry about that,'' said Wiig in an interview after his release.

In his role as Khaled, Centanni said he hoped to help Westerners see the light of Islam, which ``helps people to love mercy, brotherhood, equality and justice.'' Especially -- we can't help filling in for him -- when a gun is pointed at one's head. Or a knife poised at one's throat.

One of Wiig's interrogators, a dark figure framed by two AK-47s and with a bayonet at his feet, provided a grim reminder that death is always an option for uncooperative infidels. Thus, the journalists did what they thought necessary to survive.

Obviously, none of us can imagine what we'd do under similar circumstances. Yet despite our empathy and relief at the men's release, there is nevertheless something about that video -- of seeing those two decent, open-hearted Western men surrendering to these lowlife fanatics -- that makes me want to take a shower.

How dare those thugs lecture Westerners about the loveliness of Islam while forcing religious conversion at gunpoint?

Their objective was clear from the beginning, according to Centanni and Wiig. They wanted a video. The two Fox journalists were far more valuable shown as cowardly Westerners converting to Islam than as severed heads on the tip of a dull knife.

Let me be clear: I don't think they were cowards. But those who are willing to strap explosives to their bodies -- or enlist their children to become suicide bombers -- surely see them, and us, that way. It is easy to imagine that rancorous Muslims are as attuned to the video as we are, watching replay after replay in the smug satisfaction that they have scored another victory against the infidel and the Great Satan. Those few minutes of choreographed horror affirm for the Islamic world that Westerners are weak, while they reiterate the jihadist's message to the West:

Convert to Islam -- or die.

Lest We Forget, Part XXV

2006-09-01T12:09:00.000-07:00

From the Voice of the Martyrs blog ... Pakistani Christian Teen Barely Escapes Death at the Hands of Her Own Family. In full ...

The following news was published on Crosswalk.com in today's religious news summaries.

"Diana grew up in a strict Islamic family in Pakistan. According to Voice of the Martyrs, her life was pretty typical until she met a girl named Mary who was a Christian. Now Diana is also a Christian and on the run. When Diana's family learned that she had become a Christian, they repeatedly beat her and insisted she return to Islam. But Diana refused. She was then forced to a local canal where her uncle put a pistol to her head and gave her one last chance to return to Islam. Diana replied, "You can kill me if you want. I will not leave Christ." It was then that Diana's uncle noticed an extremely poisonous black cobra swimming in the canal. Believing he could escape any prosecution for his niece's death, he threw her into the path of the cobra. He also knew she could not swim. Diana miraculously escaped from the canal and is in hiding today. She is a new Christian but has already learned what it means to suffer for Christ. She recently told The Voice of the Martyrs, "Jesus was crucified for us. Can we not endure some of the same for Him?"

Intimate Confessions Pour Out on Church’s Web Site

2006-09-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times ... Intimate Confessions Pour Out on Church’s Web Site. In full ...

On a Web site called mysecret.tv, there is the writer who was molested years ago by her baby sitter and who still cannot forgive herself for failing to protect her younger siblings from the same abuse.

There is the happy father, businessman and churchgoer who is having a sexual relationship with another man in his church. There is the young woman who shot an abusive boyfriend when she was high on methamphetamine.

Then there is this entry: “Years ago I asked my father, ‘How does a daddy justify selling his little girl?’ He replied, ‘I needed to pay the rent, put food on the table and I liked having a few coins to jangle in my pocket.’ ”

About a month ago, LifeChurch, an evangelical network with nine locations and based in Edmond, Okla., set up mysecret.tv as a forum for people to confess anonymously on the Internet.

The LifeChurch founder, the Rev. Craig Groeschel, said that after 16 years in the ministry he knew that the smiles and eager handshakes that greeted him each week often masked a lot of pain. But the accounts of anguish and guilt that have poured into mysecret.tv have stunned him, Mr. Groeschel said, and affirmed his belief in the need for confession.

“We confess to God for forgiveness but to each other for healing,” Mr. Groeschel said. “Secrets isolate you, and keep you away from God, from those people closest to you.”

LifeChurch, which is 10 years old, tries to draw back those who may have left the faith, Mr. Groeschel said. The church hews to a conservative theology on homosexuality and abortion.

Its nine sites, in Arizona, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, draw a total of 18,000 people to weekend services. LifeChurch also has a “virtual campus” online, and it relies on technology to bind together its “campuses” through endeavors like broadcast sermons.

Still, mysecret.tv represents the first time the church has had an interactive Web site tied to its sermons, in this case a series that Mr. Groeschel began last month on the need for confession.

“I can’t tell you how many hundreds of times people have told me that ‘I’m going to tell you something, Pastor, I’ve never told anyone before,’ ” Mr. Groeschel said. “I realized that people are carrying around dark secrets, and the Web site is giving them a first place for confession.”

The Internet already offers many places to confess, from the dry menu of sins at www.absolution-online.com to the raunchy exhibitionism at sites like www.confessionjunkie.com and www.grouphug.us. It is impossible to know whether these stories, like much on the Internet, are sincere or pure fiction.

One of the best-known sites is postsecret.blogspot.com, an extension of an art project in which people write their secrets on postcards and mail them to an address in Germantown, Md.

Mysecret.tv may be singular because it gives people at LifeChurch an easy opportunity to act on the sermons, said Scott L. Thumma, professor of the sociology of religion at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.

“It’s not what you typically expect when a pastor delivers his weekly sermon, and you hit the back door and forget what he said,” Professor Thumma said. “Here it takes on a life of its own, and the folks that are here are not just those who go to LifeChurch.”

Since its inception, mysecret.tv has received more than 150,000 hits and more than 1,500 confessions, Mr. Groeschel said. Absolution is not part of the bargain, just the beginning of release.

“There’s no magic in confessing on a Web site,” Mr. Groeschel said. “My biggest fear is that someone would think that and would go on with life. This is just Step 1.”

The confessions are often just a paragraph or two. Some are eloquent, almost literary. Others are long, rushed and without punctuation, as if the writer needed to get it all out in one breath.

The starkness of the tersest confessions is jolting: “I have verbally and physically abused my wife.”

Another, referring to a spouse, said: “I tell you I love you everyday. Truth is I do love you, but I’m not in love with you, and I never have been. I just don’t want to hurt you and feel worthless.”

Many women speak of their regrets over having had abortions.

Other writers say they cannot shake the recurring nightmare of being sexually abused as children. Most were abused by relatives, neighbors and friends. Some went on to abuse younger children in their families. They state simply how their parents often did nothing to help. A few wonder where God is in all this.

“When I was 7, I was sexually abused by a guy,” a girl wrote. “Then, when I was 13, my mum did the same thing to me. Now I am 16 and scared. My doctor put me in a mental home. Sometimes, I think where is Jesus and why’s he not helping me.”

Because the site is anonymous, the staff at LifeChurch cannot reach out to those who are in danger of harming themselves or others, Mr. Groeschel said.

Professor Thumma pointed out that the resources section of the site could be improved. It now lists mostly religious books rather than mental health services.

Perhaps the most important activity the Web site has is letting people know that they are not alone in their suffering, Professor Thumma said. It harkens to the now rare practice of “testimony time” at evangelical churches, he said, when “you could hear stories about people overcoming problems, stories of hope, so that you felt you weren’t the only one struggling.”

Among those changed by the confessions is Mr. Groeschel himself.

“Knowing that so many people I see every week on the outside look so normal, and yet inside there is so much pain, that has been surprising,” he said. “When you hear about it in their own words, it’s hard to bear.”

California Christians Urged to Yank Kids

2006-09-01T08:58:00.000-07:00

From WorldNetDaily ... California Christians urged to yank kids. In full ...

There would be "panic in the streets" if Christian parents in California decided that a state-mandated pro-homosexual environment no longer is for their children and took up homeschooling, one leader in education says.

"It would be a wakeup call, heard around the country or perhaps the world," Charles B. Lowers, the executive director of the pro-family Considering Homeschool organization told WorldNetDaily.

His comments came just a day after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill requiring even Christian colleges where students receive state grants to condone homosexuality, transsexuality and bisexuality.

Lowers said that should be over the top for any parent but especially Christian parents, who should pull their children from public school systems.

"'Heck no, our kids won't go!' should be the rallying cry of Christian parents this week as school starts, instead of following the broad road of perversion and destruction that California schools are offering," Lowers said.

Lowers said while Christians need to contact their representatives and the governor regarding that bill – and others that are pending in a legislature he describes as "sold-out" to the leftist, liberal agenda – the newest mandate from the state "should be the last straw."

"It is estimated that anywhere from 80-90 percent of Christians are still sending their children off to government schools – it's like the church is behaving like a bunch of lemmings," Lowers said.

"Worldview surveys show that the majority of kids from Christian homes are humanist by graduation," he said. "School-based 'clinics' are expanding … to ensure that your daughters get birth control and abortions without you knowing. Now that the homosexuals are dictating curriculum, 80-90 percent of Christians should be homeschooling, not the other way around," he said.

"Public school is no place for innocent little kids. If they don't get molested by the John Karrs who are in the system, their minds and hearts will be molested by the curriculum," he said.

"Instead of the traditional three R's in California's public schools, children are learning Rebelliousness, Relativism, and an R-rated lifestyle," he said.

Considering Homeschooling was started by Lowers and his wife in 2001, and it seeks to reach Christian parents with encouragement for their homeschooling ideas and guidance toward that activity.

"What our focus is, we are reaching out and recruiting Christian parents, especially Christian parents of very young children, babies, toddlers, preschoolers. They have the most to lose by sending their children to state schools," Lowers said.

"The educational establishment in America really has pulled the wool over most parents' eyes. Almost every parent teaches their child to speak English or whatever is their primary language. They've done the bulk of the teaching of the basics. But the establishment has put this aura around education and (says) only certified teachers should be teaching. Those teachers are less qualified than you to teach your children. You know them," he said.

He said in California, the public schools are controlled "by a group of elitist, leftist, homosexual socialists."

"Their agenda should not be the same agenda as Christian parents. We have really been putting it on the line here, saying to all Christians, 'How could you in good conscience, knowing what you know, now send your children to public school?'" he said.

According to the National Home Education Research Institute, homeschooling may be the fastest-growing form of education in the U.S., with growth rates of 7-12 percent per year. Estimates show there are about 2.5 million home-schooled children in the United States.

That saves taxpayers roughly $16 billion annually, studies say, while at the same time those students generally perform better on standardized tests and go to college at a higher rate than those from public schools.

Significantly for Christian parents, studies show that among homeschooled students, 94 believe in Jesus when they graduate, but only 15 percent from public schools do.

The NHERI noted that a survey of adults who were homeschooled showed 72 percent participating in ongoing community service such as coaching a sports team or volunteering at a school. The comparison for other U.S. adults was 39 percent.

Is Religion Making Us Fat?

2006-08-30T11:49:00.000-07:00

From the Chicago Sun-Times ... Is religion making us fat? This one almost made me spit out my Egg McMuffin ... with an Adam Ant reference, no less. Now I've got that song in my head. In full ...

Back in the decadent early 1980s, New Wave rocker Adam Ant mocked clean living in his maddeningly catchy song, "Goody Two Shoes."

"Don't drink, don't smoke, what do ya do?" Ant taunted.

A new Purdue University study may hold the answer to Ant's question.

If they don't drink and don't smoke, what do they do?

Eat, apparently.

"America is becoming known as a nation of gluttony and obesity, and churches are a feeding ground for this problem," says Ken Ferraro, a Purdue sociology professor who studied more than 2,500 adults over a span of eight years looking at the correlation between their religious behavior and their body mass index.

"If religious leaders and organizations neglect this issue, they will contribute to an epidemic that will cost the health-care system millions of dollars and reduce the quality of life for many parishioners," he says.

Casserole as sacrament

Ferraro's most recent study, published in the June issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, is a follow-up to a study he published in 1998, where he found there were more obese people in states with larger populations of folks claiming a religious affiliation than elsewhere -- particularly in states with the most Baptists.

So it's not surprising that Ferraro's latest study found that about 27 percent of Baptists, including Southern Baptists, North American Baptists, and Fundamentalist Baptist, were obese.

Surely there are several contributing factors to such a phenomenon, but when Ferraro accounted for geography (southern cooking is generally more high-caloric), race and even whether overweight folks were attracted to churches for moral support, the statistics still seem to indicate that some churches dispense love handles as well as the love of the Lord.

Having attended a Southern Baptist church for most of my formative years, I was hardly shocked by Ferraro's discoveries. From the coffee (and doughnuts) hour after Sunday-morning worship, to the huge potluck dinners and the Sunday-night ice-cream socials, there was always food around, and it was rarely the lo-cal variety. Ambrosia salad. Seventeen different kinds of chicken/broccoli/cheese casserole. Banana-and-Nilla-wafer-pudding. Fried chicken. Barbecue chicken. Sweet tea.

Those were the elements of our social sacraments at the Baptist church.

In religious traditions where drinking alcohol, smoking anything and even dancing are vices regularly preached against from the pulpit, overeating has become the "accepted vice," Ferraro says.

Or, as Homer Simpson so eloquently put it on his way to a First Church of Springfield picnic: "If God didn't want us to eat in church, he'd have made gluttony a sin."

'Overgrazing of the flock'

Food often is substituted for alcohol at Baptist and other conservative Protestant gatherings, Ferraro says. I once attended a wedding at a conservative Bible church where, instead of an open bar or champagne fountain, the bride and groom toasted their new beginning with a massive ice-cream sundae buffet.

I kid you not.

"Baptists may find food one of the few available sources of earthly pleasures," Ferraro says.

Exhibit A: The Rev. Jerry Falwell, Baptist king of the Christian right. Falwell has been accused (rightly) of being many things.

Chubby, for instance.

He may not drink or smoke, or think lusty liberal thoughts, but it looks like the good reverend has never met a plate of cheese grits he didn't love. And it may have cost him. Falwell, 73, was hospitalized last year for acute congestive heart failure. His hefty weight, doctors said at the time, wasn't helping matters.

"Baptist and fundamentalist Protestant leaders may want to consider interventions for the 'overgrazing of the flock,' " Ferraro says.

No Protestant dietary rules

While some megachurches have fitness facilities and long have offered exercise classes as well as Bible studies, in most congregations you're still more likely to find a bake sale than a spinning class on any given Sunday.

Ferraro's study also found that about 20 percent of "Fundamentalist Protestants," (Church of Christ, Pentecostal, Assemblies of God and Church of God); about 18 percent of "Pietistic Protestants," (Methodist, Christian Church and African Methodist Episcopal), and about 17 percent of Catholics were obese.

By contrast, about 1 percent of the Jewish population and less than 1 percent of other non-Christians, including Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others), were tipping the scales with commensurate gusto.

"In my mind, one of the distinctive things about Christianity, particularly American Protestant Christianity, is we don't have any [dietary] behavior codes," said Daniel Sack of Chicago, a historian and author of the 2000 book, Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture.

"Islam does, Judaism does, Catholicism does, but basically there's nothing scriptural and in most [Protestant] traditions as long as you don't drink, you're fine. Particularly in that Baptist cohort, that's the only real rule."

This is true. Even on the Sundays when we celebrated the "Lord's Supper," i.e., communion, we had thimble-sized cups of Welch's grape juice to go with our chunks of home-baked white bread. No Jesus juice allowed.

Often gathering around food

"Food plays an important social role in the life of a religious community, particularly in the Protestant tradition," said Sack, an ordained United Church of Christ minister. "In Judaism and Catholicism, [religious celebrations] are largely family-oriented and so they're home based. Typically Protestant food practices tend to be much more congregational."

And that might have a lot to do with how most Protestant congregations are formed. Increasingly they're not geographic. People will drive for miles to attend the church they like. Theologically speaking, this kind of community is called a "gathering congregation."

"A gathering congregation has to gather around something, and it's often around food," Sack says.

Perhaps, as Ferraro suggests, more churches might want to consider turning the fellowship hall into a gym, putting down the Krispy Kremes, and gathering instead around a plate of crudite before taking a brisk walk with the pastor after church.

Because, ya know, blessed are the weight watchers.

Ministry Leader Urges Christians to Pray for Islamic Terrorists

2006-08-28T18:05:00.000-07:00

From Agape Press ... Ministry Leader Urges Christians to Pray for Islamic Terrorists. In full ...

A Virginia-based ministry is trying to encourage Christians to pray for the salvation of Muslim terrorists. Truth for Muslims is an evangelical Christian group that has recently published a prayer guide to that effect.

The publication is called Islamic Terrorism and Muslim Terrorists: a Prayer Guide for Christians. The guide is written by John Marion, project director of Truth for Muslims, who says the recent arrest of Muslim terrorists in connection with a plot to blow up passenger airplanes over the Atlantic ocean has refocused the world's attention on terrorism.

Christians must combat terror with prayer and with boldness, Marion urges. "The Islamic terrorists want to throw Western society -- and, in our case, particularly, American society -- into fear and confusion," he says, "and it is in that context that they can move their agenda forward."

But that very context, the ministry leader contends, offers Christians a chance to demonstrate their faith to others, including the terrorists. "So as they try to instill fear and confusion," he says, "we as followers of Christ have an opportunity to just go before the Lord and ask that he would give us peace and wisdom."

Meanwhile, Marion notes, this situation also offers Christians a chance to demonstrate the love of Christ for all people. This is an opportunity, he says, even to "impact the lives of terrorists" by praying for their salvation, always remembering that, although the followers of radical Islam may seem faceless and far away, nevertheless, "they are real people."

Marion and his wife have lived in Afghanistan and have worked among Muslims in the United States since the early 1980s. He urges Christians to realize that their prayers can have an effect even on the hearts of terrorists halfway around the world.

"We can be here in America and pray for these people," the Truth for Muslims spokesman asserts. "We don't know many of them; some of them are hidden," he says, "and that's one of the concerns that we have as Americans -- who are the terrorists among us and what are their plans? Who are they, and how do we know them? But God knows them, and we can pray for them and impact their lives through a ministry of prayer."

Christians should not hesitate to pray for those behind terror plots targeting the United States and other nations in the free world, Marion says. After all, he points out, the Apostle Paul was an anti-Christian "terrorist" of sorts before his life was radically altered through a relationship with Christ.

Lest We Forget, Part XXIV

2006-08-28T18:03:00.000-07:00

From WorldNetDaily ... Christian convert faces death threats. In full ...

A Malaysian woman who was born a Muslim but converted to Christianity is learning the peril that comes with that decision in a Muslim-controlled society.

WND columnist Michelle Malkin is telling the story of the woman who was born Azlina binti Jailani but changed her name to Lina Joy and was baptized a Catholic in a Kuala Lumpur church.

It parallels in many ways the story of Adbul Rahman of Afghanistan, whose decision to choose Christianity netted him a death sentence, and only the intervention of the highest government authorities under international pressure provided his safety.

Lina Joy wants to marry a Christian man and start a family, but while she converted from Islam in 1990 and was baptized several years later, the government maintains her religious designation as Muslim on her identity card.

That's significant because if she does marry and have children, they could be taken from her under the Islamic religious law which does not allow parents who are "apostate," or in defiance of God, to raise children.

So she is asking the Malaysian government to stop classifying her a Muslim. She says the government has no right to tell her what she should believe.

Malkin noted that even Joy's legal advisor, Malik Imtiaz Sarwar, has faced death threats because of his defense of her case.

The Wall Street Journal yesterday summarized her plight:

"While Muslim-majority Malaysia is considered a largely moderate, modern society, renouncing one's Muslim faith still is considered both sinful and illegal by Islamic authorities – who have gained increasing sway of late. Ms. Joy's apostasy case, now before Malaysia's highest court of appeal, has inflamed public debate, divided the legal community … and threatens to set off political tremors in this Southeast Asian nation of 25 million people."

The circumstance is that before the civil government, which is heavily controlled by Islamic belief, can remove the Muslim designation, it says Joy first must get a decision of the Islamic religious court, a parallel court system in Malaysia, declaring her "apostate."

She is resisting that, because that conclusion would provide the same result for her: a government standing by to take any children she might have.

The court ruling is expected in the coming weeks.

"We are at a crossroad, whether we go down the line of secular constitutionalism or whether that constitution will now be read subject to religious requirement," Benjamin Dawson, one of Joy's lawyers, told the Journal.

A previous court opinion in her case said as long as she is ethnic Malay, she is Muslim, even though the civil constitution in Malaysia guarantees freedom of religion. The court's opinion said that was not freedom of "choice" but a freedom to practice Islam.

A number of groups working with persecuted Christians around the world have noted the loss of right to marry, the loss of the right to work, illegal imprisonment and even torture of Christians, especially those who choose to leave Islam.

An Islamic scholar, Malkin reported, told the Journal why Muslims cannot leave Islam.

"If Islam were to grant permission for Muslims to change religion at will, it would imply it has no dignity, no self-esteem," said Wan Azhar Wan Ahmad, of Malaysia's Institute of Islamic Understanding.

"And then people may question its completeness, truthfulness and perfection," he said.

"Got that?" wrote Malkin. "It's a Religion of Peace of those who submit, and a Religion of Pieces for those who even dare think of leaving."

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty said the court hearing will focus on whether she does, in fact, need that religious court declaration that she is apostate before the civil court can move.

The Becket Fund said the government's refusal violates customary international law protecting freedom of conscience as expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

It also violates the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, to which Malaysia is legally bound, the Becket Fund said.

The earlier case involving Rahman, who now chooses to be identified as Joel, did have a happy conclusion.

As WND reported, he reached Italy where he was granted asylum after he had been charged with the death sentence under Afghanistan's Islamic law.

International pressure was credited with having prompted Afghan President Hamid Karzai to intervene.

Rahman, or Joel, reportedly converted to Christianity 16 years ago in Germany while working with an international Christian organization. He was charged with crimes carrying the death penalty after he was seen holding a Bible in Afghanistan.

For 56 Years, Battling Evils of Hollywood With Prayer

2006-08-28T17:44:00.000-07:00

Now I've got that old Misfits song, Hollywood Babylon, in my head. From the New York Times ... For 56 Years, Battling Evils of Hollywood With Prayer. In full ...

Sister Mary Pia, wearing a threadbare habit, spoke from behind the bars of her gated parlor about the boundless power of prayer.

“Hollywood is the Babylon of the U.S.A.,” she said. “For people who need prayers, we have to be here.”

Just two long blocks from her monastery, you are in the thick of the electric lights of Hollywood Boulevard: among the dopers, the runaways, the surgically augmented, the homeless, the sex salesmen.

Sister Mary Pia, as pale and innocent as an uncooked loaf, prays for all of them, while knowing virtually nothing about them. There is nothing ironic about this, she believes: “One doesn’t need to be of it to know of it.”

Indeed, in her 56 years at the Monastery of the Angels, she has ventured out no more than a few dozen times to attend religious retreats or make preparations for dying loved ones. Rarely has she set a shoe onto the stained sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard.

Yet the signs of iniquity are everywhere. Police helicopters routinely hover over the cloister. There is the dull roar of the Hollywood Freeway. The head of the monastery’s statue of St. Martin de Porres has been stolen twice. Neighbors recently complained so loudly about the belfry’s morning chimes to prayer that the authorities forced the peals silent.

“I think we pricked their conscience,” she said of the neighbors. “Is 7 o’clock too early to get up?”

Sister Mary Pia is one of 21 Dominican nuns cloistered in this walled complex of stucco and steel. From a distance, the place looks more like a loading dock than a religious retreat.

They do no missionary work here, canvass no alleys, cook in no soup kitchen. Prayer is the occupation. Until recently there were 23 nuns, but Sister Mary the Pure Heart and Sister Mary Rose were sent to a convalescent home because there were not enough youthful and vigorous nuns to care for them.

The sisterhood is a dying way of life in America. Forty years ago, the United States had about 180,000 nuns. Today there are perhaps 70,000. Fewer than 6,000 are younger than 50. There are estimated to be about 5,000 cloistered, contemplative nuns, a piece of women’s history that may be on the way out.

Reasons for the collapse can be traced to the mid-1960’s: the flowering of the women’s movement, which broadened opportunities beyond secretary, housewife, nurse, teacher and nun. But the Roman Catholic Church unintentionally inflicted damage on itself when it ratified the Second Vatican Council.

“Basically it said that religious women were no more holy than lay women,” said Sister Patricia Wittberg, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. “It was devastating.”

Still, the sisters of the Angels, frail and birdlike, go on with a vocation to which they sacrificed their youth: perhaps never to have known a man, never to have rowed the banks of the Seine, never to have taken a moonlight drive. High heels and self-adornment were given up after high school graduation.

As a young woman, Sister Mary Pia might have become an opera singer. Sister Mary St. Peter, 78, the daughter of a Protestant, thought of becoming a nurse. Sister Mary St. Pius was good at photography. They gave away these things, without regret, for something they say is incalculable.

The average age at the Monastery of the Angels is about 70. From this generation also came feminists like Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug. Hugh Hefner, too, is of their era, as was the centerfold pinup Bettie Page. This generation helped create the cultural chasm that divides America today.

“It’s a materialistic age,” said Sister Mary Pia, gray now, her eyes milky with years. “For young women, religion is far down on the list.”

Sister Mary Pia grew up in the Wilshire District of Los Angeles and joined the monastery at 17, despite the tears of her parents. Prayer, she said, had delivered her brother home from the South Pacific battlefields, and so, seeing the power in it, she dedicated her life to God. She became a novitiate in 1950, years before the birth of rock ’n’ roll.

“I’ve heard of Alex Presley,” she offered. “But I wouldn’t know his music.”

Sister Mary St. Peter gave over her life in 1947, six years before the founding of Playboy magazine. “I never heard of Hugh Hefner,” she said with a shrug in the cloister’s front garden.

Sister Mary St. Pius, who arrived in 1953 from a small town in the Mojave Desert, does not know the work of the political satirist Jon Stewart. But after a brief moment, she squealed: “Martha Stewart? Oh, yes!”

Asked about Father John Geoghan, the Boston priest and serial molester who was the catalyst of the sex scandal that rocked the Catholic Church, the sisters went blank-eyed.

When told about him, Sister Mary Pia’s eyes became flinty, flashing defiance. She said she believed that one of the last respectable prejudices in America was that against the Catholics, and that the news coverage of abusive priests had been excessive, almost joyful.

“You get a little tired of all the bad news,” she said. “The media,” she wrinkled her nose, as if catching a whiff of a bad onion. “They never write about the good things.”

The important thing, then, is that there are still old women in America with the charity to care about something more than themselves, about strangers, even if they do not know those strangers’ manias and motivations. But take a walk down the boulevard any evening, and one wonders whether their prayers are reaching the intended destination.

“That’s the meaning of faith,” Sister Mary Pia said.

This Week in Blasphemy

2006-08-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

From the Telegraph UK ... Air ban on woman in blasphemy row. My first thought was that this lady was over-reacting a bit. But is that more of a condemnation of my own lack of sensitivity regarding blasphemy in others? As Aretha Franklin said in the Blues Brothers: "Don't you blaspheme in here!" Interesting. In full ...

A devout Christian was banned from flying with the budget airline Easyjet after she asked staff to "stop blaspheming".

Fiz Thomson, 55, was returning from a trip to Israel where she had been helping war victims, when she heard boarding staff at Stansted airport repeatedly exclaiming "Oh, my God" after a child fell and hurt herself.

She said she politely asked them to stop taking God's name in vain. She was then approached by a security official and she claims she was called a "racist" for remarking that her complaint would have been taken more seriously had she been Islamic.

As a result of the altercation on Tuesday, her boarding card was withheld, her luggage was taken off the Edinburgh-bound flight and she was barred from flying with the airline for 24 hours.

The grandmother, from Burntisland, Fife, who worships at the independent Vine Church in Dunfermline, said: "There was absolutely nothing at all that I said to the airport staff which could have been interpreted as racist. "I was very polite and non aggressive, but one of the ladies angrily asked me if I expected everyone to follow my religion and do as I did.

"A member of the security staff then appeared and started arguing with me."

Mrs Thomson, a registered foster carer with Fife Council, added: "All the other flights to Edinburgh that evening were with Easyjet. I ended up having to hire a car and drive to my daughter's home in Bolton. "I stayed the night there before driving home the following day. It cost me more than £200, including petrol."

According to Easyjet, Mrs Thomson was "ranting at female gate staff of Indian origin" who had had no intention to be blasphemous.

A spokesman said her remarks appeared to be racist and a view was taken that she needed to calm down and would not be allowed to fly.

World Trade Center

2006-08-26T11:10:00.000-07:00

Brian Godawa writes what, in my view, is the premier movie review blog from a Christian perspective. They are not really reviews so much as analyses of the worldview of the films in question. Mr. Godawa gives his take on Oliver Stone's World Trade Center. In full ...

Based on the true story of two cops who survived the collapse of the twin towers and their rescue from the rubble. I must admit, I was amazed that Oliver Stone made this film. This is a very human exploration of courage, hope, pain and heroism that touched my soul with the value of family, faith and country that is usually feverishly attacked by Stone. He should be applauded for the beauty which he has created in this film. Perhaps one of the reasons why his conspiracy theorizing is absent is because he chose to focus exclusively on individual New Yorker's reactions to the events and almost completely avoided the bigger picture of what is happening, even to the extent of reducing the planes hitting to a mere shadow on a sky scraper passing by, and the sound and thunder of the hits from a distance. Of course, it is entirely possible that Stone may believe the insane ludicrous theories that the American government or "the Jews" did it, and this is merely the ant's eye view of the common man. Be that as it may, this was a truly great story and film.

What I love about stories like this is the existential factor that places the heros in such peril that you project yourself into them and wonder how you might face death, or wonder how much of your own life you have squandered in missing what's really important.

It is important to note that the Marine who went alone into the rubble was positively portrayed as a man of Christian faith, courage and duty, who entered the rubble as a symbol of how the Marines are the first to arrive and often unspoken heroes in that sense. When he walked into those ruins alone and willing to die to help find survivors, it may have been the most moving part of the film for me. He says, "You are my mission," to the trapped officers, which reminded me of the symbolic heroism of Saving Private Ryan, "The mission is a man." So there is this entirely positive symbolic portrayal of the military in this film that is diametrically opposed to his other films. Why? I don't know. Maybe he considers the military only good if it rescues people from the aftermath of evil, rather than being a positive force against evil on the battlefield. But then again, this good Marine says that there will be pay back and the story notes that he went on to two tours of duty in Iraq, so that softens that theory. Anyway, thank you, Mr. Stone, for portraying Christian faith and the Marines as positive in this picture. God knows, the negative stereotypes in movies are more typical.

Some may claim that the heroism is weakened because the cops that got buried in the rubble didn't do anything, they just went in and got covered. But this misses the point, They DID act heroically. They went in to the building to help. Sure, it was their job in a way, but it was also a choice. Not everyone went. And they were there trying to help people, so they are clearly heroes.

As for those who say, "it's too soon," Balderdash! It's not soon enough. We need to revisit September 11 intimately, because already too many people have forgotten and have reduced the war on terror to political grandstanding and party politics. 3000 Americans died from an attack by Islamofascists and Islamofascism is seeking to take over Britain, Europe and indeed the world in order to kill Jews, Christians and infidels and enslave women along with the survivors.

Christians Ended the Slave Trade

2006-08-25T15:32:00.000-07:00

Michael Barone at US News & World Reports reviews a book review? Regardless, it's good. Read it and find out Who ended the slave trade? In part ...

English academic Howard Temperley's review of David Brion Davis's Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Davis is a veteran scholar who won a Pulitzer prize for one of his books published 40 years ago; Temperley delivers a fascinating appreciation of a distinguished body of work (I prefer book reviews that appreciate good work to those that slam bad work, though the TLS runs some Englishly pungent examples of the latter). I'd like to put a spotlight on three of the last four paragraphs of Temperley's review, which I trust it will not violate copyright laws to quote:

"While it is easy to account for the rise of American slavery, its abandonment is harder to explain. At first glance the reason may appear obvious. Quite simply, slavery was wicked. The problem, it might be argued, is rather how supposedly Christian societies had put up with it for as long as they did. Yet the fact remains that, up to 1770, not only had it been all but universally accepted, but the Bible had been one of its principal mainstays. Recent revelations regarding the strength and flexibility of slavery make its demise all the more puzzling. Why, if it was so successful, did people turn against it?

Britain's behaviour is particularly hard to account for. As Davis points out, the British are not thought of as having been particularly humane in other respects, including their treatment of their own working population. He sees the intermittent slave rebellions that shook Britain's colonies as having been a response to the growing tide of abolitionist feeling rather than its cause. Indeed, on the basis of the available evidence it would appear that Britain's interests would have been best served by expanding the slave trade and broadening the frontiers of its slave empire. Just as the US expanded its slave system westward along the Gulf Coast into Texas, so Britain could have established new slave regimes in Trinidad, British Guiana and other recently acquired territories. Instead of seeking to suppress the slave trade, it could have dominated it, and in the process outproduced Brazil and Cuba, increased its own wealth, and contributed to the economic growth of the Americas. No wonder Disraeli called abolition "the greatest blunder in the history of the English people."

In his History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (1869), W. E. H. Lecky describes England's crusade against slavery as "among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations." Great powers do not as a rule behave selflessly. Not surprisingly, Lecky's comment has generally been regarded with scepticism. Now, knowing vastly more than he did about slavery and its abolition, Davis believes Lecky was basically right. Although the American abolition movement came later and assumed a somewhat different character, the same might equally well be said of it. Slaves had never liked being slaves, but the rise of a climate of opinion that objected to slavery on moral grounds was something new. There had been nothing like it in ancient or medieval times or in any other society of which we have record. The upsurge of popular support for abolition both in Britain and the northern USA was unprecedented. Perhaps, David Brion Davis hypothesizes, moral progress is possible."

This is not the lesson that today's transnational and multicultural elites in the United States and the United Kingdom like to tell. They like to portray American slavery as particularly vicious and slavery as a system imposed by evil Dead White European Males on a virtuous but unfortunately powerless Rest of the World. Davis and Temperley know better. Almost all human societies had slavery. Only one human society--the Anglosphere, starting in Britain and then in America--set out to abolish first the slave trade (enormously profitable to many Britons) and then slavery itself (enormously profitable to many Americans). "There had been nothing like it in ancient or medieval times or in any other society of which we have record." The philosophes of France, with their emphasis on pure reason, did not think to advocate the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. (See Gertrude Himmelfarb's The Road to Modernity: the British, French, and American Enlightenments on this point: The French philosophes' idea of a good society was one ruled by enlightened despots, i.e., despots governed by themselves, which their successors tried to put into place during the French Revolution.) English Evangelical Christians, like William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp, did--and accomplished their goal. So, in their wake, did Americans like William Lloyd Garrison, the Grimke sisters, and Frederick Douglass. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 (much to its economic detriment) and the United States followed, at the earliest date permissible under the Constitution, in 1808 (though the economic detriment to the United States was much less).

Secular elites of our day, or for that matter their counterparts of a century or two centuries ago, like to think that all human progress is due to secular reason. But Christian belief in the moral equality of every person played a key role in inspiring the Britons and then the Americans who led the fight to abolish the slave trade and then slavery. Others followed in their wake. This, I think, is a lesson also of Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, a book I have written about with admiration before but that I have not yet read all of; I'm putting it on my carry-on for reading on my next long flight on my tour to flog the paperback version of The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again.

Hochschild, I gather, approaches the subject from the perspective of the American left; but he is also a gifted writer who eschews annoying cant, has immersed himself in the documents that tell this story, and gives the Christian inspiration of the first opponents of the slave trade--the first opponents of the slave trade in human history--its due. As we try to fathom the mindset of Islamofascists who fight violently for genuine evil, it is worthwhile to take some time to fathom the mindset of people--Evangelical Christians, most of them, in this case--who fought nonviolently for genuine goodness.

Thanks are due to David Brion Davis, Howard Temperley, and Adam Hochschild for helping us to do that.

Choosing Sides This Side of Heaven

2006-08-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

More from Gary DeMar ... I link to this site often, perhaps because it always seems to have some good food for thought. This time its: Choosing Sides This Side of Heaven. In full ...

Two opinions vie for our attention in current Christian thinking regarding the legitimacy of social involvement and kingdom demonstration this side of heaven.1 The escapist view proposes that gospel proclamation is the church’s singular duty and no more. Concern for this world is a distraction. Heaven, and heaven alone, is the Christian’s calling and sole domain. The Christian’s citizenship is one-dimensional (Phil. 3:20; cf. Acts 21:39; 22:28). Christ’s lordship is delayed until the millennium or the eternal state.2 The Christian life is primarily individualistic and other-worldly, therefore there is no consideration of joining with other Christians to battle the effects of evil in this world as it relates to society. The Christian’s task is to remove himself from the world. There is no possibility of societal change since there can be no corporate response to the programs put forth by “inventors of evil” (Rom. 1:30). This view believes in God, but not in history. The decline of the church into apostasy is inevitable and unrecoverable.

The pilgrim view holds that gospel proclamation is the biblical priority, but there are further societal obligations which enhance gospel proclamation. Heaven is the Christian’s inevitable home, but during the time that God has determined that we remain on earth, we are called to faithful service.3 The Christian has a dual citizenship (Acts 21:39; 22:28; cf. Phil. 3:20). Christ’s lordship is a present reality and will one day be consummated by His ultimate and comprehensive victory over all His enemies. While salvation by grace through faith is an individual act by God on sinners, there is corporate solidarity in what the Bible calls “the body of Christ.” The corporate nature of the church is an effective weapon against “the schemes of the devil” (2 Cor. 2:11). The pilgrim view espouses a belief in both God and history. The failure of the forces of evil are inevitable (2 Tim. 3:7–9).

Which view is correct? It is clear that the second position, the pilgrim way, is the biblical position. While we are admonished to “flee immorality” (1 Cor. 6:18), nowhere are we told to flee the world.

Although we must be strangers in the modern world, we cannot be self-isolated hermits. The people of God have always been strangers and exiles, seeking a city built by him (Hebrews 11:13–16), even the Jews in the Promised Land and the Christians in the “Christian” Roman Empire. But it is in this world that we are exiles, and through it that we must make our intellectual as well as our physical pilgrimage. We cannot reject it in toto, and we must not accept it or succumb to it. In short, we must heed the words of St. Paul, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). He lived in the world of imperial, pagan Rome. He could not flee it, and remain obedient to his Lord, who had commissioned him Apostle to the Gentiles.4

It is true that pagan Rome eventually killed Paul the pilgrim and stranger. But biblical revelation knows of no inevitable transfer of godly construction to ungodly dominion. The kingdom of God was not obliterated by Rome with the death of countless martyrs. In the end, Rome gained nothing with the death of Paul, except ruin. The church gained everything. If we wish to follow the Bible’s command, “our world may eventually kill us.

We all have to answer the important question: on whose side will you live? But we must also be prepared to answer the other one: on whose side will you die? On Nero’s? Or Paul’s?”5 Living is the issue. Escapism of whatever kind (monasticism, pietism, or rapturism) is not the answer. Sides must be chosen and lived out in this world. There is no neutrality. There is no escape.

God takes account of how we live for Him in the here and now. Today counts forever. If the early Christians had only been concerned about heaven, then there would have been little need for Rome to deal with Christians like Paul. But the early church believed in God and history, heaven and earth, this age and the age to come. This is why Paul and his followers were considered a threat. If he had only been “other worldly” where the only legitimate sphere of Christian activity was heaven, then Rome would have dismissed him and others like him as religious mystics. But the gospel Paul preached forced men and women to choose sides, and the choice of sides had an effect on the world in which they lived.

1 Naturalism, with its attendants Humanism, Materialism, and Darwinism, would be a third view. For the Naturalist, “nature is the whole show.” Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and its Confrontation with American Society (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, [1983] 1993), 41, 141.

2 “Many dispensationalists, of course, do not hesitate to map out a divine cosmic program, but this program has little place for human activity (except for the activity of sinners), and is discontinuous with space-time history.” Howard A. Snyder, The Community of the King (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1977), 195, note 21.

3 “Modern man has largely defected from the divine cultural‑mandate and the spiritual‑moral loyalties within which he is to exert his dominion over nature.” Carl F. H. Henry, A Plea for Evangelical Demonstration (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1971), 114.

4 Harold O. J. Brown, The Protest of a Troubled Protestant (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969), 217.

5 Brown, The Protest of a Troubled Protestant, 217–218.

Calif. Lawmakers Advance Another 'Sexual Indoctrination' Bill

2006-08-22T11:55:00.000-07:00

From Agape Press ... Calif. Lawmakers Advance Another 'Sexual Indoctrination' Bill. In full ...

The California State Assembly has passed yet another bill that pro-family groups have warned would sexually indoctrinate school children.

The Democrat-controlled Assembly voted 46-31 (five more than required for a majority vote) in favor of legislation that would alter K-12 public education textbooks, instructional materials, and school-sponsored activities so as to positively refer to homosexuality, including same-sex "marriage," as well as bisexuality, trans-sexuality, and transvestitism. SB 1437, sponsored by lesbian State Senator Sheila Kuehl, now goes to the State Senate for a concurrence vote.

Randy Thomasson of the Sacramento-based Campaign for Children and Families says the bill is the real face of the California Democratic Party.

"Democrats pushed this bill through," he says in reference to SB 1437. "They have authored three other bills that are similar, and the Democrats are showing their allegiance to the homosexual, bisexual, and trans-sexual agenda."

The pro-family leader asserts that those pushing the pro-homosexual legislation are not listening to their own constituents. "It's not what the people want," he says. "It's amazing how Democrats are going against the democratic wishes of the people."

Thomasson has repeatedly referred to the current complement of education-related pro-homosexual bills as "sexual indoctrination" legislation. He says the 36-minute debate on SB 1437, during which seven Republicans spoke against it and six Democrats spoke in favor of it, confirmed that characterization.

"The Democrat Assembly speaker actually got up and said, 'This means "Jill and Jill" can go up the hill in the textbooks, and you can't say anything bad about that,'" says Thomasson. "He said that you've got to outlaw bias because perspective and point-of-view should not be against anything that is the homosexual or bisexual or trans-sexual agenda." Such statements are "scary," he adds, because "he's talking about outlawing values."

Prior to that debate, a Republican-proposed amendment requiring schools to get parental permission before teaching sexual curricula to children failed in a 26-48 vote.

The CCF spokesman is calling on Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to keep his promise to veto SB 1437. He contends the bill "micromanages public schools by forcing them to promote a gaggle of sexual lifestyles that disturb parents and confuse kids." If the governor of California "abandons children" by signing this or any of the other school sexual indoctrination bills, Thomasson predicts that "pro-family voters will abandon him" when he runs for re-election in November.

Can America Be Saved?

2006-08-22T11:45:00.000-07:00

The shock heavy metal group Gwar had an album called 'America Must Be Destroyed.' It was tongue-in-cheek. I used to think it was funny. It's not anymore.

Gary DeMar asks, and answers, the question Can America Be Saved? In my view, hits the nail squarely on the head with this:

The church has always struggled to find answers to these questions. Unfortunately, the church has often been out of balance: Either putting all of its efforts into social reform while neglecting personal reform through gospel proclamation (the social gospel movement) or retreating into an unscriptural pietism where personal salvation is seen as the evangelical’s only duty to the neglect of the world (pietism).

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Here's the rest ...

Is it possible to change a society? Has there ever been a time in history when progress could be measured against the spiritual and cultural decay of a previous era? When the church suffers a setback after a period of progress, is this a sign of the end, or does the possibility exist that God will graciously redeem and restore His people? What has the church’s position been toward social reform? Has social reform hindered the work of the gospel or has the lack of evangelical social reform been an obstacle to gospel proclamation?

The church has always struggled to find answers to these questions. Unfortunately, the church has often been out of balance: Either putting all of its efforts into social reform while neglecting personal reform through gospel proclamation (the social gospel movement) or retreating into an unscriptural pietism where personal salvation is seen as the evangelical’s only duty to the neglect of the world (pietism). Is this the reason why “American Protestant orthodoxy has produced no unified social ethics or program of evangelical social action”?1

In addition, there has been an unhealthy preoccupation with the timing of Jesus’ Second Coming. Because it is always “imminent,” and since reform efforts take time, there is no motivation to reform society. The question always is: Do we have time? But every generation has asked this question. And for two thousand years the answer has been yes. There is time because we are not privy to God’s timetable. The church has a history of predicting the end, telling Christians that there is no time left on God’s prophetic clock. Today is no different. With such a shortened view of the future, reform efforts are, at best, secondary concerns. Charles Hodge wrote the following in 1873, demonstrating that little has changed in more than 125 years of prophetic speculation:

It can hardly be questioned that a portion of our brethren, both in this country and in Great Britain, pay undo attention to the prophetic parts of Scripture. On this account they have been designated the “Prophetical School.” While there are many exceptions, it is yet a characteristic of this class of writers, that they seem more concerned in future hopes than in present duty. They have no faith in the conversion of the world under the present “dispensation of the Spirit.” They often speak in disparaging terms of the work of the Spirit, saying that the gospel has never converted a single town or village, and that it is therefore vain to expect that it will convert the world. The world according to their theory, is to be converted through the terrors and judgments attending the second advent of Christ: not otherwise, and not before.2

Reform efforts are never easy. They depend on much prayer, gospel proclamation, and ministry. The results are often very discouraging. One way out of the duty of reform is to deny its validity and project a state of future earthly blessing that’s just around the corner.

The Bible strikes a balance between personal salvation and outward reforms. This was certainly true in the Old Testament. The New Testament’s emphasis is no different. Of course, the context of the New Testament is somewhat different from the Old. Under the Roman occupation there was little opportunity for a broad application of reform. Certainly within the church community reform efforts were operating. But it didn’t take long for the church to extend its witness “even to the remotest part of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

As we study Church history, we recognize that there was a balanced relationship between regeneration and reformation. With the collapse of the Roman Empire, the gospel of the kingdom began to reform the world. While there was speculation regarding Jesus’ imminent return among the early church fathers, this emphasis changed as Rome’s place in world history began to decline.

1. Carl F. H. Henry, A Plea for Evangelical Demonstration (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1971), 23.

2. Charles Hodge, “Introduction,” in James B. Ramsey, Revelation: An Exposition of the First Eleven Chapters, originally published under the title The Spiritual Kingdom (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, [1873] 1977), i.

Praying Aloud Gets Man Jailed

2006-08-21T18:24:00.000-07:00

From the Calgary Sun ... Praying aloud gets man jailed.

Maybe if Artur Pawlowski had been holding a flag of the outlawed terrorist organization Hezbollah, Calgary Police would have left him alone.

Perhaps had they seen him on a street corner smoking crack cocaine -- or selling it -- they would have turned the other cheek, as is so often the case.

But Pawlowski was clearly doing something much more provocative Wednesday afternoon on the corner of 17 Ave. and 8 St. S.W. He -- along with about six other people -- were praying and reading the Bible.

Pawlowski, 33, who has been helping the homeless for years, gave up his lucrative home-building business last year to start up The Street Church full-time.

With the support of area churches, he spends most of his time feeding, clothing, housing and loving members of Calgary's homeless population. He starts by taking his church to them -- in front of the Drop-In Centre mostly, but for the past four years, he has often preached to the drug dealers and street kids who congregate in the block-long park in front of Mount Royal Village shopping centre.

Because Pawlowski has been threatened so often by drug dealers angry their clients often turn away from drugs as a result of his message of hope and help, he started videotaping every outing. Wednesday's was no different.

Pawlowski and his friends, including his younger brother, David, stood in the far southeast corner of the park praying and reading the Bible.

Shawn Pierson, 25, once a street person himself who is "one of the fruits" of Pawlowski's ministry can be seen and heard on the videotape reading from Psalm 140: "'O Lord, I say to you, 'You are my God.' Hear, O Lord, my cry for mercy.' "

Such activity was clearly too fringe for the Fringe Festival underway in tents further west (and out of earshot) in the park. On Monday, Pawlowski and his brother went to the park, talked with tarot card readers and other practisers of "sorcery" to tell them the Bible condemns such practices. Video shows they remained calm but the vendors became agitated. Event organizers called police and Pawlowski and his brother David were asked not to talk to the vendors again. They agreed and left.

On Wednesday, when they returned to pray, they stayed far away from the vendors. Organizers called police anyway.

The video shows Pawlowski standing on the public sidewalk with his hands in his pockets. He asks a burly police officer in a calm voice, "Why are you harassing me? What did I do wrong?" The police officer responds with: "I'm going to arrest you for obstruction."

At that, Pawlowski is handcuffed and made to walk backwards to the police cruiser where he was frisked.

Pawlowski is then heard telling the police officer about his Charter rights to freedom of speech, assembly and religion, pointing out his family immigrated to Canada from communist Poland so they could be free from oppression.

He was also charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace. He spent one night in jail and is to appear in court on Sept. 7.

Insp. Ed Yeomans confirmed Pawlowski's story, saying Wednesday's arrest was the police's second dealing with Pawlowski. "One vendor closed up her booth and others left the park because that man and his group were causing a disturbance to other users of the festival," said Yeomans.

But the video shows clearly Pawlowski and his group did not approach vendors.

Do people have a right to read the Bible in a public place? Obviously, some don't think so.

Many Calgarians will likely read this and shrug. But consider this: The video clearly shows six police officers attending to the calm Pawlowski. Your tax dollars at work, folks!

What's ironic, said Pawlowski, was he saw a couple of known drug dealers watching as he got arrested.

Something's not right with that picture.

Iran: Mother of 2 Faces Death by Stoning for Adultery

2006-08-19T17:08:00.000-07:00

From WorldNet Daily ... Mother of 2 faces death by stoning: Petition to Iranian authorities urges clemency for 34-year-old 'adulteress'. In full ...

Human rights groups and concerned individuals worldwide are demanding an end to stoning executions in Iran – and right now are pressuring the head of the Islamic nation's judiciary to lift the death sentence against a 34-year-old mother of two young children.

Malak Ghorbany was sentenced to death June 28 by a court in the Iranian city of Urmia after being found guilty of committing "adultery."

Under Iran's strict Sharia law, women sentenced to execution by stoning have their hands bound behind their back. They are wrapped from head to toe in sheets before being seated in a pit. The ditch is filled up to their breasts with dirt, and the soil is packed tightly before people assemble to execute the woman by pitching rocks at her head and upper body.

Under Iran's strict Sharia law, women sentenced to execution by stoning have their hands bound behind their back. They are wrapped from head to toe in sheets before being seated in a pit. The ditch is filled up to their breasts with dirt, and the soil is packed tightly before people assemble to execute the woman by pitching rocks at her head and upper body.

Article 104 of the Iranian Penal Code states that the stones used for execution should "not be large enough to kill the person by one or two strikes, nor should they be so small that they could not be defined as stones."

Ironically, the court sentenced the woman's brother Abu Bakr Ghorbany and husband Mohammad Daneshfar to only six years in jail for killing her lover. According to Sharia law, murder carries a lesser penalty than "crimes against chastity."

Stonings decreased after international pressure on former reformist President Mohammad Khatami in the late '90s. And Ayatollah Shahroudi, the current head of Iran's judiciary, issued a ruling to judges ordering a moratorium on execution by stoning in December 2002. But the brutal killings have continued and the practice was never abolished from the penal code of the Islamic Republic. In May, two other women, Abbas Hajizadeh and Mahboubeh Mohammadi, were executed for committing adultery, with more than 100 members of the Revolutionary Guards and Bassij Forces participating in the stoning.

Adding to the voices urging Shahroudi to lift the stoning order, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors this week unanimously passed a resolution urging the U.S. State Department to condemn the impending execution by stoning of two Iranian women, Ghorbany and Ashraf Kolhari.

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, an Iranian-American, introduced the resolution and brought it to a vote August 15.

Lily Mazahery, president of the Legal Rights Institute in Washington, D.C., had the lead role in drafting the San Francisco resolution, telling WND: "Malak is receiving the penalty of death for having committed 'adultery,' which, under the Sharia legal system includes any type of intimate relationship between a girl/woman and a man to whom she is not permanently or temporarily married. Such a relationship does not necessarily mean a sexual relationship. Further, charges of adultery are routinely issued to women/girls who have been raped, and they are sentenced to death."

The other woman referenced in the resolution, Kolhari, was sentenced to 15 years in Tehran's Evin prison for allegedly participating in the murder of her husband. Her lawyer, Shadi Sadr, said: "After she was arrested, they obtained a forced 'confession' from her, stating that she had been involved in an extramarital affair with the man who had murdered her husband." This led to a sentence of stoning for adultery as a married woman. The 37-year-old mother had previously filed for divorce, but it was rejected by the court because she has four children.

An Islamic women's organization, Women Living Under Muslim Laws, announced Aug. 11 that Shahroudi had responded to pleas for Kolhari's life. The group's website stated, "We are glad to inform you that we have heard that Ayatollah Shahroudi has acted to stop the execution of Ashraf, the 37-year-old mother of four, who was sentenced to stoning for having had extramarital sex. However, her fate is not yet clear and we urge you to continue writing to the Iranian authorities on her behalf."

Sadr reportedly encouraged continuous public outcry to ensure Kolahri's safety. She said, "I am asking you to please continue your efforts and keep your voices loud until we make sure that [Kolhari] is safe."

However, Ghorbany's fate remains undecided.

The Islamic regime has officially stayed her execution until a new trial is conducted. Mazahery holds little hope for re-examination of the case, and she intends to put intense international pressure on Shahroudi. She told WND the Islamic regime tries to silence the objections of the international human rights lawyers and organizations by initially caving in and granting a stay of execution until a new trial is set.

"The Islamic regime has been known to say one thing and do exactly the opposite," Mazahery said. "It is still quite possible that the Islamic regime will schedule a rush sham trial and re-issue the same sentence before we have a chance to take the appropriate legal actions. It is also possible that even with a new trial, Ghorbany would still receive the same sentence or be sentenced to death by public hanging instead."

Ironically, Iran is a member of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, or ICCPR. The United Nations Human Rights Committee has indicated that treating adultery and fornication as criminal offenses does not comply with international human rights standards. Article 7 of the ICCPR reads, "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." And Article 14 guarantees the right "to have legal assistance assigned to (the accused), in any case where the interests of justice so require."

"In 99 percent of these cases," Mazahery said, "the accused women have received no legal representation, and because, under the Sharia legal system their testimony is at best worth only half the value of the testimony of men, their so-called 'trials' last only a few minutes – after which they are immediately sentenced."

"There are no scheduled dates for such killings in Iran," Mazahery told WND. "A prisoner can be executed at any time with little or no notice at all. Needless to say, that makes matters that much more complicated and urgent in these types of cases."

Her petition to save Ghorbany's life is rapidly circulating online with more than 9,847 signatures.

"Let us all express our outrage to prevent these barbaric executions," Mazahery said. "Let us – all of us – take steps to ensure that no innocent woman will ever feel a rope around her neck or any stones launched at her helpless body by the hands of her own peers."

Mazahery translated a message written in Farsi from Ghorbany, which said: "I am not guilty of a crime. I have only committed an act that is the natural right of every human."

Pharmacists with No Plan B

2006-08-19T16:45:00.000-07:00

Interesting piece from Christianity Today: Law or Free Market? Can a pro-life pharmacist be compelled to fill a prescription for a pill that goes against his or her religious beliefs? In full ...

On July 6, 2002, Neil Noesen found himself on the front line of the culture wars. Less than three days after taking a job as a pharmacist at a Kmart in Menomonie, Wisconsin, he received a refill request from University of Wisconsin-Stout student Amanda Renz for the contraceptive Loestrin.

Noesen, a devout Catholic, had always refused to dispense birth control. For six years previous, he had been willing to refer patients seeking contraception to another pharmacist, but a recent trip to Calcutta—where he realized anew that health care is about helping the suffering—had convicted him that this was wrong. "Finally, my conscience caught up to me," Noesen told CT. "I couldn't do it anymore. I felt like I was being used by the system, that I was becoming part of the problem rather than part of the solution."

Now back home in Wisconsin, he faced the first real test of his new policy. He told Renz he could not provide Loestrin.

The store's head pharmacist, who knew Noesen's concerns, had agreed to personally fill such prescriptions, but he was out of town for the weekend. Renz asked where else she could get the prescription filled. Noesen declined to tell her. Renz went to the local Wal-Mart, but when the pharmacist there attempted to transfer her prescription over the phone, Noesen refused.

The resulting deadlock put Noesen's name in newspapers around the country and brought the case to the attention of the Wisconsin Department of Regulation and Licensing (DRL). Though Noesen had violated no state law or administrative code, DRL's Pharmacy Examining Board looked into the matter. They found that Noesen was within his rights when he refused to fill the prescription, but that he had not served the public in a "minimally competent manner," because no procedure was in place to ensure that patients could fill prescriptions to which he objected.

On April 13, 2004, an administrative law judge agreed. She ruled that Noesen must take six credit hours of ethics courses and pay the full costs of the proceedings against him—around $20,000. Noesen's principled stand cost him dearly.

A Contested Right
Noesen's case is not an isolated incident. Since 2004, pharmacist refusals have made headlines across the country—and have often spurred local governments into action. In Denton, Texas, three pharmacists were fired from Eckerd after refusing to fill an emergency contraception prescription for a rape victim. Gene Herr told the Associated Press that he "went in the back room and briefly prayed about it" and decided that he could not in good conscience provide the pills, which he believes can cause an abortion. Similar refusals have been reported in Georgia, Alabama, New Hampshire, Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin.

Some states have already acted to limit such refusals. In response to reports that some Chicago pharmacists were refusing to fill certain prescriptions, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed an emergency rule in early 2005 that ordered pharmacies to dispense drugs in a timely manner—no transfers or referrals allowed. Blagojevich argued that the state's Health Care Right of Conscience Act does not cover pharmacists. He later moved to make the rule permanent, saying there should be "No delays. No hassles. No lectures" (ct, June 2005, p. 29).

In 2005 alone, state legislatures considered more than 20 bills aimed at sorting out the situation. Some would force pharmacists to dispense all legal prescriptions, while others would allow pharmacists to refuse for any reason of conscience and prevent employers from taking action against them. Arkansas, South Dakota, Mississippi, and Georgia already have laws that give pharmacists the right to refuse, and many other states will decide one way or another in the next year.

The issue has exploded during the last five years, in part because of the recent availability of emergency contraception (EC). Both Preven (approved in 1998) and Plan B (1999) can be taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex. If properly used, they are more than 70 percent effective at preventing pregnancy. Though all forms of contraception raise ethical issues for Catholic pharmacists, EC raises the ante for Protestant pro-lifers as well, because some claim that the drug is an abortifacient.

"For pro-life pharmacists, this is a real bright line in the sand," David Stevens, executive director of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, told CT. "There's a difference between dispensing EC and a birth-control pill."

The Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice—a group that represents Episcopalians, Presbyterians (PCUSA), Conservative and Reform Judaism, United Methodists, and Unitarians, among others—argues that EC is little more than a potent birth-control pill of the kind that Christian women take routinely. It works the same way and contains the same ingredients as birth control (unlike the abortion pill, RU-486, which is not available in pharmacies), so it should pose no moral problems for pharmacists. The Rev. Carlton W. Veazey, the group's president, told CT, "People need to understand: The medical fact is that neither birth-control pills nor emergency contraception—a concentrated dose of these same birth-control pills—cause an abortion."

Defining Terms
So is this simply a case of some pro-life Christians refusing to look at the science? Not quite. As with many aspects of the abortion debate, defining terms is critical.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) defines conception (and therefore pregnancy) as beginning at the moment of implantation. "Conception is implantation," says ACOG, and therefore EC cannot, by definition, cause an abortion—even if it affects a fertilized egg. But, as Karen Brauer of Pharmacists for Life International told CT, "Our issue has to do with human life, not their definition of pregnancy." In her view, human life begins the moment that an egg is fertilized.

This difference in emphasis is crucial. According to its maker, Plan B "prevents pregnancy mainly by stopping the release of an egg from the ovary and may also prevent the fertilization of an egg. Plan B may also work by preventing it from attaching to the uterus." Though EC will do nothing to stop the growth of a developing fetus, it has the potential to prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall. To many pro-life pharmacists, this makes it an abortion-inducing drug, and its presence in the neighborhood pharmacy has caused them to fight for their right not to dispense it.

Their refusal got the attention of NARAL Pro-Choice America, which launched a campaign in March 2005 to pressure pharmacies and legislators. NARAL president Nancy Keenan said, "In 2005, it is appalling that women do not know whether their prescriptions will be filled. Pharmacies have no right to override a decision made by a woman and her doctor."

This move brought publicity to the debate about whether pharmacists should have the right to refuse any drug to any patient at any time. Most states passed "conscience clauses" years ago, but these were generally targeted at individual physicians, approved in the years following Roe v. Wade to allow doctors to opt out of performing abortions. The position of pharmacists has been more ambiguous. Few states have laws explicitly granting them the same conscience protection that doctors have.

Polls show that pharmacists want to be treated like true health care professionals, not automated pill dispensers. More than two-thirds of them want freedom to refuse to fill prescriptions, Glenn Kessler of HCD Research told CT.

The American Pharmacists Association, which represents more than 50,000 pharmacists across the country, has adopted a policy that supports a pharmacist "stepping away" from but not hindering a transaction. The association says that it "recognizes the individual pharmacist's right to exercise conscientious refusal and supports the establishment of systems to ensure [the] patient's access to legally prescribed therapy without compromising the pharmacist's right of conscientious refusal."

This right of refusal can take several forms. If at least two pharmacists are available, the one who objects may simply hand the prescription to the colleague. Or the pharmacist may refer the patient to another pharmacy.

Not all pharmacy chains find this an acceptable solution, however. Eckerd, CVS, and Kmart all have policies allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions, but only when another pharmacist is available. When pharmacists work alone, they are generally expected to fill all prescriptions.

Fighting Words
Target, by contrast, allows its pharmacists to "refuse and refer" a patient to another pharmacy. This stand has earned Target the wrath of Planned Parenthood, which organized a nationwide protest against the retailer last December.

Though "refuse and refer" sounds moderate, it satisfies neither groups like Planned Parenthood nor some pro-life pharmacists. To Brauer, an Indiana pharmacist, giving a referral is like saying, "I don't kill people, but I can send you to a specific person who does."

Brauer believes that EC and some forms of birth control can cause abortions, and she was fired from a Kmart pharmacy in 1996 for telling a patient that the store was out of birth control (it was not). She went on to found Pharmacists for Life International, a group that represents about 1,500 members. The group's rhetoric is angry; members call their opponents names such as "Klan Parenthood" and "Slobodan Blagojevich," and they are on a mission to stop the work of "abortoholics" in this country.

Brauer's group can be uncompromising, but it's not the only one dishing out tough talk. On the other side, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice argues that Christians working in public professions have no right to bring their views into the workplace. Those who want to do so should find a new job. "The pharmacist has a professional responsibility to fill prescriptions accurately and according to established standards, not to advocate personal or political views while on the job," says Veazey. "If the pharmacy is dispensing products the pharmacist objects to, then he or she should not be working there."

The public tends to side with Veazey. A 2005 poll by HCD Research found that 73 percent of Americans believe pharmacists should be required to fill all prescriptions despite religious objections. Responses of Catholics (70 percent) and Protestants (68 percent) were not much different from the general population, and among Orthodox Christians, the majority still sided with the patient (55 percent).

Advocates who oppose conscience clauses for pharmacists worry about the slippery slope. "Are we going to let the pharmacist ask for a marriage license?" Frances Kissling, head of Catholics for a Free Choice, told CT. "Are we going to allow them to deny prenatal vitamins to unmarried women because they shouldn't have gotten pregnant? How far does the right of conscience go?"

The discussion often comes down to one of rights: the right of pharmacists not to do something that violates their consciences versus the right of patients to obtain legally prescribed medications. Steve Aden, a lawyer at the Center for Law and Religious Freedom, has represented several pharmacists, including Noesen. Aden told CT that most pro-life pharmacists are not out to deny legal medications to anyone—they simply don't want to be forced to dispense them personally.

"In every case that I've ever heard of," he said, "a woman can get access to her contraceptive medication by alternative means if for some reason the nearest pharmacy doesn't have a pharmacist on duty who will dispense it."

Indeed, Amanda Renz, the young woman in search of Loestrin, got the contraceptive two days later and missed only a single dose.

But Kissling finds this scenario unacceptable. "I cannot in good conscience say that a woman who has been raped should shop around," she said, "before she finds [a pharmacy] that actually will fill the prescription."

Such overt refusals happen infrequently, especially when it comes to EC. Ron Stephens, a pharmacist who serves in the Illinois General Assembly, said Plan B is the least prescribed medication in the state. "I own parts of two pharmacies in downstate Illinois," he told CT. "We fill hundreds of thousands of prescriptions a year, and we've not seen one for the morning-after pill."

Kissling, however, said that's because many women don't know about EC.

Legislators Stepping In
Legislators at every level are attempting to settle the dispute. While bills introduced at the state level have varied widely, a consensus appears to be emerging within the federal government. Both the Access to Legal Pharmaceuticals Act (S.809) and the Workplace Religious Freedom Act (S.677) were introduced in 2005, and both take the same approach: They allow a pharmacist to refuse a prescription but make sure that another pharmacist can fill it. Everyone from John Kerry, D-Mass, to Rick Santorum, R-Penn, supports such legislation, but nothing has yet been passed. Until a federal bill is in place, both women and their pharmacists will remain uncertain about their rights and responsibilities.

Dilemmas like Noesen's will only multiply in the coming years. The last few decades have brought abortion, euthanasia, in vitro fertilization, and contraception. Newer technologies such as cloning and stem-cell research present similar challenges.

But this year, the main event is in the local pharmacy, and the outcome will define conscience rights in the public sphere for years to come. That's a prescription for battle.

Fire and Brimstone, Guns and Ammo

2006-08-19T11:08:00.000-07:00

For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds.

When the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ apes the popular culture, the result is rarely good. Take, for example, this Washington Post piece: Fire and Brimstone, Guns and Ammo. A sampling: "The game is about killing people for their lack of faith in Jesus. The Gospel is not about killing people in the name of the Lord, and Jesus made that very clear." Amen to that. In full ...

As the camera pans over a smoldering representation of New York City, the booming voice says it all: "For those left behind, the apocalypse has just begun!"

That's the tail end of the promotional trailer for Left Behind: Eternal Forces, an upcoming computer game based on the best-selling book series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.

The "Left Behind" books, which center on Armageddon and the Second Coming of Jesus, have sold more than 70 million copies and are the basis of three movies, making the franchise overdue for a video game. The game, which will soon be marketed in churches and video game stores across the country, is due out in October.

In Eternal Forces, which is based on the first four books, the rapture has occurred and billions of people have disappeared from the planet. Players command the left-behind Tribulation Forces and battle the forces of the Antichrist, who happens to be employed as the head of a U.N.-like world government organization. The game's action takes place across 500 carefully re-created New York City blocks, stretching from Wall Street to Harlem.

The object of the game is to recruit the members of New York's remaining "neutral" population to the side of God during a seven-year reign of the Antichrist. Players have to win over the remaining agnostics and unbelievers of New York City or kill them -- either before or after they are pulled to the forces of evil.

In the parlance of computer games, Eternal Forces is a "real-time strategy" title, in which players have to marshal a limited number of resources as the clock ticks. In multiplayer mode, players can choose to command the Antichrist's armies.

Left Behind Games chief executive Troy Lyndon, a game industry veteran who was involved in early incarnations of Electronic Arts' Madden football franchise, is particularly fond of the game's "pray" button. Sending one's holy warriors into a bloody battle can hurt their morale; having them pray first can bolster their faith.

Still, the game has attracted controversy, from critics who argue that it will promote religious intolerance.

Miami attorney Jack Thompson, already famous to a generation of Xbox and PlayStation owners for pitching campaigns against game companies, argues that games are rotting the minds of young people. But, as a practicing Christian, he says, he has more reasons than usual to dislike the latest target of his ire. The Eternal Forces game "breaks my heart," he said.

"The game is about killing people for their lack of faith in Jesus," he said. "The Gospel is not about killing people in the name of the Lord, and Jesus made that very clear."

Thompson worries that the existence of this game will be taken as proof by radical Muslims that Western culture is mounting a modern-day crusade against non-Christian faiths. Thompson says he broke off a publishing relationship with Tyndale House -- the company that puts out the "Left Behind" books -- because it approved licensing the book franchise to the start-up company that is just now putting on the game's finishing touches.

But Lyndon claims that the game doesn't get into religious denominations.

"It doesn't say who you pray to," he said. "I don't think the word 'Christian' is anywhere in the game play." Likewise, the game has only a " 'Star Wars' level" of violence. "There's no blood or gore; people just fall over," he said.

Lyndon says he hopes to give parents and gamers an option for an action-packed title that also gets players thinking about eternal matters.

"If you have two games and one has a good theme and one has a bad theme, people are generally going to reach for the one with the good theme," he said.

The Grand Theft Auto games are well-designed but have a bad theme, in his view. Lyndon intends for the Left Behind games (follow-ups to Eternal Forces are already in the works) to contain a religious theme that is "not preachy or dogmatic."

An early version of Eternal Forces has already won respect in write-ups on gamer Web sites. Until now, religion-oriented video games have tended to be relatively weak efforts -- far from cutting-edge and more the sort of lame thing Ned Flanders's kids might play on "The Simpsons."

One of the best-selling Christian game titles, called Catechumen, sold 86,000 copies, just a fraction of what most games need to make a profit.

In addition to the usual ads in gamer magazines, Left Behind Games is taking an inventive approach to the market by sending a million free sample copies of the game to churches around the country. It's a marketing tactic reminiscent of last year's "Left Behind" movie, called "World at War," which screened at megachurches and avoided commercial theaters altogether.

Game fans who like the "Left Behind" books say they are looking forward to Eternal Forces. Heath Summerlin, a Christian gamer who lives in South Carolina, said he thinks the game "could reach a broad spectrum of people who wouldn't necessarily be exposed to the books or go to church."

Summerlin has read a few of the "Left Behind" books and is interested trying the game when it comes out. In all honesty, though, he said, he's still more interested in the popular online game World of Warcraft, where he belongs to a Christian-oriented group of players called "Redeemed." The club, which Summerlin calls "a ministry outreach within the game itself," has about 250 members, who gather their characters in an online prayer before going on missions each day.

Ralph Bagley, designer of Catechumen and a spokesman for the Christian Game Developers Foundation, said Eternal Forces could turn out to be the first game to break out of the Christian market and appeal to secular audiences, though he is concerned by some reports about it.

"You can't kill people in the name of God and put it in the game play and hope it won't offend people," he said.

On the other hand, Bagley said he understands the need for a gamemaker to put in plenty of action to appeal to the market.

"There are people out there who think that if it's a Christian game, it has to be about putting two animals on an ark," he said. "But how many people are going to play that?"

The Eschatology of Islam

2006-08-18T15:27:00.000-07:00

Eric Rauch over at American Vision writes a very thought provoking piece called The Eschatology of Islam.

Europe is quickly becoming Muslim. Conservative estimates predict that “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.” Less optimistic estimates have this happening much sooner. France has had its troubles with young, anxious and unemployed Muslims. More recently, England has found itself in the middle of a terror scheme to explode trans-Atlantic planes. What was an interesting demographic upsurge is now being found to have real social and economic consequences. A united front that includes Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (the true leader of Iran1), and thousands of young Muslim converts, is beginning to emerge and demands notice by the rest of the world.

England is still shaking its head in disbelief over the terror plot that its anti-terror police were able to thwart. 24 suspects were arrested in connection with the plan to smuggle liquid explosives on planes from United, American and Continental Airlines. A neighbor of one of the suspects asked, “If you truly believed in God, you wouldn’t go out and do that kind of thing. It’s all about peace, isn’t it?”2 Well, no, actually it’s not. It’s about victory and supremacy; and it’s about time that we realize this fact. All religions are not equal, all religions do not lead to God, and all religions do not promote peace. It is this very naïve, pluralistic approach that is allowing terrorism to flourish.

This is the principal reason why jihad terrorists routinely refer to American troops as “Crusaders.” In their view, the War on Terror, which began for Americans on September 11, 2001, is only the latest installment of a conflict that has continued for over a thousand years. This conflict, in their view, is destined to end with the hegemony of Islam. In the words of Osama bin Laden, jihad warriors the world over are fighting, “so that Allah’s Word and religion reign supreme.”3

All religions have an eschatology—a view of the future—that informs how its adherents live their lives today. The so-called “radical Muslim terrorists” are simply living in accordance with their scriptures. But why does it seem that all of this terrorist activity is increasing? It could very well be the result of the eschatology of the Shiite Muslims that are looking for the 12th Imam.

In Islam, as in Judaism and Christianity, there are certain beliefs concerning the cosmic struggle at the end of time—Gog and Magog, anti-Christ, Armageddon, and for Shiite Muslims, the long awaited return of the Hidden Imam, ending in the final victory of the forces of good over evil, however these may be defined. Mr. Ahmadinejad and his followers clearly believe that this time is now, and that the terminal struggle has already begun and is indeed well advanced. It may even have a date, indicated by several references by the Iranian president to giving his final answer to the U.S. about nuclear development by Aug. 22. This was at first reported as "by the end of August," but Mr. Ahmadinejad's statement was more precise.4

A corollary to this apocalyptic belief is the leveling of Israel, the “Mini-Me” or Little Satan to the Great Satan, the United States. In fact, Khamenei broadcast his support of Hezbollah in their recent attacks on Israel. “Your unprecedented holy war and steadfastness are beyond the limits of my description. It’s a divine victory. It is a victory of Islam. With God’s help you were able to prove that military superiority is not (measured) in the number (of soldiers), planes, warships and tanks. Rather, it depends on the power of faith and holy war. You have ridiculed the myth that the Zionist army is invincible.”5 The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah could very well be the barometer by which to measure the potential for Iran to use their nukes. If Hezbollah appears to be weakening or falling back, the Shiite Iranians would have no problem with pulling out the big guns to ensure that the stage is clear for the “Hidden Imam’s” return.

The phrase "Allah will know his own" is usually used to explain such apparently callous unconcern; it means that while infidel, i.e., non-Muslim, victims will go to a well-deserved punishment in hell, Muslims will be sent straight to heaven. According to this view, the bombers are in fact doing their Muslim victims a favor by giving them a quick pass to heaven and its delights—the rewards without the struggles of martyrdom. School textbooks tell young Iranians to be ready for a final global struggle against an evil enemy, named as the U.S., and to prepare themselves for the privileges of martyrdom.6

How can you possibly defeat an enemy that wants to die? This is one of the main attractions for young Muslim converts, like the plane bombers of Britain. Why struggle through life, hoping your good deeds outweigh your bad, when you can accept the call of martyrdom and get head-of-the-line privileges into “heaven?” Here at American Vision we struggle on a daily basis to convince Christians to get involved and take dominion of this world; instead of sitting around, believing the rapture is coming and this is all just a prophetic inevitability. Muslims are having the exact opposite problem. Their eschatology is such that they have volunteers waiting for a chance to sacrifice their life for Allah. The story of Ibrahim Savant, one of the 24 suspects arrested in England, brings a sobering reminder.

“My cousin, who went with Ibrahim to the same class, said that he converted, because one day he went to a priest and asked him some questions that he wanted to be answered,” [said] Hamza Ghafoor, 20, a Walthamstow resident and friend of Mr. Savant. “But the priest couldn’t give him any plausible answers,” Mr. Ghafoor added. “And so some of his friends told him to go to the mosque and ask the imam there. And he liked the way, how the imam answered him the questions. He was 18 years old when he converted.”7

Apologetics matter. The priest didn’t have the answer, so the 18-year-old went looking elsewhere. It’s about time that the Church and Christians begin to understand the very real danger of “spiritual warfare.” One’s belief in “first principles” will inform his entire walk of life. Jihad has been declared and the bombs and rockets are only the results of the individual or group’s beliefs and ideas. You can’t convince someone who is hell-bent on dying as a martyr with a machine gun or a tank. “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God…” (2 Cor. 10:3-5). The real holy war is a war of ideas, and the Church has the real nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, most Christians aren’t prepared to launch nuclear weapons. Much training is needed, much work is still to be done. We need to begin to view our churches as boot-camps and armament centers, instead of rest homes and hospitals.

1. “ Iran in fact has two governments: its formal democratic government run by Ahmadinejad and a religious-ideological command structure headed by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.” John von Heyking, “Iran’s President and the Politics of the Twelfth Imam,” Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs, November, 2005. Online here.

2. Ian Fisher, “Shock Reverberates Among Acquaintances of the Young Suspects,” NYTimes, August 12, 2006. Online here.

3. Robert Spencer, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2005), 184.

4. Bernard Lewis, “August 22; Does Iran have something in store?” Opinion Journal, WSJ.com, August 8, 2006. Online here.

5. http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060816/D8JHOAT00.html

6. Lewis, “August 22.”

7. Fisher, “Shock Reverberates.”

Lest We Forget, Part XXIII

2006-08-17T11:57:00.000-07:00

Evangelist Remains Faithful Amidst Persecution in Indonesia Prison. In full ...

An Indonesian Christian has been handed a 4-and-a-half year prison sentence for defaming Islam and its Prophet Muhammad.

Open Doors UK, a ministry working as a voice for the persecuted Church, has reported that Abraham ’Abe‘ Bentar, 55, has no choice but to adjust to his new life behind bars. Sentenced by the local court on 17 May for defaming Islam and its ‘prophet’ Muhammad, the evangelist now spends his days in Tasikmalaya prison in West Java province.

Although gradually recovering from the stroke that impaired his right arm, Abraham still struggles with high blood pressure and diabetes. Because of the medicines and food brought by his wife Waty, aged 36, and a local church, he manages well. Visits from his wife are difficult though because the only way she can visit him is by making a long and costly overnight bus journey.

The evangelist says he is battling discouragement and fear. When Open Doors visited him, it was said that it took a while before he recognised us and agreed to meet with us because he has received several unwanted ‘visitors’ who have been allowed to beat him.

"I have been abused many times. I have lost six teeth because of that," Abraham explained. Amongst those who abused him were Muslim 'visitors' attempting to reconvert Abraham to his former Islamic beliefs.

In a prison of almost 400 inmates, Abraham shares a cell with four others. However, he finds no difficulty in having personal quiet time and worship sessions, tell Open Doors.

“Everyday, I wake up at 3:00am to pray and sing praises. I stop at 4:00am to give my cellmates a turn to pray,” he explained.

He is free to fellowship with four other Christian prisoners on Sundays. Although he can give a sermon, he is prohibited from mentioning ‘Jesus Christ’. “I have to say ‘God’ instead,” he reports.

Other prisoners can hear the worship songs and seem to enjoy the melody, Abraham said, although they do not really understand what the songs are about.

Abraham testified, “[This is] nothing compared to what Paul and Jesus Christ went through.”

With this heart he has been able to reveal forgiveness to the ones who are persecuting him despite challenges in adjusting to life behind bars.

Following Abraham’s confession to the charges at his second hearing, the judges found him guilty and sentenced him as charged.

“But I am not guilty as charged. I was forced to confess under great pressure,” he said. “Up to now, I can’t stop thinking about what I have done. Other Christians must think I deserve to be jailed.”

The day before the hearing, several Muslim fanatics visited him in the prison. They interrogated him, saying, “Tell me, what have you gained by becoming a Christian?” Abraham replied, “Jesus Christ has been blessing me abundantly.”

A blow landed on Abraham’s head. When asked to recite the shahada (the Islamic faith declaration), Abraham refused. He received another blow, report Open Doors.

Meanwhile, Open Doors has been assisting Abraham’s family by paying the rent on their house in Central Java.

Eddie Lyle, CEO of Open Doors UK and Ireland commented, “It is so inspiring to hear of believers like Abraham who stay strong in their faith despite severe abuse and mistreatment. However, Abraham and his family still desperately need our support, letters and prayer. We urge Christians to participate in our prayer and letter-writing campaign for him and to also remember, if possible, many other imprisoned Christians and their families.”

Bob Dylan's Gospel Years

2006-08-17T11:28:00.000-07:00

You might be a rock 'n' roll addict prancing on the stage,
You might have drugs at your command, women in a cage;
You may be a business man or some high degree thief;
They may call you Doctor or they may call you Chief.

But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed;
You're gonna have to serve somebody;
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord;
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.

Bob Dylan

World Magazine previews a documentary on Bob Dylan's gospel years called Rolling Thunder and the Gospel Years in Like A Rolling Stone.

When asked in 1997 to explain the enduring popularity of his songs, Bob Dylan said, "What makes them different is that there's a foundation to them. . . . They're standing on a strong foundation, and subliminally that's what people are hearing." On Aug. 29 Columbia Records will release Dylan's 32nd studio album, Modern Times, and judging from song titles such as "Thunder on the Mountain," "Spirit on the Water," and "Beyond the Horizon," the specific foundation to which he was referring—old folk, country, blues, and gospel songs—still serves as the bedrock of his composition. Another title, "The Levee's Gonna Break," eerily underscores the fact that the album's release date coincides with the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Dylan recordings and catastrophes have coincided before. In 1997 he was hospitalized with a near-fatal heart infection after completing Time Out of Mind, and in 2001 his Love and Theft was released on Sept. 11. But his history with hurricanes goes all the way back to 1976, when he hit the top 40 with "Hurricane," his lengthy musical recounting of the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of the boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter.

The hit marked the beginning of a renewed period of creativity in Dylan's life. The song, the album on which it was included (Desire), and the tour Dylan undertook in its wake (the Rolling Thunder Review) serve as the starting point for Bob Dylan 1975-1981: Rolling Thunder and the Gospel Years (Highway 61 Entertainment), the latest in a series of investigatory documentaries by Joel Gilbert, the leader of the "world's only Bob Dylan tribute band," Highway 61 Revisited.

What makes Rolling Thunder and the Gospel Years unique, however, is that it is the only project of its kind to explore the years during which Dylan was scandalizing the pop-culture world with recordings and performances that proclaimed Jesus Christ as the only way to salvation.

"A lot of Dylan fans are not understanding or tolerant of Dylan's gospel period or the music," Gilbert told WORLD. "But they really should love that period. That's why I was happy to delve into the subject and help give an honest appraisal."

By interviewing members of Dylan's ever-shifting inner circles and acute observers on its periphery, Gilbert provides a wealth of insight into both the singer-songwriter (recently dubbed No. 1 of 100 best living songwriters by Paste magazine) and the effect of evangelism on contemporary society as a whole.

Christians will find Gilbert's interviews with those directly involved in Dylan's gospel music particularly interesting. Veteran producer Jerry Wexler, for instance, describes the often humorous challenges faced in recording Slow Train Coming with a largely religiously indifferent ensemble. "I had no idea what the content was going to be," says Wexler, now 89, "that it was going to be wall-to-wall Jesus. But I couldn't have cared less, and I don't care now. It could be the Yellow Pages. It's Bob, you know?"

Wexler also recalls Dylan's attempt to evangelize him: "I said, 'Bob, it ain't no use. You're talking to a 62-year-old, card-carrying Jewish atheist.' . . . He didn't try to work on me anymore."

Elsewhere, keyboardist Spooner Oldham and background singer Regina McCrary give firsthand accounts of performing Dylan's all-gospel sets to often hostile crowds. Providing equally revealing context are Joel Selvin (the San Francisco Chronicle critic whose panning of Dylan's new show both captured and helped set the tone for its hostile reception), Al Kasha (the award-winning songwriter and Messianic Jew at whose home Dylan composed portions of Slow Train Coming), and Mitch Glaser (the Jews for Jesus leader responsible for providing, at Dylan's request, on-the-spot evangelism and tract distribution at the San Francisco shows).

Gilbert's real coup, however, was coaxing Pastor Bill Dwyer, the teacher of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship Bible class that Dylan attended for several months, to speak on the record for the first time. "I first spoke to [Pastors] Ken Gulliksen and Larry Myers," says Gilbert, referring to the other Vineyard clergymen usually mentioned in connection with Dylan's conversion, "and they're the nicest people in the world to phone, but they're very hesitant to speak publicly. They were still in 'keep Bob's story private' mode. Even 27 years later, I had to go through quite a bit to convince them to take a different approach." Five months of "long conversations" on the phone and mailing material, he said, preceded a breakthrough.

The persistence paid off. Besides sharing entertaining anecdotes—Dylan's reciting from memory the beatitudes in the King James Version as a condition for passing the course, for instance—Dwyer also explains in uninterrupted detail what it means to be "born again," as does Dylan himself at one point, albeit in more elliptical terms.

Although copyright restrictions forbade Gilbert's inclusion of Dylan's music (a situation remedied in part by Gilbert's Dylan-simulating soundtrack), no such restrictions applied to his use of a brief, seldom-seen post-performance interview that Dylan gave to Pittsburgh's KDKA TV in 1980. "I can understand why they're rebellious about it," says Dylan, referring to the poor response of his gospel-tour audiences to his new music. "Up until the time the Lord came into my life, I didn't know nothing about this. I was just as rebellious and didn't think much about it either way."

Perhaps audiences were baffled because between the Rolling Thunder tour and the gospel albums, was Dylan's short-lived "Las Vegas" phase, his 1978 world tour with flashy onstage outfits and versions of his songs that were radically rearranged for his 11-member, i.e., "big," band. And even on this brief, seldom-examined period of Dylan's career, Gilbert unearths insightful information.

In an interview with Rob Stoner, for instance, Gilbert gets the former Dylan bassist and bandleader to reveal that he came up with that tour's notorious arrangements and did so to keep the then-37-year-old Dylan from being bored with performing songs that he had composed in his 20s ('60s hits like "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," "Mr. Tambourine Man," and "Like a Rolling Stone").

Gilbert admits that casual viewers might lack the background necessary for appreciating his latest DVD's almost obsessive attention to detail, but it's not, he says, the casual viewer that he's targeting. "This is for a Dylan fan that has some knowledge, has seen some of these performances, has heard the music. It's not intended as an A&E [production], where you show everything from the beginning. You only have time to go to a certain point. It starts at a midway point and takes you all the way to the end. Otherwise it would be an eight-hour DVD."

Gilbert, a conservative Jew reared in Oak Ridge, Tenn., brings an unusually varied perspective to his subject. "There were churches on every corner, and the people were very serious Christians," he says of Oak Ridge. "I grew up with respect and appreciation for who they were, and they respected my being part of a small Jewish minority in the Bible Belt. So I think I have a lot of sensitivity, appreciation, and respect for different religions."

As an adult Gilbert studied economics, Islam, and Arabic in London, working as a boxing promoter in Israel and managing alternative-rock bands in Los Angeles. It was while a student in London in the mid-'80s that the seeds of his career as a Bob Dylan impersonator were planted. "I saw Don't Look Back [D.A. Pennebaker's film of Dylan's 1965 British tour] on the BBC," he recalls. "And what struck me was that when Dylan was just speaking, he sounded like I did when I listened to myself speaking on tape. So I thought, 'Gee, if I can talk like him, maybe I could sing like him.' But I didn't take it seriously as a tribute for quite some time. It was more like something fun to do."

In carrying out the study necessary for him to perfect his act, Gilbert became aware of gaps in common Dylan lore, gaps that his DVDs seek to bridge. His first project, Bob Dylan World Tour 1966: The Home Movies (2002), consisted largely of amateur footage shot by the oft-overlooked drummer Mickey Jones, who temporarily filled in for Levon Helm when the group that would eventually become known as the Band was helping Dylan "go electric." Bob Dylan World Tours 1966-1975 (2005) combined a Gilbert-narrated visit to Dylan's late-'60s Woodstock home with the unveiling of dozens of previously unpublished photos by Dylan's erstwhile official tour photographer, Barry Feinstein.

With increased complexity has come increased viewing time, and casual viewers may complain that at four hours Rolling Thunder and the Gospel Years runs too long. Not that anyone who has sat through Martin Scorsese's three-and-a-half hour No Direction Home, Dylan's own sprawling four-hour Renaldo and Clara, or such misbegotten, too-long-at-any-length celluloid Hollywood Dylan vehicles as Hearts of Fire or Masked and Anonymous is likely to suffer impatience where Dylan films are concerned.

Sadly, Dylan seldom performs his gospel material these days. Despite occasionally revisiting "Saving Grace" several years ago, only "Every Grain of Sand" made the cut on his two most recent tours. So whether or how much such songs reflect his beliefs or affect his life is anyone's guess. Speculation will rise once again with the release of Modern Times and a month-long tour beginning this month playing 20 minor league ballparks with guitar legend Junior Brown. One thing that Rolling Thunder and the Gospel Years makes clear, however, is that those songs permanently affected, and continue to affect, the lives of countless others.

Where Does God Stand on Abortion?

2006-08-17T11:08:00.000-07:00

Gary DeMar offers a retort to the recent USA Today piece which asked Where Does God Stand on Abortion?

Here is the original. Here is Mr. DeMar's retort, in full ...

Tom Ehrich, an Episcopal minister and writer living in Durham, North Carolina, claims that the religious debate on the subject of abortion “is one best captured in shades of gray rather than . . . in black and white.”1 Ehrich asks where God stands on the issue and then only quotes Psalm 139 and Jeremiah 1:5. The Bible has a lot more to say on the subject.

The Bible attributes self-consciousness to preborn babies. Jacob and Esau are said to have “struggled together within” their mother’s womb (Gen. 25:22). The New Testament offers a similar glimpse into prenatal self-consciousness: “And it came about that when Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb” (Luke 1:41). Again, this is more than a hiccup. The preborn John was responding to the news of Jesus’ birth.

I’m surprised that Mr. Ehrich did not use Exodus 21:22–25 to determine where God stands on abortion. The passage reads as follows:

"If men struggle with each other and strike a woman with child so that she gives birth prematurely [lit., so that her children come out] yet there is no injury, he shall surely be fined as the woman's husband may demand of him, and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise."

The verb yatza (“come or go out”) refers to a live birth, not a miscarriage (Gen. 25:25, 26; 38:28–30; Jer. 1:5; 20:18). “Harm” has reference to both the mother and the child since the Hebrew word yeled is used for children already born. The mother and the baby are given equal status before the law. The text does not say, “yet there is no further injury to the mother” (Ex. 21:22). “Further injury” refers to the mother and child. If it is first established that yeled means “child,” which it does, then those case laws referring to persons, whether children or adults, must be applied. If the harm does not lead to the death of either the mother or the child, then a fine is paid to compensate the injured, either mother or the children who “come out” prematurely (21:18–19). If either the mother or the child is harmed in any way, the lex talionis applies.2 Meredith G. Kline offers a helpful summary of the passage:

This law found in Exodus 21:22–25 turns out to be perhaps the most decisive positive evidence in scripture that the fetus is to be regarded as a living person…. No matter whether one interprets the first or second penalty to have reference to a miscarriage, there is no difference in the treatments according to the fetus and the woman. Either way the fetus is regarded as a living person, so that to be criminally responsible for the destruction of the fetus is to forfeit one’s life…. The fetus, at any stage of development, is, in the eyes of this law, a living being, for life (nephesh) is attributed to it…. Consistently in the relevant data of Scripture a continuum of identity is evident between the fetus and the person subsequently born and Exodus 21:22–25 makes it clear that this prenatal human being is to be regarded as a separate and distinct human life.3

In terms of the Bible, abortion is not a debate “in shades of gray.”

1. Tom Ehrich, “Where is God stand on abortion?,” USA Today (August 14, 2006), 11A.

2. Is this law nullified by Jesus in Matthew 5:38? A careful comparison of Matthew 5:38 and Exodus 21:22–25 will show that there is a distinction between personal retaliation and judicial decisions. Jesus was dealing with personal relationships. The Exodus passage tells us that the lex talionis only applies “as the judges decide” (21:22). “If we assume that the woman is a mere bystander, and is only accidentally struck, then the penalty is strict indeed. Two men preparing to fight in the street would have to keep in mind that if they accidentally hurt a bystander, they will have to pay, even with the death penalty. This constitutes a very strong incentive to resort to arbitration rather than to violence.” (James B. Jordan, The Law of the Covenant: An Exposition of Exodus 21–23 [Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985], 114).

3. Meredith G. Kline, “Lex Talionis and the Human Fetus,” The Simon Greenleaf Law Review, 5 (1985–1986), 75, 83, 88–89. This article originally appeared in Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (September 1977).

Biblical Disputes Revive Question: What is an Evangelical?

2006-08-17T10:47:00.000-07:00

From the Associated Press via Christianpost.com ... Biblical Disputes Revive Question: What is an Evangelical? In full ...

University of Akron (Ohio) polling finds evangelical Protestants are the largest segment of actively religious Americans, outnumbering Roman Catholics. But the definition of "evangelical" is open to dispute.

That issue arises with "Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical's Lament" (Basic Books), a caustic tract by historian Randall Balmer of Barnard College in New York. He says the evangelical activists' agenda "is misguided, even ruinous" to "the nation I love and, ultimately, to the faith I love even more."

Unlike many recent books that attack the "religious right," Balmer grabs attention by claiming to defend God and country from within evangelicalism, though he acknowledges that many would deny him that label.

The loosely knit evangelicalism includes millions like lay Episcopalian Balmer in pluralistic "mainline" denominations, as well as members of conservative denominations and congregations.

By Balmer's definition, an evangelical "takes the Bible seriously" and often literally, emphasizes personal conversion to Jesus, and sees a necessity to evangelize.

Similarly, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) theologian Jack Rogers says evangelicals believe that people need a personal relationship with God through Christ, the Bible is the final authority for salvation and life, and everyone should hear about Jesus.

Like Balmer, Rogers has had his evangelical credentials questioned because he advocates full acceptance of same-sex couples and gay clergy, as in "Jesus, the Bible and Homosexuality" (Westminster John Knox). Years ago, he taught at evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary and opposed gay behavior.

Balmer complains that evangelicals refuse to read Paul's "apparent condemnations of homosexuality" as rooted in, and "arguably" limited to, "the historical and social circumstances of the first century."

Conservative scholars have published thorough rebuttals of the Balmer-Rogers stance.

Balmer is equally agitated about abortion, which set the pattern for later evangelical activism on gay issues. A libertarian, he believes abortion is "properly left to a woman and her conscience."

He charges that conservatives grabbed abortion "as the issue that would propel them to prominence," indicating that moral principle wasn't involved, only "shameless pursuit of affluence and power" through politics. He likewise says conservatives within mainline denominations exploit the gay issue to build their power base.

Defending that harsh judgment, he says evangelicals "take pride in a kind of slavish literalism" on the Bible, which never forbids abortion as such. Conservatives say biblical teaching requires opposition.

Balmer believes the activists "would love nothing more than to dismantle the First Amendment and enshrine evangelical values and mores as the law of the land," impose "intelligent design" upon biology classes, and end separation of church and state. Of course, liberal agitators continually enshrine the opposite values.

Balmer says, "I'll put up my credentials as an evangelical against anyone," and expects to be cast out because of this book, including possible ouster from the masthead of Christianity Today, the movement's flagship magazine.

Asked whether Balmer and Rogers are evangelicals, that magazine's editor David Neff (another lay Episcopalian) says they're "in a very small minority" on issues like gays and abortion. He'd consider them still within the fold "if they employ evangelical discourse and display evangelical piety," basing conclusions on the Bible rather than on current social science.

Neff considers Balmer and Rogers part of the evangelical family the way Woody Allen is Jewish — not representative of the group but shaped by it.

The question remains: Does Christianity have social ramifications? So preach the non-evangelical Protestants who enjoyed political influence through much of the 20th century. Balmer appears to believe the less activism the better and that faith is purer and more effective when it's unsoiled by politics.

He pronounces both the mainline denominations and the Democratic Party "virtually moribund."

Faithful to God & Science

2006-08-17T10:42:00.000-07:00

From the LA Times ... Faithful to God, Science. In full ...

The dying woman looked up at her physician. "What do you believe?"

The question unsettled Dr. Francis Collins. For days, he had watched the elderly woman serenely endure the pain of a failing heart, certain she was leaving this world for a better one. She talked to him often of her faith. He listened with bemusement.

He was a man of science; he had earned a PhD in physical chemistry at Yale and was completing his medical degree with bedside training at a North Carolina hospital. When his patients talked of God, he pitied them.

Yet confronted with the woman's earnest question, Collins felt not superior, but oddly ashamed. After 30 years, he still remembers how he flushed as he stammered: "I'm not really sure."

The patient died soon after. And Collins embarked on a journey of exploration that took him to the White House to discuss his landmark map of human DNA with President Clinton — and to a lonely mountain meadow, where he dropped to his knees one bright morning and surrendered himself to Jesus Christ.

A scientist and a believer. A born-again Christian and director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, a federal project with 550 employees, a $480 million annual budget and a mandate to explore every twist of the DNA that makes us who we are. The synthesis has brought Collins much joy and intellectual satisfaction. But he's frustrated, too, that he's perceived as such an oddity.

In his new book, "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief," Collins expresses his dismay at what he calls "the chasm between science and faith."

Evolution versus intelligent design. Darwin versus God. Embryonic stem-cell research versus the sanctity of human life.

"We act as though there's a battle going on," Collins said. "An irreconcilable conflict."

He feels no such conflict. He believes in evolution and in the resurrection. He wears a silver ring with a raised cross and works at a dining-room table painted with the double-helix of DNA.

Tall and trim, with gray hair; blue eyes; a relaxed, self-effacing manner; and just the barest hint of a Southern twang, Collins, 56, has set himself up as an emissary between two clashing worldviews.

He urges his fellow scientists to give up the arrogant assumption that the only questions worth asking are those science can answer. He entreats his fellow believers to recognize it's not blasphemous to learn about the world.

One day last summer, in the basement office of his suburban home here, Collins dictated this manifesto into a tape recorder: "Science is not threatened by God; it is enhanced. God is most certainly not threatened by science; He made it all possible." It became the central thesis of his book — with this addendum: "Abandon the battlements."

This plea for a truce encourages some veterans of the culture wars.

Polls routinely show that about half of all Americans believe God created man, fully formed, within the last 10,000 years, as the Bible recounts. The vast majority of scientists find that ludicrous, but their account of man evolving from primordial muck does not resonate broadly, especially with Christians who believe in a personal God, deeply concerned about each human life.

Collins, some hope, might bridge this gap by reassuring Christians that they can buy evolution without selling out their faith. Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, called Collins' book "extremely important … particularly because it was written from a conservative Christian view. This is not some Unitarian speaking."

Some Christians accuse Collins of denying the foundation of faith when he calls the Biblical creation account an allegory.

"Not accepting the history in Genesis undermines the entire gospel," said Ken Ham, president of a ministry called Answers in Genesis, which promotes creationism. "The Bible says from dust we come and to dust we return. We don't return to an ape-man when we die."

From the other camp, some scientists ridicule Collins' effort to find a place for God in the scientific framework.

"I could just as well say that there are 70 pink elephants revolving around the Earth," said Herbert A. Hauptman, a Nobel laureate in chemistry. Science and faith "are simply incompatible," he added. "There's no getting around it."

Collins took a roundabout route to the intersection of faith and science.

His parents both had graduate degrees from Yale but chose to live in the mountains of Virginia on a scruffy farm with no running water. His father traveled the rural South to record and preserve old folk songs; his mother home-schooled their four sons except when a creative fever gripped her and she shut herself in her room for a week at a time, writing plays.

As a boy, Collins attended an Episcopal church — under orders from his parents to ignore any mumbo-jumbo about God. He was there, they explained, strictly to learn to read music in the choir.

Entering college at age 16, Collins had no fixed ideas about God. He soon came up with one: Religion was for fools.

All that began to change when the dying woman asked Collins, then 26, what he believed. For months, he had been observing his patients draw comfort from faith; the question "made me realize that I had moved away from my certainty that this was all bunk into a curiosity," he said.

Collins considers evolution irrefutable; he has no doubt that all life emerged from a common ancestor over millions of years. But he began to ask himself whether God could have set this amazing process in motion:

Maybe it all appears random from Earth — as though man's existence is due to an improbable series of lucky breaks — but from God's perspective, perhaps evolution is a logical, even elegant, way to populate the planet. Maybe God intended mutations in DNA over the millennia to lead to the emergence of Homo sapiens. Once man arrived, maybe God set him apart from the other creatures by endowing him with knowledge of right and wrong, a sense of altruism and a yearning for spiritual nourishment.

Collins knew he could never prove any of these ideas, but that no longer troubled him the way it once had.

Science could reel back time 14 billion years to postulate a Big Bang that created the universe. But it could not explain what came before that singular moment — or how the energy that fueled the cosmic explosion came to be. Science clearly had limits. So it seemed unfair to Collins to reject the divine simply because God's existence could not be proved.

That argument frustrates Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg. Yes, he said, science does have limits. But attributing the unknown to God doesn't advance human knowledge or serve a useful purpose, except to give believers a "warm, fuzzy, reassuring feeling."

And given all the violence done in the name of religion, Weinberg argues that the world is better off without it. "It's something we have to grow out of," he said. "There will always be mystery, always things we don't fully understand. We just have to resign ourselves to that."

For a long time — even after he had convinced himself that God was plausible — Collins, too, was uneasy about organized religion. But the more he studied Scripture, the more he felt drawn to Christianity. Still he held back, afraid getting religion would turn him into a bore: "I'd become pious, tiresome, humorless. I'd suddenly feel I had to go to Africa and save millions."

Then one day in 1978, as he hiked past a glorious waterfall in Oregon's Cascade Mountains, Collins felt a stirring he could not resist. The next morning, he knelt in a meadow behind his motel and gave his life to Jesus. (To his relief, he found he still loved to ride motorcycles and crack jokes.)

Beginning his research career at the University of Michigan — where he discovered the genetic flaw that causes cystic fibrosis — Collins didn't hide his faith, but neither did he broadcast it. Polls have found that 40% of scientists believe, as Collins does, in a God who actively communicates with man. Among elite biologists, however, the figure is much lower, about 5%, and Collins has often felt at risk of ridicule among his peers.

Even today, when his book has brought the subject into the open, Collins avoids any mention of God when he addresses scientific audiences. He much prefers to sing instead.

At a recent lecture for students interested in genetics, Collins pulled out his guitar and offered to share some of the geeky lyrics he delights in writing. Stealing the tune to the Beatles' "You Really Got a Hold on Me," he belted out an ode to genetic discoveries over the ages, leading up to his breakthrough accomplishment of mapping the human genome:

Mendel had all his wrinkled peas

Darwin had all his finches' beaks

But oh, oh, oh, you can't stop us now

We really got the code on you …

As Collins sang, his creaky voice filling the auditorium of the Koshland Science Museum in Washington, the audience of about 30 hooted and cheered. A young man in the back held up a cigarette lighter. And that was as close to worship as the lecture got.

Lebanese Cardinal Concerned About Christian Exodus

2006-08-17T10:07:00.000-07:00

More on Christians in Lebanon ... Lebanese Cardinal Concerned About Christian Exodus. In full ...

Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, patriarch of the Maronite Church, is very concerned about the "progressive devastation" in Lebanon and "the growing outward migration of Christians, who are not returning."

"We held out in the Arab world for 2,000 years, but now things are going downhill at a rapid pace," he told Spiegel Online. "The current crisis is dramatically amplifying this tendency."

He speculated that if Hezbollah should ever take power in Lebanon, "Christians will leave the country in droves."

The cardinal said it was unfortunate that some Christians "make arrangements with Hezbollah - if only for tactical reasons." His statement was in response to an observation made by Spiegel that Christian General Michel Aoun, who could possibly be Lebanon's next president, has forged an alliance with Hezbollah.

The cardinal expressed his support for Prime Minister Siniora's peace plan, which calls for the disarmament of all Shiite militias.

"As soon as a cease-fire with Israel takes effect, as soon as the two sides exchange prisoners and the Shebaa Farms are returned to Lebanon, Hezbollah will no longer have the right to maintain an army," he said. "Hezbollah has become a state within a state, with help from Iran. That's not something we can continue to accept after the war."

The cardinal said Lebanon wants "orderly relations" with Syria. "We refuse to tolerate proxy wars on Lebanese territory. … That means Damascus must accept the demarcation of the Syrian-Lebanese border and release our prisoners."

The cardinal warned that Lebanon's greatest threat currently is Iran, which continues to ship weapons into the country.

A native of the Palestinian territories, the cardinal also told Spiegel that Lebanon wishes for the Palestinians "to have their own state on their home territory, just like we Lebanese have our own state. … But the struggle for Palestine cannot be fought from Lebanon, the smallest and weakest state in the Arab world."

The cardinal said he only expects peace with Israel once "all other Arab states have signed a peace treaty with Israel, too."

The Evangelical Left

2006-08-16T12:56:00.000-07:00

More on Rev. Gregory Boyd ... The Evangelical Left in Crosswalk.com, reprinting an article from The Weekly Standard. In full ...

THE JULY 30 NEW YORK TIMES gave prominent coverage to a Minnesota mega-church pastor who disavowed the Religious Right ("Disowning Conservative Politics, Evangelical Pastor Rattles Flock"). The Rev. Gregory Boyd, ostensibly fed up by the political pressures of the 2004 presidential race, gave a sermon series denouncing the shibboleths of politically conservative religionists. In response, 1,000 of his 5,000 member congregation ended up leaving the church.

Others in the church, the Times reported, were delighted and "liberated" by Boyd's stance. In May, his book, The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power is Destroying the Church, was released, cataloguing his theology on religion and the state. He wants the church out of politics, to stop its focus on sexual issues, and to abandon any notions of a Christian America, past or present. Boyd may represent a trend among a new generation of evangelical clergy who want to overturn conservative stereotypes about the evangelical subculture.

BOYD IS A PRINCETON and Yale-trained minister who founded Woodland Hills Church in suburban St. Paul in 1992. Formerly a "oneness Pentecostal" who denied the Trinity, Boyd eventually rejected that view in favor of orthodox Trinitarianism. But he embraced another heterodoxy while teaching at Bethel College in St. Paul, where he advocated "open theism," which denies, or minimizes, God's foreknowledge of the future. The website of Boyd's church declares that "we . . . recognize the current disagreement among evangelical Christians about the biblical data regarding the content of the future that God perfectly knows" and describes Woodland Hills Church as not having a "single position" on this issue. An effort by some in Boyd's Baptist General Conference to oust him from the denomination failed.

Beyond "open theism," Woodland Hills Church appears to be a conventional evangelical mega-church, whose theology is orthodox, and which disapproves of homosexual practice and abortion. Supposedly after years of pressure to distribute conservative voter guides and endorse anti-gay marriage rallies, Boyd exploded with his 2004 sermon series on "The Cross and the Sword." He intoned: "When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses." Boyd accused the evangelical church of exchanging the Gospel for political power and American nationalism.

Although supposedly shunning both political left and right, almost all of Boyd's fire is aimed at conservatives, mostly fellow evangelicals. "I am sorry to tell you," he preached in one 2004 sermon, "that America is not the light of the world and the hope of the world," a view that he ascribes to his targets. He chastised the "hypocrisy and pettiness" of evangelicals who dwell on "sexual issues" like homosexuality and abortion. American evangelicalism, he said, "is guilty of nationalistic and political idolatry."

Boyd is blunt in his critique of America. "Our country was founded pretty much as most nations were founded--thru barbaric violence," he recently told a radio interviewer. "It was a conquering kind and 10 to 20 million Native Americans were killed [which was followed by] the enslavement of African Americans."

But because too many Christians propagate the myth of Christian America, "many now hear the good news of Jesus only as American news, capitalistic news, imperialistic news, exploitive news, antigay news, or Republican news," he complained. For many, "the American flag has smothered the glory of the cross, and the ugliness of our American version of Caesar has squelched the radiant love of Christ."

Because Americans have believed that, "God's will was manifested in the conquest and founding of our country," they "have assumed our nation's causes and wars were righteous and just." Power-hungry Christians are the problem across history. "When Christians get into power it's destructive to the church," Boyd has said. Christian rulers have been "barbaric" in practicing "persecution" and "bloodshed."

While conservative activists and others want "Christians to run the nation," Boyd warns that Christians should "keep from being polluted." He asserts: "You can't have Christ-like laws." God may use the governments of the world, and Christians may be obedient to them, but the faith has little to nothing to say about politics.

In Myth of a Christian Nation, Boyd quotes from and appears to rely upon the late Mennonite theologian and pacifist John Howard Yoder, who rejected all statecraft as coercive. Yoder, who taught at Notre Dame, portrayed Christ's submission to crucifixion as a rejection of all violence. Christians, rather than seeking political power, should simply model their sacrificial love through the church. Yoder's colleague, Stanley Hauerwas, now teaches at Duke Divinity School and, is Yoder's main apostle (Time magazine declared Hauerwas to be America's most influential theologian).

Despite their ostensibly rejecting politics, Yoder-Hauerwas fans are typically condemning of America as "empire." After 9/11, Hauerwas suggested that America got its just desserts, comparing it to Chile's supposed equivalent of 9/11 on September 11, 1973, when Socialist Salvador Allende was overthrown by the Chilean military.

Boyd makes points not dissimilar to Hauerwas's. In Myth of a Christian Nation, he says that the "horrendous" abuse by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib led to the Iraqi terrorist beheading of John Berg. "You can begin to understand why, given our passionate convictions and given their passionate convictions, this bloody tit-for-tat game is almost inevitable," he writes, attributing both passions to "tribal" loyalties.

Will evangelicals hearken to the separatist, neo-Anabaptist mindset that Boyd espouses, as transmitted through Yoder and Hauerwas? It seems unlikely, but Yoder and Hauerwas are popular in many evangelical seminaries. For evangelicals uninspired by the traditional Religious Right, the Yoder-Hauerwas model seems to offer an alternative, without succumbing to theological liberalism. Expect to hear more from such disciples as Rev. Boyd.

AIDS Conferees Jeer Mention of Abstinence as Preventive Measure

2006-08-16T12:47:00.000-07:00

Interesting quote in AIDS Conferees Jeer Mention of Abstinence as Preventive Measure, from Agape Press.

"He (Dr. Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute) points out that billions of American dollars are spent trying to convince smokers to quit smoking -- yet homosexuals are told researchers will do all they can to stem the spread of AIDS so that they can continue to have sex, the number-one cause of AIDS. Cameron feels there is no logic to such an approach."

Here's the whole thing ...

Pro-family advocates say the International AIDS Conference taking place in Toronto this week is a huge waste of time and money -- as well as an opportunity for those in attendance to take a swipe at sexual abstinence as a way to combat the deadly disease.

The opening remarks at the 16th International AIDS Conference were delivered by software guru and multi-millionaire Bill Gates. Family Research Council president Tony Perkins says Gates' comments were well received -- until he brought up the subject of sexual abstinence and fidelity in marriage, which he suggested as possible strategies in combating AIDS. According to Perkins, the hall "erupted" in loud boos.

"Their reaction is very instructive," comments Perkins. "We see here the open hostility of the international AIDS 'community' to anything but the promotion of condoms as a means of combating the spread of AIDS."

Gates wasn't the only Bill to take the conference podium in Canada. Former President Bill Clinton also spoke, praising the White House's "ABC" approach (Abstinence, Be faithful, Condoms) to battle AIDS in Africa -- but blasting the Bush administration's support of abstinence-only education programs in the U.S. Clinton also said he supports government-funded needle-exchange programs as a way to reduce transmission of the AIDS virus.

According to a story in the Globe and Mail newspaper, the former president believes a combination of science, social change, and political will is what is need to "break the back of AIDS."

Illogical Approach
Dr. Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute says this AIDS conference will go the same route as those in the past, totally ignoring the preventive aspect of AIDS. "You never hear calls for prevention," Cameron observes. "You hear calls for preventive medicine, maybe a vaccine, so that homosexuals can still do sex."

He points out that billions of American dollars are spent trying to convince smokers to quit smoking -- yet homosexuals are told researchers will do all they can to stem the spread of AIDS so that they can continue to have sex, the number-one cause of AIDS. Cameron feels there is no logic to such an approach.

Dr. Cameron has attended the International AIDS Conference before, but has been denied a booth to promote abstinence of homosexual sex as a preventive measure.

'Aborted' Baby Born Alive, Authorities Say

2006-08-16T12:36:00.000-07:00

'Aborted' baby born alive, authorities say, from WorldNet Daily, in full ...

An investigation into the remains of a baby found at a Hialeah, Fla., abortion clinic in July has determined that the child was born alive, but authorities say it may come down to an interpretation of federal law whether charges will be filed.

The case developed at the end of July when the remains were found in a biohazard bag at "A Gynecologists Diagnostic Center" after an anonymous 911 call reported to police that a child had been born alive, then killed.

Infants' remains at an abortion clinic are not a violation of the law -- unless that child was born alive, in which case the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2000 takes effect.

The Miami-Dade County medical examiner and police in Hialeah have been investigating, and now local investigators in the South Florida city have confirmed the child was born alive.

Hialeah Deputy Police Chief Mark Overton recently told WorldNetDaily columnist Jill Stanek that the medical examiner ruled the baby was born alive, but state attorneys were trying to determine if the child was viable, or able to live outside the womb.

At the time the body was found, a lawyer for the owner of the abortion business issued a statement that no crime was committed, and an 18-year-old had had an abortion without complications.

"My clients run an abortion clinic. It's a legal business," Regina DeMoraes-Millan told television station WFOR-TV in Miami-Fort Lauderdale at the time. "Right now police are just investigating a 9-1-1 call."

Police were called to the Hialeah clinic on July 20 after a report that a person – identified by Overton as clinic owner Belkis Gonzalez – took the infant and placed it in the biohazard bag. But police were unable to investigate because the clinic was closed when they arrived.

After getting the mother's name, police obtained a search warrant, but on July 22 found nothing in their search, Stanek's sources reported.

Then on July 29, after another anonymous tip, officers returned and found the decomposing body in the bag.

Since then, the investigation has gone on, but now Overton has confirmed to Stanek that he's ready to move it to the next level, if a homicide count isn't coming.

"I will make a request to have the case reviewed by a higher authority and go to the media, regardless of the outcome," he told her.

At the time the body was found, a spokeswoman for Florida Right to Life told WND that babies' bodies in an abortion clinic are just "business as usual" for the industry.

Spokeswoman Linda Bell said there are very few protections for the mother, and essentially none for the unborn children, as a "result of legalized abortion in our nation."

Hialeah investigator Det. Tony Rodriquez expressed immediate concern about the situation, too.

"In 24 years in law enforcement, I have never seen a case like this," he had told reporters.

Witnesses told police the woman went in for an abortion, and returned the next day but an abortionist wasn't immediately available. While she was in a room, she gave birth to the child, witnesses told police.

The witnesses said the clinic worker then came in and put the baby in the bag.

Bell said her organization and others concerned about life repeatedly have tried to get basic health clinic rules applied to abortion businesses, without success to date.

"Unfortunately, that's the mentality of this country, that the abortion business is not subject (to rules)," she told WND. "This is the result of that."

One of the witnesses in the case is the mother of the child, police have said.

A report by the Miami Herald said state records show the clinic is one of a group owned and run by the same people. The records show the owner is Gonzalez, of Miramar, who also was listed as the owner of the Miramar clinic that was closed in 2005 after several workers were accused of practicing medicine without a license.

The state Department of Health concluded that one worker, Roberto A. Osborne, failed to treat a woman after giving her an abortion in 2000 and he pleaded guilty in 2005 to performing medicine without a license, a third-degree felony.

Bell also noted the Miramar clinic at one point promoted a cleaning woman to medical assistant so she could assist with abortions. Bell said the woman later pleaded guilty to nursing without a license.

Conservatives Put Faith in Church Voter Drives

2006-08-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

Conservatives Put Faith in Church Voter Drives is an article -- from the LA Times -- that will certainly irritate liberals to no end. In full ...

As discontent with the Republican Party threatens to dampen the turnout of conservative voters in November, evangelical leaders are launching a massive registration drive that could help counter the malaise and mobilize new religious voters in battleground states.

The program, coordinated by the Colorado-based group Focus on the Family and its influential founder, James C. Dobson, would use a variety of methods — including information inserted in church publications and booths placed outside worship services — to recruit millions of new voters in 2006 and beyond.

The effort builds on the aggressive courtship of evangelical voters in 2004 by President Bush's reelection campaign, even as the Internal Revenue Service has announced renewed scrutiny of nonprofit organizations, including churches, that engage in political activities.

The new voter registration program puts a special focus this year on eight states with key Senate, House and state-level races. Turning out core voters is central to the GOP strategy to retain control of Congress, especially as the party struggles with negative public sentiment over the war in Iraq and other administration policies.

"Any time you go from a big presidential year like 2004 to an off-year like this, there's going to be a drop-off" in voter interest, said John Paulton of Focus on the Family Action, the political arm of Focus on the Family. "It's a question of how much. You could argue that the fear of what could happen if many more liberal politicians take over could be very motivating to get out and vote as strongly."

The program, announced in an e-mail to activists last week, is seeking county and church coordinators in the targeted states of Maryland, Montana, Tennessee, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Minnesota.

"In 2004, about 25 million evangelicals failed to vote. Now is the time to reverse the trend," the e-mail said.

According to the e-mail, county coordinators are being asked to work about five hours a week and would be responsible for "recruiting key evangelical churches."

The church coordinators, devoting one or two hours per week, would be in charge of "encouraging pastors to speak about Christian citizenship, conducting a voter-registration drive, distributing voter guides and get-out-the-vote efforts."

Registering voters in churches is not a new tactic for either party, but Republicans have proved far more effective in recent years at combining religion and politics for electoral gain.

Critics say the practice is potentially illegal, citing tax laws that prohibit churches from engaging in partisan activities.

The IRS has launched a program to crack down on violators, with investigations pending against dozens of churches.

The IRS probe with the highest profile is that of All Saints Church in Pasadena, one of Southern California's largest and most liberal congregations.

After a priest delivered a sermon critical of the Iraq war two days before the 2004 presidential election, the IRS began reviewing the Episcopal church's tax-exempt status. No decision has been announced.

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called the evangelical voter registration drive a "blatant effort by Dobson to build a partisan political machine based in churches."

"He has made it abundantly clear that electing Republicans is an integral part of his agenda, and he doesn't mind risking the tax exemption of churches in the process," Lynn said. "Dobson wants to be a major political boss, and this is his way to get there."

Organizers of the drive say they pay careful attention to the law — focusing on registering voters and discussions of values, not endorsing a specific candidate or party.

But, they acknowledge, the goal is reaching the conservative base.

"Everybody knows where their audience is, and we know who our audience is," said Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values, an Ohio-based group coordinating voter registration with Dobson's organization.

"Absolutely we can target who we want to register to vote," he said. "There's nothing that prevents us from doing that."

He said that in Ohio, where this year's Senate and gubernatorial races are highly competitive, the plan calls for 3 million bulletins detailing voter registration procedures to be placed in publications distributed by 15,000 churches.

The group will also distribute voter guides listing candidates' views on same-sex marriage, abortion, stem cell research and other hot-button issues.

In 2004, Burress said, his group registered more than 50,000 voters, largely because of a ballot measure seeking a ban on same-sex-marriage, a campaign he headed.

This year, a potential ban on same-sex marriage is on the ballot in Tennessee, where there is a competitive Senate race. Legal and political battles are also raging over the issue in three of the other targeted states: Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Maryland.

The Republican Party is escalating its own courtship of evangelicals, registering voters at Christian rock concerts, state fairs and other events that draw religious activists and core conservatives.

The effort has been complicated in recent months, though, with Dobson and other evangelical leaders expressing disappointment in Bush and the Republican leadership.

They were pleased with Bush's nominations of John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court, but distressed by Congress' failure to approve a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and its support of expanded federal spending on embryonic stem cell research.

Bush used the first veto of his presidency on the stem cell bill, a move that some viewed as an effort to mobilize evangelicals.

In May, Dobson warned the GOP that trouble might lie ahead, holding a series of meetings with party strategists and members of Congress to remind them of the evangelical movement's muscle.

"There's just very, very little to show for what has happened," Dobson said on Fox News' "Hannity & Colmes" show at the time, "and I think there's going to be some trouble down the road if they don't get on the ball."

Bono: Christ Won't Let the Church Walk Away from AIDS Crisis

2006-08-13T16:30:00.000-07:00

From the Christian Post ... Bono: Christ Won't Let the Church Walk Away from AIDS Crisis. In full ...

Megachurch pastor Bill Hybels received a phone message from someone named Bono – a rock star to millions around the world, but a person Hybels, a country music fan, knew little of.

When he returned the surprising call, Hybels soon discovered that God had orchestrated the crossing of paths with a person that would open his eyes and heart in new ways – a person who was trying to "vision-cast" the churches and wake them up to the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

"I never liked the church," U2's Bono said in an exclusive interview with Hybels, which was featured at the 2006 Leadership Summit on Friday. But ever since the rock star took a Live Aid trip to Ethiopia two decades ago and revisited the questions raised then on poverty and disease, he's been on a mission to get the world and especially the churches on board to fix what is "fixable," as Bono said.

He pondered, how come churches aren't getting on board with the greatest social cause of the day?

Bono himself has been using his celebrity influence to bring attention to the heart-wrenching scene in Africa.

"Music is my first love," he told Hybels, thanking God for his gift. A melody playing in his head inspires him to get up every morning. Bono pointed out another reason that gets him up each day: the ONE Campaign. The campaign, voiced by a host of celebrities with Bono as the leading man, as well as faith communities, was launched to mobilize Americans for the cause of poverty and HIV/AIDS.

Calling the "celebrity" thing "ridiculous," Bono plainly stated, "I'm a rock star ... but I have a head for the world's poor."

Bono – TIME magazine's 2005 Person of the Year along with Bill and Melinda Gates – was featured at the Leadership Summit because he "understands influence," which is what leadership is all about, Hybels explained. And he's leveraging his influence for the sake of the poor and sick.

We want to represent the most poor and vulnerable, Bono said.

When Bono came into Hybels' life, the megachurch pastor found it "ironic" that a rock star was approaching the church with a cry to help the poor and the sick – a command that Jesus had clearly given and that churches were typically known to do. However, churches have always been behind on such issues, said Bono. And he explained the reason being a fear of politics and a judgmental attitude about the AIDS virus.

While churches have largely been in the charity and homeless feeding scene in their local communities, their presence has been foreign to the millions suffering from HIV/AIDS.

Charity is important, Bono noted, but the desire of the churches for justice is what the world really needs, he added.

Responding to the absence, the rock star emphatically said, "Christ won't let the church walk away from the AIDS emergency."

Church leaders agreed. After Bono's comment, applause rung out among the Leadership Summit attendants at Willow Creek and the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn – one of some 125 “satellite sites” nationwide participating in the annual leadership conference.

"'Love thy neighbor' is not advice," said the rock artist. "It's a command.

"We can be the instrument of God's grace."

Speaking from the pulpit, as Hybels described it, to tens of thousands of church leaders, Bono told them, "Let's walk together ... [and] stand up for the least of these."

And in recent years, the Church has stood up, or as Bono described it, "something dreadful happened – the Church started to wake up." He now holds respect for the Church.

In partnership with World Vision, Willow Creek Association created the Courageous Leadership Award where the church that most exemplifies the gospel in action (associated with HIV/AIDS service), will be awarded $100,000 to help fund that particular church initiative. The winner will be selected and awarded at next year's Leadership Summit.

In the meantime, the exclusive interview with Bono which includes scenes of U2 concerts is being made available, by Bono's permission, to each church that wants to show it to awaken the congregation to the AIDS pandemic. Copies will be made only from Willow Creek and from there distributed.

Evangelicals Quiet about War

2006-08-11T14:10:00.000-07:00

The media has trouble covering evangelical Christians. They would love to have one voice to go to that represents all Evangelicals, as they have with the Pope for Catholics. Lacking that, they assign spokespeople, everyone from Pat Robertson to Jerry Falwell to James Dobson.

To wit ... from AP Religion writer Rachel Zoll ... Evangelicals quiet about war.

In the flurry of pro and con statements from American Christians regarding Israel's strikes on Hezbollah guerrillas, one major religious group has remained notably quiet -- evangelicals.

The most influential organizations in the movement, usually vocal backers of the Jewish state, have made no formal comment on the war in Lebanon despite pleas from Israelis that they do so.

Among those who have taken no official stand are the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents thousands of local churches and ministries, the 16.2 million-member Southern Baptist Convention and James Dobson's Focus on the Family.

The Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the evangelical association, insists the inaction is not a criticism of Israel, but reflects a new caution about the risks for Christians living in Muslim countries. After the Sept. 11 attacks, American evangelicals came out strongly against terrorists, with some calling Islam a violent religion. That created a backlash overseas.

Haggard said Israeli embassy officials called him several times a day during the first two weeks of the conflict, which erupted last month, asking for a public expression of support. He declined.

"Our silence is not a rejection of Israel or even a hesitation about Israel. Our silence is to try to protect people," said Haggard, pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colo. "There's a rapidly growing evangelical population in virtually every Islamic country. Much of it is underground in the countries that are more radicalized, and many of the Christians survive based on their neighbors just ignoring the fact that they don't go to mosque."

Asked for comment, Richard Land, head of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, said only that, "Southern Baptists overwhelmingly support Israel's right to live at peace with her neighbors within secure borders and they pray for the peace of Jerusalem to prevail in the Middle East."

Paul Hetrick, a spokesman for Focus on the Family, said Friday that his organization was "contemplating issuing a statement."

The three groups have far greater impact on public policy than do Christian Zionists, a minority among conservative Christians who back Israel unequivocally because they see its existence as part of biblical prophesy.

Many evangelicals have individually expressed support for Israel. Evangelist Pat Robertson was in Jerusalem this week, where he joined hands with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to pray for victory in Lebanon.

However, Robertson's support among American evangelicals is waning and other conservative Christians have quietly expressed concern about the hundreds of Lebanese civilians killed.

While Israel is the biblical homeland, Lebanon also holds a special place in the Christian community.

About 36 percent of its population is Christian, comprised mostly of Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics, according to the World Christian Database at Gordon Conwell-Theological Seminary. And Christians across the spectrum of belief have long-standing missionary ties there, setting up hospitals, schools and other ministries.

The Web site of Christianity Today, a top evangelical magazine, has drawn comments from Lebanese Christians pleading with evangelicals to do more to end the violence.

"I think there is a little concern about being too closely identified with Israel on the part of some evangelicals," said Corwin Smidt, a political scientist at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., who studies evangelicals. "I think there is some uneasiness."

Those reservations have mainly been expressed by the Roman Catholic Church and the more liberal mainline Protestant groups. The World Council of Churches, which represents about 350 Protestant and Orthodox Christian churches, along with the Lutheran World Federation and the Vatican have repeatedly called for a cease-fire.

Nathan Diament, public policy director for the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, which has strengthened ties with evangelicals in the last few years, said "Israel needs as many friends as she can get right now," but he was not worried that some groups have not spoken out.

"I don't think anyone doubts the great support that Israel has in the evangelical community," he said.

India: Supreme Court Ruling Will Greatly Advance Persecution of Christians

2006-08-11T13:26:00.000-07:00

From Crosswalk.com ... India: Supreme Court Ruling Will Greatly Advance Persecution. In full ...

Police no longer require warrants to arrest and detain Christians accused of "proselytisation." On Friday 4 August, India's Supreme Court ruled that police do not require warrants in order to lodge First Issue Reports (FIRs), arrest and detain anyone accused of involvement in religious conversion activities.

Hindu Taliban
Clearly this ruling opens the door for police with Hindutva sympathies to act as Hindu Taliban. It also opens the door for Hindutva forces to employ corrupt and sympathetic police as their agents of persecution.

Nuns, pastors, bishops and evangelists, as well as Christian aid workers, teachers and social workers, are all immediately at risk of arrest and imprisonment because of their Christian witness. In fact every Christian, actively witnessing or not, is at risk from hostile elements that may exploit the opportunity to bring false charges against them, inspired by a variety of motives, in the same manner that the blasphemy law is exploited for personal gain in Pakistan.

No Sanction Required
The Times of India reports: "Despite the bar on courts to take cognizance of an offence relating to proselytisation without the prosecution obtaining prior sanction either from the Central government, state government or the district magistrate, the police can lodge FIRs and arrest those indulging in such activity, the court has ruled." (See story).

"A Bench comprising Justices G P Mathur and Dalveer Bhandari said police do not require prior sanction of anybody in lodging an FIR or arresting a religious leader, if there is a complaint of proselytisation against him."

Previously the practice had been that police would follow Section 191(1-A) of the Criminal Procedure Code. The Times of India explains, "Section 191(1-A) of CrPC says that 'no court shall take cognizance' of an offence involving inducement for conversion unless the prosecution has obtained previous sanction of the 'Central government or of the state government or of the district magistrate'." This protected religious leaders from harassment at the hands of police.

By its ruling, the Supreme Court has drawn a clear distinction between courts taking cognizance of an offence pertaining to proselytisation, and police lodging FIRs and arresting the religious figures alleged to be proselytising. So courts require a warrant before they hear a proselytism case, but police do not require a warrant to file criminal charges or to arrest and detain those so accused – those who should be regarded as innocent until proven guilty.

Trigger
In January 2005, Pastor Paulraj Raju of Kanartaka state was beaten by local Hindus and later arrested by local police on charges of attempting to convert Hindus. A criminal case was registered against Pastor Raju on 15 January 2005. His wife filed a petition against the arrest on 27 January 2005 and the proceedings were quashed by the Karnataka High Court on 23 February 2005, while the investigation was continuing, on the grounds that police had arrested Pastor Raju and registered the case without first obtaining a warrant and therefore the proceedings were illegal. Pastor Raju was released on 3 March 2005. However, the Karnataka government then appealed against the High Court order which quashed the case against him.

Familiar with Persecution
Pastor Paulraj Raju is familiar with persecution. He was attacked also on 1 May 2005. On that occasion he was so badly beaten he required hospitalisation. According to Compass Direct around 60 people were meeting in Pastor Raju's home in Mangalwarapete village near the Mysore district in Karnataka state when a 500-strong mob of Hindu militants and nationalists entered and violently attacked Pastor Raju, his wife, and other Christians, leaving both Pastor Raju and his wife bleeding profusely.

Supreme Court Explains Ruling - Denies Miscarriage of Justice
The Times of India reports: "The [Supreme] court explained that absence of prior sanction, a mandatory pre-requisite for a court to take cognizance of such offence, would not prevent a magistrate from remanding to police or judicial custody of an accused arrested by the police for the offence of proselytisation.

"There is no bar against registration of a criminal case or investigation by the police agency or submission of a chargesheet against the accused in such cases, Justice Mathur, writing for the Bench, said.

"Mere production of the arrested accused before the magistrate and the latter remanding him to custodial detention does not amount to taking cognizance of the offence, for which alone prior sanction is required, the Bench said."

IndLaw.com reports: "The apex court further ruled 'The specified authority empowered to grant sanction does so after applying its mind to the material collected during the course of investigation. There is no occasion for grant of sanction soon after FIR is lodged nor such a power can be exercised before completion of the investigation and collection of the evidence. Therefore the whole premises on the basis of which the proceedings have been quashed by the high court is wholly erroneous in law and is liable to be set aside."

IndLaw continues: "The Supreme Court in its concluding remarks observed, 'Power can be exercised to quash the criminal proceedings pending in any court but the power cannot be exercised to interfere with the statutory power of the police to conduct investigation in a cognizable offence. This being the settled legal position, the high court ought not to have interfered with and quashed the entire proceedings in exercise of power conferred by section 482 Cr P C when the matter was still at the investigation stage.'

"The apex court also described as wholly unjustified the sweeping remarks made by the High Court that initiation of criminal proceedings was an abuse of the courts process court and miscarriage of justice."

That a person can be arrested and detained without warrant is indeed a gross miscarriage of justice and abuse of human rights. It will certainly advance the Hindutva agenda and the persecution of Christians in India.

"The J Word" Illegal among US Navy Chaplains?

2006-08-11T13:14:00.000-07:00

Previously on the 522: Christianity is Being Criminalized in the US Navy.

From World Net Daily ... Praying Chaplain Faces Court Date.

A priest in the Evangelical Episcopal Church who has served as a U.S. Navy chaplain is asking a military court to dismiss a series of complaints filed against him after he was caught praying in "Jesus" name.

A pretrial hearing is scheduled Monday for Chaplain Gordon James Klingenschmitt, who is accused of participating in a March 30 event with former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore in front of the White House. He's also accused of telling the congregation at the funeral of an accident victim the man had given his life to "Christ."

Lt. Klingenschmitt told WorldNetDaily he prayed at the White House event, as historically has been allowed for military chaplains, but didn't express political or other views while in uniform. And at the funeral, he talked about the victim's faith.

"I was preaching at a memorial service, honoring the Christian faith of the deceased sailor, saying he's in heaven today because of his faith in Jesus Christ," Klingenschmitt said.

He said his superior officer, Capt. James R. Carr, then punished him for speaking about Jesus, and that decision was affirmed by officers higher up in rank.

Monday, his lawyer will argue in the hearing at Naval Station Norfolk, Va., that his commander's order that he not wear his uniform and speak of Jesus was illegal, that his prosecutors and judges so far, in fact, have been the same people, and the Navy has refused to document evidence in the case.

The chaplain, who earlier this year staged an 18-day hunger strike to protest the military's new prayer policy, also has filed a whistleblower complaint with Congress because of his commander's criticism that preaching about Jesus is "exclusive" and that offended people.

Klingenschmitt told WND the new prayer policy, essentially, allows only generic prayer.

The order not to pray in Jesus name was inappropriate, Klingenschmitt's motion to dismiss argues, because federal law "expressly protects a chaplain's right to 'conduct public worship according to the manner and forms of the church of which he is a member.'"

"The very symbol upon the Chaplain's uniform, a cross to symbolize his Christian faith, implies that his public religious speech during public prayer is not the 'official view of the government,' yet still permitted in the uniform," the motion says. "For the government to attempt to punish a chaplain for publicly saying two prayers and reading from the Bible in uniform would impermissibly violate the chaplain's right protected by the U.S. Code to speak as an officer specifically commissioned to represent the official views and worship style of his church."

When Klingenschmitt was told not to wear a uniform at a church service, "his rights to the free exercise of religion, speech, to assemble and petition the government were all impermissibly restricted," the motion says.

The order also violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it said. During a court challenge to that law, the federal court's conclusion was that an attempt to prevent military chaplains from discussing "political" issues violated the First Amendment.

"What we have here is the government's attempt to override the Constitution and the laws of the land by a directive that clearly interferes with military chaplains' free exercise and free speech rights," the decision said.

The case falls under the "whistleblower" framework because the restrictions were imposed only on Klingenschmitt shortly after he had contacted Congress and the president about the issues.

It was during this process and following his complaints that the U.S. House of Representatives approved a measure permitting chaplains to pray "according to the dictates of their conscience."

Another six dozen chaplains also have joined together in a civilian lawsuit that alleges the Navy hierarchy allows only those Christian ministers who advocate only non-sectarian blandishments to be promoted. Those with evangelical beliefs, they say, are routinely drummed from the Navy.

The lieutenant's second motion to dismiss is based on the fact that the charges against Klingenschmitt were filed under the general supervision of an admiral who clearly had an interest in the case.

"Not only has ADM (F.R.) Ruehe been the decision-making authority for previous complaints filed by Chaplain Klingenschmitt, but he also is currently the subject of several official complaints made against him personally … by Chaplain Klingenschmitt," the motion says.

The motions, prepared by Lt. Tiffany Hansen, JAG, and civilian defense counsel William J. Holmes, conclude with a motion noting that the government has declined to provide emails that were exchanged among the officers involved in disciplining Klingenschmitt unless he paid a fee in excess of $47,000.

The conversations among officers that led to Klingenschmitt's various punishments certainly are pertinent to making judgments on those actions, his motion says.

Turning Wine Into Grape Juice

2006-08-10T17:14:00.000-07:00

Being a history dork, I found this fascinating. From American Vision comes the history of unfermented wine: Turning Wine into Grape Juice.

A Methodist dentist, Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch, objected to the use of fermented wine in the communion service of his church in Vineland, New Jersey. He experimented in his kitchen to come with a non-alcoholic substitute which he named “Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine.” This was in 1869. He approached church officials to persuade them to substitute his beverage for the traditional wine. The elders regarded his suggestion as being an unacceptable innovation. His son Charles, who was also a dentist, changed the name to Welch’s Grape Juice. He promoted the product at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. He said that his work on the wine substitute was born “out of a passion to serve God by helping his church to give its communion (as) ‘the fruit of the vine’ instead of the ‘cup of devils.’” He set up a production facility in a barn behind the family home. Since the skins of grapes are covered with yeast, fermentation begins almost immediately after the yeast mixes with the juice. The juice has to be pasteurized to stop the fermentation process. Response was so overwhelming that he gave up dentistry and devoted full time to making and distributing grape juice. Many Christians claim that Jesus drank grape juice—the true fruit of the vine—and not wine. Since grape juice was not developed until the nineteenth century, it’s hardly possible that the wine mentioned in the Bible was actually grape juice. “Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan startles the world by serving Welch's Grape Juice instead of wine at a full-dress diplomatic function honoring the retiring British ambassador. Newspaper columnists, cartoonists and editors make much of it for months.” Today, Welch’s is a multi-million-dollar food company.