Father Zakaria Botros is perhaps the most hated man in the Middle East. He’s confronting Islam with an in-your-face style of television and internet evangelism.
[Read more…]
Coptic Priest Fearlessly Spreading God’s Word
Christian Persecution
Redefining the First Freedom
6/30/2010 – Chuck Colson –
For some time now, I’ve been warning you about the various threats to religious freedom. We’ve talked about the gay-rights movement, which insidiously insists that religious believers and organizations bow before the altar of sexual freedom. We’ve talked about the so-called health care reform bill, which does not protect the freedom of conscience of medical practitioners.
But now I’m seeing the threat to religious freedom in its most pernicious and dangerous form ever. I speak about this in my latest video commentary [see YouTube video below].
In a speech at Georgetown University, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered a speech on human rights. Not only did she talk about the right “to love in the way you choose,” (an obvious attempt at making protecting gay rights a top priority for the U.S. government), she also talked about “freedom of worship.”
But she never mentioned freedom of religion. Only freedom of worship. This is a big change.[Read more…]
Shocking Setback for Religious Freedom in Supreme Court
6/30/2010 – Ken Klukowski –
On June 28, the Supreme Court handed down a deeply-disturbing decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez that sets back religious freedom in this country. This case was nothing more than the Court expressing outright hostility to a group because of its orthodox Christian beliefs.
Christian Legal Society (CLS) is an association of Christian lawyers and law students. In 2004 it was denied recognition as a student group at Hastings College of the Law (part of the University of California), making CLS the only group ever denied recognition by the school. [Read more…]
Embracing the Tormentors
5/26/2010 – Faith McDonnell –
Conducting “truth commissions” to denounce American armed forces and organizing divestment campaigns to cripple Israel are vital issues to some American church officials. Raising the banner of Intifada and expressing solidarity with Palestinians are also very important to this collection of liberal leaders. They “spiritualize” the Democratic immigration and health care reform agendas with pompous prayer, but their social justice-focused prophetic vision has strange blind spots. Leftist church leaders hardly ever see, let alone condemn, the imprisonment, enslavement, torture, and murder of Christians in the Islamic world, North Korea, and China.
Church officials and partner organizations such as the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the World Council of Churches (WCC) issue strident policy statements on such topics as “eco-justice,” broadband access for “economically depressed rural areas,” the Israeli “occupation,” and “unnecessary Department of Defense spending.” But one is hard-pressed to find these church leaders denouncing the recent appointment of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. One searches in vain for an expression of solidarity with the Christian community in Jos, Plateau State, in central Nigeria, where hundreds of Christians were slaughtered by Fulani jihadists during March and April of 2010. If there are any such statements, they address vaguely “ethnic conflict” and are masterpieces of moral equivalency. [Read more…]
The Real Reason the Left Loves Illegals
5/14/2010 – J.R. Dunn –
The Ottomans had an interesting method of assuring political stability. The sprawling empire operated on a system in which “millets,” distinct ethnic and religious groups, were allowed to oversee their own internal affairs while giving absolute loyalty to the sultan and his government. Every now and then a millet would be ordered to pack up and head out for a new home, at times at the opposite end of the imperium, amid new neighbors — sometimes the original residents, sometimes other refugees — of alien origins, ethnicity, and religious belief. Christians among Muslims, Catholics among Orthodox, Bulgarians among Turks, Circassians among Arabs…the variations were nearly endless. [Read more…]
Gay Legislation Trumps Religious Freedom in the UK
5/3/2010 – Sonja Corbitt –
What is going on in the UK? In what amounts to a legal rejection of the Right to Religious Freedom, it seems that Christians are a casualty of the homosexual equality/equivalency agenda. Apparently tolerance and equal protection under the law does not include those of the Christian faith.
Dale McAlpine, a British Baptist street preacher, was arrested and jailed on April 20 by a homosexual police community support officer (PCSO) for allegedly saying homosexuality is a sin according to the Bible.
McAlpine was publicly handing out pamphlets on the Ten Commandments with a church member when a passerby initiated a debate about his faith. When the exchange was over the woman was approached by the PCSO who spoke with her briefly, at which point the officer informed McAlpine that a complaint had been made for his use of homophobic language. [Read more…]
God in Our Classrooms
Townhall.com | by Joseph C. Phillips | Apr. 15, 2010
Such was our founder’s belief in the preeminence of God that when the First Continental Congress convened in 1774, Massachusetts delegate Thomas Cushing suggested to the assembly that together they pray for divine guidance and protection. The historical events that would forever change the world were preparing to unfold: war loomed on the horizon; the Declaration of Independence would be signed, and a nation “conceived in liberty” would be born. In this moment, men of varied religious beliefs — Presbyterians, Episcopalians, some Quakers, others Baptists or Congregationalists – were led in prayer by an Episcopal priest in an appeal to the almighty that was described as “extraordinary…filling the bosom of every man present.”
It would not be the last time the founders appealed to the Almighty God.
James Madison acknowledged God’s favor in our founding in Federalist 37 referring to “a finger of that almighty hand, which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.” I dare say that men like Madison and Cushing would not recognize the America of today, filled with politicians afraid to confess their faith or educators fearful of offending the sensibilities of their students with any mention of God. Math teacher Brad Johnson of Westview High School of the Poway School District in San Diego, California, is a case in point. [Read more…]
Why a Town in Iowa Sought to Abolish Good Friday
by Dennis Prager | 4/6/2010
Leftism functions as a secular religion, and its adherents understand that the major obstacle to the dominance of Leftist policies and values is traditional religion, specifically Christianity. With the demise of Christianity in Western Europe, Leftist ideas and values came to dominate that continent. America, the most religious industrialized democracy, remains the great exception. […]
When a town in Iowa seeks to rename Good Friday “Spring Holiday,” you know America has problems.
Those of us who affirm the Judeo-Christian values that have constituted the basis of America’s values since before the founding of the United States expect such things on the two coasts. The West Coast and the East Coast (at least down to Virginia) have largely abandoned the God-based morality of the Declaration of Independence and all the Founders. [Read more…]
Christian Girls Attacked and Terrorized in Iraq
Sister Hatunes, an Orthodox Christian nun, is working to help some very unfortunate Christian souls who have been abused and terrorized by Islamic radicals. May God bless her and the girls and families she is helping. [Read more…]
The Communist Holocaust
Compiled by Chris Banescu
(Contributors: Chris Banescu, Scott Manning, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation)
In October 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution gave birth to the deadliest ideology in human history – Communism. In less than 100 years, Communism has claimed more than 100 million lives. Today, it continues to enslave one-sixth of the world’s population.
A free people cannot afford to forget the evils of Communism. We cannot allow the atrocities of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Ceausescu, and Castro to fade into the background of history. We must not forget the trail of blood and tears this utopian deception has left behind.
It is a great moral failing that so many don’t know the extent of Communism’s atrocities and the great evil they unleashed on the world. While the horrors of Nazism are well known, who knows that the Soviet Union murdered more than 20 million people? Who knows that China’s dictators have slaughtered as many as 60 million? Who knows that the Communist holocaust has exacted a death toll surpassing that of all of the wars of the 20th century combined? (Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation) [Read more…]
