The Atlantic Wire shares a disturbing report on famed atheist Richard Dawkins:
Richard Dawkins defended “mild pedophilia” in an interview this weekend. And while the quote itself is quite jarring, especially to those who look to Dawkins for his influential writings on atheism (but haven’t noticed some of his other strange stances), it’s far from the first time that the scientist has launched a defense of the behavior — or talked about his own abuse at the hands of boarding school teachers.
LifeNews reports:
The pro-life movement has actively engaged in promoting pro-life lists at the popular Buzzfeed social media web site. Joining the National Right to Life Committee in bringing the pro-life message to its community forum today is Live Action.
Lila Rose’s organization posted a list of seven moms who either rejected abortion or courageously chose life in risky birth situations.
“Nailed it! With the help of their awesome moms, these awesome babies blew raspberries at death,” Live Action said.
Fox News radio talk show host Todd Starnes reports:
A Florida ministry that feeds the poor said a state agriculture department official told them they would not be allowed to receive USDA food unless they removed portraits of Christ, the Ten Commandments, a banner that read “Jesus is Lord” and stopping giving Bibles to the needy.
“They told us they could no longer allow us to have any religious information where the USDA food is going to be,” said Kay Daly, executive director of the Christian Service Center.
According to the Los Angeles Times:
She was excited to be pregnant, excited enough that she brought the new sonogram of her unborn child to show coworkers.
But hours later that day in late March, R.L. — as she came to be known in the pile of criminal court documents that followed — felt sick, with cramping and pain.
R.L. went home and bled heavily the next day. She began to suspect the antibiotics her boyfriend had given her weren’t really antibiotics at all.
Then, on March 31, doctors in Tampa, Fla., confirmed the worst: Her unborn child was dead.
The Cripplegate’s Mike Riccardi weighs in on the Australian Prime Minister’s recent response when he was asked why Australians should vote for a man who continually changes his view on important issues. According to Riccardi, “A video of Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has gone viral, as a Christian pastor asks the Prime Minister, who supports homosexual ‘marriage’ and also identifies as a ‘devout Christian,’ why he doesn’t believe what the Bible says about the sinfulness of homosexuality.”
LifeNews reports:
NAACP President Benjamin Jealous will be stepping down in a few months from his position as the head of the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights group. During his tenure, Jealous oversaw the NAACP’s transformation into an abortion advocacy organization.
The NAACP passed a 2004 resolution voicing support for “equal access to abortion” and urging its members to participate in a pro-abortion rally in Washington. Then, in 2007, the NAACP, for the second time in four years, blocked a proposed resolution expressing opposition to abortion.
Baptist Press reports:
Religious freedom advocate Liberty Counsel is at the forefront of groups continuing to fight for the right of teenage patients to receive reparative therapy to treat homosexuality, countering legislation in New Jersey and California banning the treatment.
Liberty Counsel has filed suit against New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and others to reverse the state’s law prohibiting reparative therapy for minors and will seek another redress of a similar law in California, according to Liberty Counsel news releases.
The Cripplegate’s Jesse Johnson has posted a guide to the NIV that explains why some churches and ministries no longer are using the translation:
The NIV Bible is no more. Alas.
The version that many grew up reading has finally ridden off into the sunset, never to return. Zondervan has phased it out, buried it, and replaced it with something else.
Many people denied that a significant change had taken place, and tried to act like the Bible being sold now as the NIV is indeed the NIV they grew up with. That myth was sustainable for a while, but eventually it just didn’t work. This year many Christian schools finally dropped the NIV, and replaced it with something else. Even AWANA was forced to make the change.
The Christian Post reports that radical gay rights activist Dan Savage is networking with pro-LGBT groups that are allegedly Christians to launch a website that will reach out to LGBT youth:
Known as the NALT Christians Project (NALT being short for “Not All Like That”), the site was launched Wednesday and features video testimonies from Christians supporting gay rights.
“The purpose of the NALT Christians Project is to give LGBT-affirming Christians a means of proclaiming to the world-and especially to young gay people-their belief and conviction that there is nothing anti-biblical or at all inherently sinful about being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender,” reads the About section.
LifeSiteNews reports:
Biola University’s president has apologized for a school administrator threatening a student with expulsion and arrest for holding a sign showing an abortion victim and affirmed the role graphic images play in educating the public about “injustice.”
The incident occurred three months ago when Diana Jimenez held a single sign with an image of an aborted baby. Jimenez had resorted to her lonely demonstration after her approved table display was shut down for displaying unapproved graphic images.
She had also been denied permission to display one sign for one hour.
According to John Lanagan of My Word Like Fire:
Francis Chan is scheduled to speak at the IHOP-KC Onething Conference in late December. So is Banning Liebscher, director of Jesus Culture. And, yes, Jesus Culture will be there as well. Matt Redman is also on the docket.
Last year International House Of Prayer leadership scheduled a Catholic Track at Onething without ever revealing this on the IHOP website. The Catholic Track speakers planned to “draw upon Catholic doctrine, practices, and tradition and touch on the larger conference’s themes centering on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.”
According to prominent blogger Tim Challies, there are 7 marks to look for in a person who teaches a false gospel:
No one enriches hell more than false teachers. No one finds greater joy in drawing people away from truth and leading them into error. False teachers have been present in every era of human history, they have always been a plague and have always been in the business of providing counterfeit truth. While their circumstances may change, their methods remain consistent.
Baptist Press writer Mike H. Hunter reports the chilling story of a courageous American pastor:
It was hot, stuffy and crowded in the one-room shack, deep in a labyrinth of slums of Mumbai, India, when the door burst open. Angry Muslim men ordered everyone to get out — except for one.
“You stay!” they told the pastor of one of Louisiana’s largest churches who was holding a Bible study with about a dozen Bangladeshi men.
As part of its international missions outreach, the church — unnamed for security reasons — adopted Bangladeshi Muslims, an unengaged, unreached people group who migrated to India by the millions and are despised “illegal immigrants” in the predominantly Hindu nation.
This was the second trip for the Louisiana church to meet with house church planters who were evangelizing the vast slums of Mumbai.
“The first minute or two my blood pressure rose because I knew they were angry — and I was alone — except for the Lord,” the senior pastor recounted. “But I felt courage rise. Jesus said, ‘Don’t worry before you go in to testify before kings and authorities, I will give you words in that moment,’ and in that moment the Lord was granting me wisdom to respond to what they were saying.”
CNS News reports:
Pro-life groups decried the “abortion-first” mentality of a bill approved Monday by the California State Senate that will allow nurse practitioners, certified nurse-midwives and physicians’ assistants to perform first-trimester abortions.
“This expansion will help alleviate a shortage of abortion providers in California,” said Assemblywoman Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), who introduced the bill, which passed by a 25-11 margin. “All women should have timely access to reproductive healthcare regardless of whether they live in urban or rural areas and without excessive expense or travel,” she said in a press release.
Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis reminds Christians that they are living in the midst of an ongoing spiritual war. Many believers “are virtually asleep while a battle rages all around them.”
A friend of ours, knowing that Mally and I enjoy watching detective programs on TV, sent us an intriguing DVD series set in World War II. As we watched the programs, I thought about what is happening today in the church. You see, while soldiers were at the battlefront overseas in WWII, people back home in England were by and large going about their daily business.
The British people definitely knew a war was going on, but they were quite oblivious to much of what was happening where the battles were raging. When soldiers came home, some with horrific wounds and startling stories, it was clear that the general population really did not know what terrible things were happening on the front lines.
Author and speaker Nancy Pearcey examines the liberal worldview that holds that a person’s sex at birth is merely arbitrary and not a scientific, biological fact.
California has just passed a new law saying school districts may not bar transgender students from same-sex settings, like men’s basketball teams or women’s locker rooms (Assembly Bill 1266). Opponents promptly submitted a referendum to overturn the law. But it will take more than the usual political activism to stop the momentum on what some are calling the next major drive for “equality.”
It will take a serious, sustained program of education in both scientific facts and real respect.
Every law has an implicit worldview, a set of assumptions that justifies it. The worldview implicit in the transgender movement is that our physical bodies have no particular value — that our biology is irrelevant to who we are as persons.
In a piece posted at LifeSite News, Hillary White examines “homosexualism.”
I have been asked recently “what is homosexualism?” I started using the term in my writing on these issues a few years ago when it became clear that we were dealing not with a group of people, but with a particular ideology that is often held by people who are not themselves homosexuals.
A few days ago in The Guardian, Peter Tatchell wrote a pretty good description not only of that ideology’s goals but its origins. This political ideology, often called “queer theory” by its proponents in academia, is what is being pushed, quite openly these days, by the “gay rights” movement. Despite what we are told all day by their collaborators in the mainstream media, from the six o’clock news to your favourite sit-com, this movement is not about “equal rights”. It is about re-writing the foundational concepts of our entire society. I predict that it will not be much longer before the pretense of “equality” is dropped, having done its work.
LifeSiteNews shares this disturbing report:
Planned Parenthood employees will soon have access to a vast federal database of sensitive information, including the Social Security number, tax form, bank account, and medical records of every single American citizen as the president seeks their help in implementing ObamaCare.
Consumers purchasing health insurance through health care exchanges will speak to “navigators,” whose job is to help them find the best coverage and determine if they are eligible for a federal subsidy.
CNS News reports:
Campus Pride, a gay rights advocacy group, released its annual list of the “Top 25 LGBT Friendly Colleges and Universities” on Tuesday, which includes schools with gender-neutral bathrooms and a minor in “queer studies.”
The top 25 schools had to achieve five stars in overall, sexual orientation, and gender identity/expression categories in order to be listed in the top 25. Each school also had to be 4.5 stars or above in eight LGBT-friendly factor areas
According to Christian News Network:
A Muslim terrorist who killed thirteen people in a shooting rampage has told a local newspaper that he was “defending his religion” in the ruthless attack.
On November 5th, 2009, former Army Major Nidal Hasan opened fire in Texas’ Fort Hood army base, killing thirteen people and injuring over 30. One of the slain individuals was a pregnant mother; the unborn baby died also. Hasan fired over 200 bullets during the rampage.
Christian News Network reports:
A Christian legal organization states that it plans to file a lawsuit against New Jersey officials in an effort to block the enforcement of a new law that bars therapists and counselors from assisting youth in turning away from their homosexual inclinations.
As previously reported, reiterating his belief that homosexuality is “not a sin,” the Republican governor of New Jersey signed a bill into law on Monday that bans the use of conversion or reparative therapy, or to otherwise help minors who are struggling with homosexual feelings to overcome their temptations.
GotQuestions.org provides us with the answer to this burning question:
The question of whether there are more people in heaven or hell is answered by Jesus Himself in one succinct passage: “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:13-14).
This passage tells us that only those who receive Jesus Christ and who believe in Him are given the right to become children of God (John 1:12). As such, the gift of eternal life comes only through Jesus Christ to all those who believe. He said “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). It’s not through Islam, Buddha, or other false gods of man’s making. It’s not for those wanting a cheap and easy way to heaven while continuing to live their own selfish and worldly lives on earth. Jesus only saves those who fully trust in Him as Savior (Acts 4:12).
According to the Baptist Press:
As Hispanic populations across the United States, many of which are traditionally Catholic, continue to increase, so do opportunities for Southern Baptist churches to address the spiritual questions of current and former Catholics.
Hispanics made up 38.1 percent of the population of Texas in 2011, the U.S. Census reports. This reflects a nearly 10 percent increase since 2006, when Hispanics accounted for 35.7 percent of all Texans, according to the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts’ office.
The Washington Times reports that Christian churches are being burned to the ground and the homes and businesses of Christians are facing similiar “dire circumstances.”:
Dozens of churches and monasteries have been burned and attacked, a Virgin Mary statue decapitated and several Christians killed in the past few days of unrest in Egypt.
The violence against Christians has been the underbelly to the ongoing public clash between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and interim government and security forces.