Self explanatory title. I abhor that nicey nicey, politically correct, pseudo-Christianity which almost always supports leftwing attitudes - which in most cases are profoundly anti-Gospel. This Blog supports persecuted Christians. This Blog exposes cults. This Blog opposes junk science. UPDATED DAILY. This is not a forum. This Blog supports truly Christian websites and aids their efforts. It is hardhitting and unashamedly evangelical so if it offends - please do not come to this site!
Monday, September 30, 2019
What Can You Possibly Say?
Killing the unborn, confessing to plants
I’m all for environmental stewardship. But I find it beyond ironic that a staunchly liberal seminary which supports a woman’s “right” to abortion held a special chapel service to make confession to plants.
Share The Living Jesus With Moslems.
Sharing Jesus with Muslims: Challenges and Opportunities in a Post-9/11 World
September 19, 2019
With recent history in mind, it can be tempting to write off Muslims as wholly “other” and to want nothing to do with them. But this is a path that neither their role as fellow image bearers nor the biblical call to restore all things will permit us to take.
In the 18 years since the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly three thousand Americans, Islam has gone mainstream. Eighty-nine percent of the 3.45 million Muslims in America say they are proud to be a Muslim and an American. Now, it isn’t strange to see the fast of Ramadan broken with an iftar dinner hosted by the White House or by Muslim members of Congress.
Fear of Muslims, however, has yet to abate. Sparked by numerous terrorist attacks from home-grown and imported holy warriors, “Islamophobia” remains a thing, with anti-Muslim incidents hitting levels not seen since 2001. This year a Baptist pastor in Michigan who calls himself an Islamophobe organized an event called “9/11 Forgotten? Is Michigan Surrendering to Islam?” before canceling it following an outcry.
New research from the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, an American Muslim organization, finds that only 35 percent of evangelicals and 44 percent of Protestants know a Muslim—compared with 53 percent of the general public, 61 percent of Catholics, and 76 percent of Jews.
And relationships with American Muslims—or the lack of same—really do matter. “The personal relationships with Muslims, that’s a game changer,” Todd Green, Luther College professor and former Islamophobia adviser to the U.S. State Department, told Christianity Today and the Washington Post. “It tends to make you less Islamophobic.”
Only 21 percent of Americans hold a favorable opinion of Muslims. But that ratio jumps to nearly one in two among those who know a Muslim. Just 20 percent of white evangelicals hold favorable views of Muslims, along with 44 percent unfavorable. Only 35 percent of white evangelicals, according to Pew Research, even know a Muslim, the lowest of any religious group. LifeWay Research says that a mere 17 percent of those with evangelical beliefs report having a Muslim friend.
Surprisingly, Muslim Americans appear to be more open to evangelicals than the reverse. Half of those surveyed say they have “no opinion” when it comes to evangelicals, while a third has a favorable opinion. Only 14 percent have a negative view of evangelicals.
So these statistics point to an opportunity, if not an open invitation, for kingdom-minded believers to reach out in friendship to the 1 percent of the U.S. population that claims to follow Islam. Perhaps, rather than responding in fear, in faith we can take a meal to the new family on our street, or visit the neighborhood mosque that just opened its doors, without compromising our witness in the least.
Can we be Good Samaritans to those who need the good news? How will these men, women, boys, and girls, created in God’s image, hear, unless someone is sent to them? Tragically, those who have the living water they so desperately need are among those least likely to go to them, or even to know them.
The need is no less urgent overseas, where Christians can face the loss of life or livelihood from Muslim authorities and neighbors. According to Open Doors USA, of the ten worst persecuting countries of Christians, seven are run by Muslims. But, thank God, the Spirit is already working around the globe to draw Muslims to Himself.
Southern Baptist researcher and author David Garrison heard encouraging reports of Muslims becoming followers of Jesus Christ and decided to investigate. “Something was happening—even as Christianity was on the wane in many Western countries and vanishing from its roots in much of the Middle East, a wind was blowing through the House of Islam,” Garrison said in Newsweek. “By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, reports of large-scale conversions of Muslims to the Christian faith were surfacing in many corners of the ‘House of Islam.’”
Garrison visited forty-four such voluntary movements to Christ of at least a thousand people in twenty-nine Muslim countries from West Africa to Indonesia, in the process conducting more than a thousand interviews. He learned there were sixty-nine such movements flourishing around the world as of 2013, compared with only three such movements in Islam’s first twelve centuries.
Garrison cites a number of factors: (1) increased prayer for Muslims; (2) intentional evangelism toward Muslims; and (3) more Bible translations in colloquial languages spoken by Muslims. Other factors, surprisingly enough, include new, more understandable translations of the Qur’an, which cause many Muslims to see their religion clearly and long for something different; Muslim violence, such as the Iranian revolution, which prompts many to decide there must be something better; and, for many, the appearance of Jesus Christ in a dream.
Regarding dissatisfaction with Islam, CBN quotes an Iranian intelligence official as admitting that Christianity continues to spread in the Islamic Republic.
“These converts are ordinary people whose jobs are selling sandwiches or similar things,” Mahmoud Alavi reportedly said. “We had no choice but to summon them to ask them why they were converting. Some of them said they were looking for a religion that gives them peace. We told them that Islam is the religion of brotherhood and peace. They responded by saying that: ‘All the time we see Muslim clerics and those who preach from the pulpit talk against each other. If Islam is the religion of cordiality, then before anything else, there must be cordiality and peace among the clerics themselves.’”
And as one Muslim convert along the Syrian-Turkish border told NBC News, “If heaven is made for ISIS and their belief, I would choose hell for myself instead of being again with them in the same place, even if it’s paradise.”
So while there are undeniable challenges in reaching Muslims with the good news in a post-9/11 world, there are undeniable opportunities.
Let’s take them.
Stan Guthrie is a life coach and a licensed minister, as well as an editor at large for the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Stan is the author of the forthcoming book Victorious: Corrie ten Boom and The Hiding Place.
Weaponisation of Our Children By Zealots.
THE WEAPONISATION OF WESTERN CHILDREN
To watch the teenage climate-change zealot Greta Thunberg at the UN was a distressing experience.
Not, though, for the reasons she intended. What was so distressing was to see this very vulnerable child’s anguish and rage at the world’s failure to put modernity itself into reverse, in order to combat a supposedly unstoppable apocalypse for which no plausible evidence whatever exists but over which nightmarish vision she and countless others are being terrified out of their wits by worthless or outright fraudulent studies which they have been led to believe constitute “settled” and unchallengeable science, heaven help us, and through which bogus emergency they are being used and manipulated to create global hysteria.
In other words, it’s a kind of madness, a repudiation of reason, that has now gripped great swathes of the world. But it’s even more sinister than that. For what appears to be emerging is a new strategy by those who want to destroy capitalism and the west.
I wrote here about the various groups who are funding, organising and promoting this supposedly “spontaneous” global outbreak of mass teenage anxiety and uproar about “climate change”.
This link, moreover, shows how climate activists planned this street theatre of children’s marches and strikes as long ago as 2012, at a secret meeting in La Jolla California which needed to find an alternative to conventional campaigns against man-made global warming which had failed to persuade voters and politicians to support their cause.
Using children in this way to prattle propaganda strikes many as a form of child abuse. But it seems it’s not just “climate change” zealots using children as front-line troops.
Please watch the video below. It shows how pupils as young as five years old were taken out of class at four San Francisco schools to march in a “Close The Camps” protest against the control of illegal immigration and the fact that children were being separated from their families at the Mexican border. Or so they were told, we hear, by their teachers. Watch these children screaming “Who do we hate! Donald Trump!” and chanting from pre-written scripts “You build the wall, we tear it down, brick by brick, wall by wall, the border wall will fall!” and “What do we want! Freedom! When do we want it! Now!”
It’s terrifying and sickening. Children being indoctrinated about situations they cannot fully understand. Children being manipulated and used by revolutionary ideologies. Children being brainwashed to hate.
This takes the already deep unease about Extinction Rebellion onto a different plane. Now we are beginning to see a broader and deeper agenda.
What came out of Greta Thunberg’s mouth was utter rubbish. Her zero-carbon agenda would take us back to a pre-industrial age, if not earlier. It would certainly destroy modern life. This is what she was begging us, through her tears and her rage, to bring about. It was grotesque to watch such a child, who reportedly suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, being manipulated into spouting such demonstrably ludicrous propositions dressed up as demands. “How dare you!” she cried; what that called to mind was nothing other than a childish tantrum.
What is now becoming clear, however, is that “climate change” is ancillary to the real issue – and that is nothing less than the destruction of capitalism and western society and culture. It’s an agenda which also requires the destruction of the western nation, which is why mass unchecked immigration is another enormous issue; and of course the destruction also of President Donald Trump, who embodies the fight by the west to retain its cultural distinctiveness characterised by capitalism, the nation state and modernity.
And now children are being used to bring about this revolutionary agenda. What we are witnessing is the weaponisation of children.
Children are a most potent weapon for a number of reasons. First and most obvious, if you indoctrinate the children into your cause you can potentially produce an entire brainwashed generation of adults. Second, they act as cultural hostages: the instinctive reluctance to be nasty to children inhibits robust adult responses to the rubbish they are spouting. Third, the fact that children represent the future of mankind delivers a punch to the solar plexus of western adults prone to neurotic guilt and self-recrimination about the way they’ve already mucked up the world.
As with virtually every current ideology, it’s all about guilt and expiation, the secularised version of sin and redemption and the belief in the imminent perfection of the world. Such beliefs characterised medieval Christian apocalyptic millenarianism, as well as every secular totalitarian regime from the French Revolution onwards – all of which left a bloody trail of slaughter down through the centuries.
Indeed, today’s insurrectionary use of children has echoes of the 13th century Children’s Crusade. As Norman Cohn wrote in his classic, The Pursuit of the Millennium:
“In 1212, armies of children set out to recapture the Holy City, one army from France and another, much larger, from the Rhine valley. Each was headed by a youth who believed himself chosen bye God and who was regarded by his followers as a miracle-working saint.
“These thousands of children could be held back neither by entreaty nor by force; their faith was such that they were convinced the Mediterranean would dry up before them as the Red Sea had dried up before the Israelites. These crusades too ended disastrously, with almost all the chidden either drowned in the sea or starved to death or sold into slavery in Africa. Nevertheless, these mass migrations had inaugurated a tradition; for more than a century, autonomous crusades of the poor continued to occur from time to time, and with consequences which were no longer disastrous to themselves alone”.
Ring any bells? Melanie Phillips.
Sunday, September 29, 2019
Too Many Go To University.
The news that over half of England’s young people are going to university will be music to Tony Blair’s ears. According to the latest government figures, 50.2 per cent of 17-30 year-olds in England had participated in higher education in 2017-18.
Back in 1999, when the figure was only 39 per cent, Blair set himself the 50 per cent target and less than 20 years later it has been achieved. The percentage of young people in England going to college or university is now even higher than in the United States, where the figure for 18-24 year-olds is about 40 per cent. DT.
Of course, this was always a political move from Blair - bringing hosts of those who would never previously have done so under the influence of the academic left. This is not an attempt to improve education. What nation needs that many people at uni? - No. The net result is that higher and higher qualifications are now being asked for basic jobs. To be honest, I have always felt that the main thrust of the policy was to 'hide unemployment' by taking youngsters out of the job market for an extra three or four years.
Rescue From Abuse.
(AFP) — Police in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna have rescued more than 300 male students from an Islamic school where many had been tortured and sexually abused, a police spokesman said Friday.
Officers raided a building in the Rigasa area city on Thursday where the victims including adults and minors were kept in “the most debasing and inhuman conditions in the name of teaching them the Koran and reforming them”, Kaduna state police spokesman Yakubu Sabo told AFP.
“We found around 100 students including children as young as nine, in chains stuffed in a small room all in the name of reforming them and making them responsible persons,” Sabo said.
The school which has been operating for a decade, enrolled students brought by their families to learn the Koran and be rehabilitated from drug abuse and other illnesses, police said.
The proprietor of the school and six staff were arrested during the raid.
Many of the rescued students bore scars on their backs and serious injuries, police said.
“The victims were abused. Some of them said they were sodomised by their teachers,” Sabo stated.
Police had been tipped off by complaints from local residents who became suspicious of what was happening inside the school.
During the raid on the school, police said they found a “torture chamber” where students were chained, hung and beaten.
‘Severe punishment’
One inmate quoted by Nigerian media described horrific conditions and treatment at the facility.
“I have spent three months here with chains on my legs,” Bello Hamza said, adding that he was meant to be in South Africa studying for his Master’s degree.
“This is supposed to be an Islamic centre, but trying to run away from here attracts severe punishment; they tie people and hang them to the ceiling for that.”
Pictures published in several newspapers showed an alleged victim with scars on his back and another chained up by his foot to a metal railing.
Sabo said the victims were of different nationalities and that “two of them said during interrogation they were brought by their parents from Burkina Faso”.
The identities of the rescued victims were being documented to determine where they came from and to contact their families.
Parents of some of the victims from within the city, contacted by police were “shocked and horrified” when they saw the condition of their children, as they had no idea what was happening inside the school.
Parents were allowed to visit their children every three months, but only in select areas of the premises.
“They were not allowed into the house to see what was happening… the children are only brought to them outside to meet them,” Sabo said.
“All they thought was their children are being taught the Koran and good manners as they looked subdued,” he added.
Private Islamic schools are common in mainly Muslim northern Nigeria, where government services are often lacking.
Breitbart London
Loonytuneswatch Coconuts Awarded.
Nigel Farage probed by police for using metaphor at Brexit rally after Remainer complains.
BREXIT Party leader Nigel Farage is being investigated by the police after an MEP from Northern Ireland reported him for telling a crowd he would “take the knife" to EU-loving pen-pushers from Whitehall.
By CARLY READ
Brexit Party conference: UK are 'sick to death' of EU says Farage
Gwent Police said they are investigating a complaint made by Alliance Party MEP Naomi Long who reported his words to officers who are now probing the Brexit Party leader who she accuses of inciting violence. Mr Farage told a 500-strong Brexit Party rally in Newport: “Once Brexit is done, we will take the knife to the pen pushers in Whitehall.” Ms Long reported the matter for a "clear case of incitement to violence against staff in the civil service".
Blogger: I have decided to resurrect the Loonytuneswatch coconut awards.
Two are awarded. The first for Ms Long and the second to Gwent Police.
Saturday, September 28, 2019
Deaths of The Apostles - Use With Some Caution - We Do Not Really Know With Any Degree of Certainty Which Are True.
The traditions related to the deaths of the Apostles are well known. According to local and regional histories, all of the Apostles and their close associates died for their claims related to the Resurrection:
Andrew was crucified in Patras, Greece.
Bartholomew (aka Nathanael) was flayed to death with a whip in Armenia.
James the Just was thrown from the Temple and then beaten to death in Jerusalem.
James the Greater was beheaded in Jerusalem.
John died in exile on the island of Patmos.
Luke was hanged in Greece.
Mark was dragged by horse until he died in Alexandria, Egypt.
Matthew was killed by a sword in Ethiopia.
Matthias was stoned and then beheaded in Jerusalem.
Peter was crucified upside down in Rome.
Philip was crucified in Phrygia.
Thomas was stabbed to death with a spear in India.
Bartholomew (aka Nathanael) was flayed to death with a whip in Armenia.
James the Just was thrown from the Temple and then beaten to death in Jerusalem.
James the Greater was beheaded in Jerusalem.
John died in exile on the island of Patmos.
Luke was hanged in Greece.
Mark was dragged by horse until he died in Alexandria, Egypt.
Matthew was killed by a sword in Ethiopia.
Matthias was stoned and then beheaded in Jerusalem.
Peter was crucified upside down in Rome.
Philip was crucified in Phrygia.
Thomas was stabbed to death with a spear in India.
The Labour Conference From A Jewish Perspective.
https://www.melaniephillips.com/labours-israel-bashing-full-display-brexit-chaos-intensifies/
Friday, September 27, 2019
Far Too Many Bishops Let The Church Down.
(Photo: Unsplash/MattBotsford)
Imagine, just for a moment, being given an opportunity to address the country on national radio.
What's more, you've been asked – specifically as a Christian – . to share with people something that will really make them think. And all you've got is a couple of minutes. What might you want to say?
As a Christian, I hope you might find yourself trying to think of ways in which you could present something of Jesus clearly, in such a way as to draw people to him, and not put them off. You might perhaps think, 'What one simple thing can I say about Jesus that will really provoke thought when it is heard?'
Which brings me to an episode of Thought for the Day broadcast on Radio 4's Today programme last week where the speaker was Nick Baines, the Bishop of Leeds. Bishop Nick has helpfully reproduced the whole transcript of it on his blog and you can read it for yourself here.
In many ways, it is quite interesting. It certainly demonstrates intellectual breadth, beginning as it does with the phrase 'the other day I was browsing the German political journal Der Spiegel,' which is probably not something many of us (or indeed many bishops) could say. We also get references to Bertolt Brecht, Shakespeare and WH Auden.
The fact that I am writing about it now shows at least that it had some kind of impact. But when the bishop had finished speaking, I must share honestly that I felt let down and disappointed. The reason? There was no mention of Jesus.
Now, don't get me wrong. I am not writing this to indulge in bishop-bashing for the sake of it. And broadcasting on Thought for the Day is incredibly difficult. I'm not aware of the precise brief that the speakers are given, nor am I pretending I could do a better job.
But not to mention Jesus ... I struggle with that. Browsing down the bishop's blog I notice that his Pause for Thought on Radio 2 on September 9 also contains no mention of Jesus by name, and neither does his article from the Yorkshire Post below that. A Church Times article (September 8) mentions the word 'Jesus' once, albeit in brackets as a sub-clause to the main point of the sentence.
By now I am sensing a pattern. We scroll down to September 6, and a speech in the House of Lords: no mention of Jesus. And then we're back to Thought for the Day with the transcript of another broadcast. Surprise surprise, although there is reference to loving our neighbours, which obviously Jesus did say, there is no mention of Christ by name – although we do learn that the good bishop was once employed by the intelligence service GCHQ 'working mainly in Russian and German'. Which must be handy. Perhaps he now browses Russian magazines as well as Der Spiegel.
The Bishop of Leeds, Nick Baines(Photo: Diocese of Bradford)
At this point I should probably give the answer to your unspoken questions, and the answers are firstly, 'Yes I have cut and pasted the articles to which I refer above and run a spell check,' and, secondly, 'Yes the spell check does indicate only one reference to Jesus in passing, and no mention of the word "Christ" either'.
It might be argued in relation to Thought for the Day that there is a clear prohibition on anything that might be classed as 'proselytism' – the attempt to convert others. Maybe – I don't know. But I cannot see that such a ban, even if it actually does exist, precludes mentioning Jesus. After all, I have learnt everything I know about Guru Nanak from listening to Indrajit Singh, the delightful Sikh leader and broadcaster, in that same slot. And in the first Thought for the Day transcript I have located online by Vishvapani Blomfield there is a direct quote from the Buddha.
In the Church of England service when bishops are ordained, they are asked: 'Will you lead your people in proclaiming the glorious gospel of Christ, so that the good news of salvation may be heard in every place?' I struggle to see how, without much mention of the name of Jesus, this is really being done in the blog items I have mentioned above. In fairness to Bishop Nick, several days ago, with this article in mind, I did leave a comment on his blog below the first transcript I have quoted from above. It said something like, 'I really struggle with the fact that God and Jesus are not mentioned in this'. A little note popped up to tell me my comment was 'awaiting moderation'. It remains unpublished.
When Steven Croft became Bishop of Oxford, the very first words he spoke when inaugurated were: 'May I speak with humility, mercy and joy, May I speak of Jesus and his ways. May I speak clearly and with boldness now and always. Amen.' A good prayer for all bishops – and all of us, indeed, too.
David Baker is a former daily newspaper journalist now working as an Anglican minister in Sussex, England. Find him on Twitter @Baker_David_A
A Politicised Judiciary Is NOT British.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1183113/Brexit-news-David-Starkey-Supreme-Court-ruling-prorogation-Boris-Johnson-Parliament-latest
Royalty Worship - From A Lukewarm Royalist.
You would think we were back in the 1940s the way the gutter press fawn over the Royal Family - it is tantamount to worship. As a Christian, I can certainly see the flaws in that.
Well, I suppose that the Daily Mail, in particular, must be in tune with its readership - otherwise it would not be the very worst of the bunch.
I admire a constitution with a neutral Head of State; our Queen has been splendid in her role; the benefits to our economy are, indeed, many BUT ...
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God’s Love and Ours. 1 John 4.
God’s Love and Ours. 7) Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows G...
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Franklin Graham preached in Glasgow, launches new fund to defend religious freedom in the UK. Staff writer Franklin Graham preaching at ...
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https://www.christianpost.com/voices/marys-magnificat-the-wait-is-over.html