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Apologies if this has already been postedAs you sit down with your family on Thanksgiving and consider offering a prayer of gratitude, be aware the turkey at the center of the table may have already been "blessed" – in the name of Allah. Customer service representatives from Butterball, one of America's most popular Turkey brands, confirmed to WND that the company's whole turkeys are – without being labeled as such – slaughtered according to Islamic "halal" standards. "Halal slaughter involves cutting the trachea, the esophagus and the jugular vein and letting the blood drain out while saying, 'Bismillah allahu akbar'...

Christian apologist William Craig has offered a response to atheist intellectual Richard Dawkins who called him "a deplorable apologist for genocide" in his column last week. In a speech at the Sheldonian Theater at Oxford University on Tuesday, Craig responded to Dawkins' allegations during the question and answer session. “There was no racial war here, no command to kill them all,” he said, alluding to extermination of the Canaanites in the Old Testament, “the command was to drive them out.” He then said: “I would say that God has the right to give and take life as He sees fit....

A dull-looking chart projected on the wall of a university office in Jerusalem displayed a revelation that would startle many readers of the Old Testament: The sacred text that people revered in the past was not the same one we study today. An ancient version of one book has an extra phrase. Another appears to have been revised to retroactively insert a prophecy after the events happened. Scholars in this out-of-the-way corner of the Hebrew University campus have been quietly at work for 53 years on one of the most ambitious projects attempted in biblical studies — publishing the authoritative...

An example of ancient Hebrew script...a derivation of proto-Canaanite During the years I've been researching [My name is Reuven; An English teacher by profession, I...possess an insatiable desire to research anything pertaining to my Jewish roots. Born [and] raised in New York City, I have been an Israeli citizen for more than 30 years, and reside in the charming Galilian town of Karmiel] the Hebrew language and alphabet, I've been astounded to discover that the overwhelming majority of Jews and Christians - even observant ones - have been unaware of the existance of the original ancient Hebrew alphabet, the script...

Saturday, December 18, 2010 Because God Became Man (Despite His Flawed Human Ancestors) Posted by Frank —Feast of Blessed Anthony GrassiThis day is just beginning, but I can't let it go forward without mentioning yesterdays Gospel reading. It is from Chapter 1 in Matthew and it is the genealogy of Jesus. Here the gospel writer goes to great pains to show that Our Lord and Savior is indeed descended from the line of King David. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling with portraits of Our Lord's earthly ancestors. After reading this post, you may think that earthy is a better...

Featured Term (selected at random):NEBI'IM The prophets or prophetical books of the Old Testament, as distinct from the Torah, or Law (Pentateuch), and the Ketubim, or hagiography. The Nebi'im are commonly divided into the early prophets (from Joshua to II Kings) and the later prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and the twelve Minor Prophets. All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.

The recent Synod called by the Vatican of the leaders of the Eastern Church and all the Christian denomination related or accepted to Catholicism from the Middle East was a very revealing occurrence. The final liturgical statement by Archbishop Cyril S. Bustros was, to say the least, quite disturbing to me as a Jew and a Zionist. The Archbishop’s statement that the Jews could no longer use Old Testament Biblical claims to verify the legitimacy of their claim to the Promised Land is ludicrous, not even the small part existing as a sliver of land bordering the eastern Mediterranean Sea....

Let it be a rule with us, in the reading of our Bibles, to study the types and ordinances of the Mosaic law with prayerful attention. They are all full of Christ. The altar--the scape-goat--the daily burnt-offering--the day of atonement, are all so many sign-posts pointing to the great sacrifice offered by our Lord on Calvary. Those who neglect to study the Jewish ordinances, as dark, dull, and uninteresting parts of the Bible, only show their own ignorance, and miss great advantages. Those who examine them with Christ as the key to their meaning, will find them full of Gospel...

5 This is what the LORD says: "Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the LORD. 6 He will be like a bush in the wastelands; he will not see prosperity when it comes. He will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives. 7 "But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in him. 8 He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the...

Catholic Biblical Apologetics Apologetics without apology! What does the Roman Catholic Church teach about ...? ... and why? This website surveys the origin and development of Roman Catholic Christianity from the period of the apostolic church, through the post-apostolic church and into the conciliar movement. Principal attention is paid to the biblical basis of both doctrine and dogma as well as the role of paradosis (i.e. handing on the truth) in the history of the Church. Particular attention is also paid to the hierarchical founding and succession of leadership throughout the centuries. This is a set of lecture notes...

CNN correspondent Max Foster’s short report about Richard Dawkins on Tuesday’s Situation Room played more like a commercial which promoted the militant atheist’s new book. Despite Dawkins’s past inflammatory statements about Christianity, Foster only labeled him “an outspoken critic of creationism....[whose] atheist views have put him at the center of controversy” [audio clip available here]. Anchor Suzanne Malveaux’s introduction for the correspondent’s report highlighted the 150th anniversary of the printing of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species,” and how Dawkins was a “controversial successor [to Darwin] carrying the torch for evolution.” Foster gave a very basic description of Dawkins’s...

5 Myths about 7 Books  MARK SHEA Here are the answers to five common arguments Protestants give for rejecting the Deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament. People don't talk much about the deuterocanon these days. The folks who do are mostly Christians, and they usually fall into two general groupings: Catholics — who usually don't know their Bibles very well and, therefore, don't know much about the deuterocanonical books, and Protestants — who may know their Bibles a bit better, though their Bibles don't have the deuterocanonical books in them anyway, so they don't know anything about them either....

A man who performed an amateur circumcision on his four-year-old son on the floor of the family kitchen has been found guilty of criminal negligence. The man, identified only as D.J.W. in a written B.C. Supreme Court ruling released this week, was found not guilty of aggravated assault and assault with a weapon. Justice Marion Allan said D.J.W. ought to have known better, partly because a circumcision he earlier performed on himself led to bleeding, sutures and infection. “The fact that the accused had previously ineptly circumcised himself exacerbates, rather than minimizes, his awareness of the risks of home circumcision...

PHOENIX (AP) - An Arizona pastor has triggered protests after preaching a sermon last month titled "Why I Hate Barack Obama." Dozens of demonstrators gathered Sunday outside Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe to protest the message preached by the Rev. Steven Anderson.

“There is far more violence in the Bible than in the Qur’an; the idea that Islam imposed itself by the sword is a Western fiction, fabricated during the time of the Crusades when, in fact, it was Western Christians who were fighting brutal holy wars against Islam.” So announces former nun and self-professed “freelance monotheist,” Karen Armstrong. This quote sums up the single most influential argument currently serving to deflect the accusation that Islam is inherently violent and intolerant: All monotheistic religions, proponents of such an argument say, and not just Islam, have their fair share of violent and intolerant...

Old Testament Difficulties 140. How could God harden Pharaoh's heart and then punish him for not letting the Jews go? The sense is that God permitted Pharaoh to harden his own heart. It is but a Jewish mode of speaking. Exod. VIII., 15, says, "And Pharaoh hardened his own heart." God sent Moses to ask Pharaoh to let the Jews go, and that means that He meant Pharaoh to do so. God would not, therefore, have deliberately prevented Pharaoh from doing so. God permitted Pharaoh to harden his own heart, just as He permits men to sin even in...

Old Testament Difficulties 116. I believe in the New Testament, but not in the Old Testament. There are things in the New Testament just as hard to believe as many things in the Old Testament, and on your principle you should reject much of the New Testament itself. Yet let us act on your admission that you do accept the New Testament. Christ and the Apostles had the same Old Testament as we have today. They treat it always as the inspired Word of God in its totality. Christ, the Son of God, would have been the first to...

Old Testament Difficulties 128. That Ark surely is a fable or symbol. Even on the measurements given it could never have contained all said to be in it. It is not a fable, although it does symbolize the Catholic Church in which souls are saved from the moral flood of sin. It was over 400 feet long, 70 wide, and 40 deep. The flood was most probably local, and the animals were of various types from the region only of its occurrence. We are not obliged to believe that all living animals were represented, nor that all animals outside...

This is a great reference source for Bible study and general online reading. Links to all Books and Chapters are on one page which makes this very helpful. Also there are audios of a number of translations. Here are links to some of the more popular and reliable English language translations. 1. New International Version - http://www.biblegateway.com/versions/?action=getVersionInfo&vid=31 2. New American Standard Bible - http://www.biblegateway.com/versions/?action=getVersionInfo&vid=49#books 3. New King James - http://www.biblegateway.com/versions/?action=getVersionInfo&vid=50 4. Amplified Bible - http://www.biblegateway.com/versions/?action=getVersionInfo&vid=45 5. Holman Christian Standard Bible - http://www.biblegateway.com/versions/?action=getVersionInfo&vid=77 6. King James Version - http://www.biblegateway.com/versions/?action=getVersionInfo&vid=9

Abortion is not new. The act of murdering unwanted infants dates back to ancient times. In the Old Testament book of Ezekiel, we find a record of an abortion and God's reaction to it. Read Ezekiel Chapter 16:1-14 1 The word of the LORD came to me: 2 "Son of man, confront Jerusalem with her detestable practices 3 and say, 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says to Jerusalem: Your ancestry and birth were in the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. 4 On the day you were born your cord was...