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"Was God in the Tsunami?" I woke up to that question in my Yahoo inbox four days after the waves struck, a posting from Beliefnet, a popular discussion list I subscribe to. It was the morning when the death-toll estimates had gone into six figures for the first time. It would be interesting to calculate the number of deaths from a catastrophe that trigger the moment when people start asking "Where was God?" questions. But it seemed to me that morning marked the beginning. It was a week that would end with the Archbishop of Canterbury himself declaring that he...

An atheist who sued because he did not want his young daughter exposed to the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance has filed another lawsuit -- this time with other parents. Michael Newdow won his case more than two years ago before a federal appeals court, which said it was an unconstitutional blending of church and state for public school students to pledge to God. In June, however, the Supreme Court dismissed the case, saying Newdow could not lawfully sue because he did not have custody of his elementary school-aged daughter and because the girl's mother objected to...

What we have been saying has now happened. You cannot quote what the Bible has to say about homosexuality in public or you will be charged with a "hate crime." Philadelphia is only the beginning. If we fail to take a stand here, this "crime" will soon be applied across America. In the 27 years of this ministry, I have never witnessed a more outrageous miscarriage of justice than what is happening in Philadelphia. Four Christians are facing up to 47-years in prison and $90,000 in fines for preaching the Gospel on a public sidewalk, a right fully protected by...

Wednesday, January 5, 2005 MEDIA MATTERSPBS station cancels intelligent-design filmTV outlet charged with practicing 'politically correct censorship'Posted: January 5, 20051:00 a.m. Eastern By Ron Strom © 2005 WorldNetDaily.com The PBS station in Albuquerque, N.M., has canceled a scheduled showing of a documentary on the theory of intelligent design, eliciting charges of "politically correct censorship." New Mexico teacher Phil Robinson says he worked with staff at KNME-TV to arrange for the documentary, "Unlocking the Mystery of Life," to air on Friday night. Robinson discovered Monday that the show had been pulled and newspaper advertising for it had been canceled. The station says the...

------------------------------------------------------------------------ SEATTLE, JAN. 4 — The misreporting of the evolution issue is the focus for the new blog Evolution News & Views, www.evolutionnews.org, maintained by Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture (CSC). “The legacy media seem to have rediscovered the evolution controversy with the recent lawsuits in Pennsylvania and Georgia,” says Rob Crowther, CSC director of communications. “The problem is that many reporters are sadly uninformed about the issue which has resulted in much of the news coverage being sloppy, inaccurate, and often overtly biased. “There’s nobody else in the blogosphere right now holding the media accountable for how...

OK. I am 31 years old. I became a Christian at 26. I received absolutley no religious instruction from my parents as a kid. Once I was an adult, I sought Christ, but was misled as I went to the prominent Christian church in town. It was an Episcopalian Church where all the prominent citizens went. Anyway, being a critical thinker, it was obvious that God wasn't being taught there. I did not really know what God was, but it was obivous that nobody else there did either, so I thought the whole thing was a scam. I came to...

Islam is very similar to Christianity both historically and ideologically. People may find it strange that these two religions share many characteristics, but they do. Both religions are monotheistic and preach about the same God. Christians call Him "God", and Muslims call Him "Allah". Some Christians believe in the Trinity and others believe that Jesus was the Son of God. Muslims reject both notions but believe that Jesus was an important prophet, performed miracles and was a great man. Christians and Muslims, along with Jews believe Abraham was a major prophet, and both Arabs and Jews trace their ancestry back...

A friend of mine recently installed voice-recognition software on his computer. Instead of “keyboarding” thoughts, he now speaks them in. He tested the software by saying a wide range of words and sentences and found the software did reasonably well, even on technical vocabulary. But then he spoke the word exegesis, meaning the explanation or elaboration of a biblical passage or other text. He nearly fell off his chair laughing when exegesis came up on the monitor screen as exit Jesus—a computer Freudian slip, but prophetic nonetheless. Later that day several news dispatches reminded him that there is a concerted...

IT IS THE question of questions for religious belief. How does God permit a tragedy such as the Indian Ocean tidal wave? How does he allow the innocent to suffer and the guiltless to die? It was just such a disaster — the Lisbon tragedy of All Souls’ Day 1755, in which 60,000 people died as a result of tsunamis produced by an earthquake — that led Voltaire to write Candide, satirising religious faith. The butt of his irony, Dr Pangloss, is generally thought to be modelled on Leibniz, the German philosopher who held that “all is for the best...

God Isn’t to Blame for Asian Casualties.December 29th, 2004 By Rabbi Daniel LapinPresident, Toward Tradition With the final death toll in Asia yet unknown, analyzing the calamity can appear callous, especially in the light of ancient Jewish wisdom’s advice to refrain from even comforting mourners whose dead still lie before them, let alone analyzing their loss. Still, once we have, in some human way, associated ourselves with the disaster by means of financial or other contribution, we surely are obliged to try and learn something from it. Sometimes before the answers can be found, the right questions must be...

Turning to both Judaism and Buddhism for solace, the author meditates on God's role in the tsunami tragedy. I am trying to connect to this tragedy the best I can. The pictures help a little. I see dead children on the floor, a parent weeping. The little ones look like they are sleeping; it is unimaginable that they are dead. I see a parent holding his dead child. I feel in my body what it is like to hold... that weight. To feel the life gone, and the heaviness of a body that does not have life. It is different...

LONDON - It is one of the oldest, most profound questions, posed by some of the most learned minds of every faith throughout the course of human history. It was put eloquently this week by an old woman in a devastated village in southern India's Tamil Nadu state. "Why did you do this to us, God?" she wailed. "What did we do to upset you?" Perhaps no event in living memory has confronted so many of the world's great religions with such a basic test of faith as this week's tsunami, which indiscriminately slaughtered Indonesian Muslims, Indian Hindus, Thai and...

More than 100,000 dead in south Asia, but it's business as usual at the web sites of America's Christian right organizations It took President Bush three days to ready himself to go before the television cameras and make a public statement about Sunday's devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck southern Asia. Even though he was late, and much more money will be needed, the president pledged at least $35 million in aid to the victims of the disaster. But, as of December 30, some of the president's major family-values constituents have yet to be heard from: It's business as usual...

Time to declare war on American soil - Americans unite against the ACLU. See for yourself; Let the truth be told: http://www.christian-news-in-maine.com/larry_austin.htm

Here are excerpts from an address given by George Weigel at the Gregorian University this month. Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. * * * Politics Without God? Reflections on Europe and America By George Weigel At the far western end of the axis that traverses Paris from the Louvre down the Champs Elysées and through the Arc de Triomphe is the Great Arch of La Défense. Designed by a sternly modernist Danish architect, the Great Arch is a colossal open cube: almost 40 stories tall, faced in glass and 2.47...

WASHINGTON - A religious liberties lawsuit brought by a Satan worshipper, a Wiccan witch, a white supremacist, and an adherent of an ancient Viking religion is drawing the impassioned support of major national religious groups as it approaches a hearing before the Supreme Court. The case is potentially the most important religious liberties case on this year's docket, impacting how far a state can go to accommodate the religious practices of its citizens and whether Congress can require states to be more accommodating. The case was filed by a group of Ohio inmates - Jon Cutter, J. Lee Hampton, John...

The most censored speech in the United States today is not flag-burning, pornography or the press. The worst censors are those who prohibit classroom criticism of the theory of evolution.A Chinese scholar observed, "In China we can criticize Darwin but not the government. In America you can criticize the government but not Darwin." Polls show that the vast majority of Americans reject the theory of evolution, as have great scientists such as William Thomas Kelvin and Louis Pasteur. But that does not stop an intolerant minority from trying to impose a belief in the ape-to-man theory on everyone else.Local school...

Sunday, December 26, 2004; Page A01 DOVER, Pa. -- "God or Darwin?" Lark Myers, a blond, 45-year-old gift shop owner, frames the question and answers it. "I definitely would prefer to believe that God created me than that I'm 50th cousin to a silverback ape," she said. "What's wrong with wanting our children to hear about all the holes in the theory of evolution?" Charles Darwin, squeeze over. The school board in this small town in central Pennsylvania has voted to make the theory of evolution share a seat with another theory: God probably designed us. If it survives a...

Why Darwinists Fear Democracyby Gary Northby Gary North On December 24, I received a letter in response to my obituary for Mel Gabler. Jesus, it's about time the fascist bastard died. I'm a scientist. I know he, and his wife, tried to make science politically correct with the religious crowd by opposing the teaching of evolution in public schools. It took the appearance of Nobel prize winning physicist Steve Weinberg before the Texas School Board textbook committee to undue the damage that the Taliban-like Gablers did to the teaching of evolution. I'm glad the old bastard's dead. As he fries...

The world's leading Gospel scholar separates the myth from the historical facts of Jesus's life WHAT DOES Christmas signify today if we discard the festive eating, drinking and merrymaking, inherited from the pagan Yule? Is it a reawakening of childhood imagery, dreaming of, but rarely experiencing, a white snowy morning, with Jesus lying in the manger, greeted by bearded shepherds and three colourful oriental stargazing kings, while in the background angelic choirs sing glory to God? Alas, all this is largely pious fiction. No one knows the exact date of the birth of Jesus Christ. December 25 was selected by...