News-Record.com

UPDATE: "So what I would like to know is, does this exhibit tell the truth?"
Dead Sea Scrolls student

See never-before-exhibited fragments of Genesis and Deuteronomy in an exhibit created specifically for N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences.

A novel marketing idea:

In honor of the spicy, bold taste of our signature Hot Wings, KFC wants to know if it really is "Hotter than Hell" in your town. If it is, you have a chance to win free KFC Hot Wings!
Just how hot is Hell?
Now through July 4, visit kfc.com each day to verify the high temperature for Hell, Michigan. If your town is "Hotter than Hell," enter your information for a chance to receive $3 in KFC gift checks to try KFC's Hot Wings (you pay all applicable sales tax).

Obama wants to continue -- while tweaking -- Bush's faith-based programs , which would allow religious groups to compete for government funds to perform community social work.

The number of neopagans roughly doubles about every 18 months in the United States, Canada and Europe, according to the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance.
Neopaganism, whether a careful reconstruction of ancient practice or a completely modern interpretation of ancient lore, is now among the country's fastest-growing religions.

Wiccan kit -- $150 OBO.

The Pew Forum claims 1 in 5 atheists believe in God.
Atheists have the will to believe?

He's in critical condition and several family members have died, after a man traveling the wrong way on a highway apparently ran into their vehicle.

South Carolina will have "I Believe" license plates.
The state's Lt. Gov says he will personally put up the deposit to get DMV production begun.

As the wider Anglican Communion fragments over homosexuality, England's established Church is moving towards its own crisis with a crucial vote on women bishops this weekend.

"He was a man of compassion, sincere moral conviction and a strong Christian." Franklin Graham on the former senator's life.

The Vatican said Tuesday it regrets the decision by the Church of England's governing body to allow the ordination of women as bishops.

UPDATE:
A student at the University of Central Florida claims his life -- and afterlife -- were threatened by enraged Catholics after he pocketed "the body of Christ" during a church ceremony, according to a report on myfoxorlando.com.

Has some people asking: "All this fuss over a cracker?"
Others say "sacred" once it's blessed.

The winner of a $57 million Mega Millions lottery jackpot in June is a registered sex offender who also pleaded guilty to two breaking and entering charges in the 1980s, according to Time Magazine.
Fred Topous Jr., 45, was discharged from Michigan Department of Corrections supervision in October 2006.
Topous said he planned to buy a house, send his children to college and have some fun with his winnings. He said he and his wife work multiple jobs to make ends meet and thought they'd have to work till they died. "I want to enjoy a little bit of life," Topous told state lottery officials. "We're plain folks. We've struggled all our lives."

The press release (with editorial opinion in bold):
"Until now, the skin-rejuvenating line could only be found in high end department stores (for some reason I'm thinking of the rich man, camel and needle parable) or on the AHAVA website; but now the elite products can be found in select Christian bookstores.

"... no one has to be left behind (groan) when it comes to having stunning and youthful looking skin!"

Could it really be this bad for atheist soldiers?

Jeremy Hall says the military has become a Christian organization. His sudden lack of faith, he told CNN, cost him his military career and put his life at risk. Hall said his life was threatened by other troops and the military assigned a full-time bodyguard to protect him out of fear for his safety.

The amount of the reward -- $495,000 -- floored me until I read this:

"Heim, who would be 94, tops the center's list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals. A reward of $495,000 is being offered jointly by the center and the German and Austrian governments for information leading to his capture.
Heim, known as "Dr. Death," was indicted in Germany on charges he murdered hundreds of inmates at Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was camp doctor.
"His crimes are fully documented by himself, because he kept a log of the operations that he carried out," Zuroff said. "He tortured many inmates before he killed them at Mauthausen, and he used body parts of the people he killed as decorations."

Authorities have seized more than 100 snakes, many of them deadly, from the home of a fundamentalist Christian pastor in Kentucky.

Looks like the pastor was buying many of the deadly snakes online for between $50 and $450 a piece.

Choice quote from the local zoo director:

"You can purchase anything off the Internet except common sense ...A venomous snake isn't a pet. You don't play with it. If you do, you're an idiot."

All this makes me wonder..is there some way we can convince complete religious zealots outside of Appalachia to stop shooting doctors, bombing clinics, beating up gay kids and flying planes into buildings and start handling poisonous snakes?

For those of you not hip to Christian snake handling -- let Billy Ray Cyrus school you:

Bradley LaShawn Fowler, 39, of Canton, Michigan is seeking $60 million from Zondervan Publishers and another $10 million from Thomas Nelson Publishing in lawsuits flied in U.S. District Court of the Easton District of Michigan, reports the Grand Rapids Press.

Fowler states that he's suing the two major Christian publishers for violating his constitutional rights and causing emotional pain, because the Bible versions they publish refer to homosexuality as a sin.

Generations of recovering alcoholics, soldiers, weary parents, exploited workers and just about anybody feeling beaten down by life have found solace in a short prayer that begins, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change."
But who really wrote it?

BEIJING (AP) | Police fatally shot five members of a purported radical Islamic separatist group in the far west of China as Beijing tightened security ahead of next month's Olympic Games, state media reported Wednesday.
The suspects confessed they had all received training in waging a holy war, Xinhua reported.

Gone were all but two members of the choir he had assembled over the years. Gone were all but one of the eight altar servers. Gone were the husbands from the weddings he had performed, and gone were the fathers of the children he had baptized.

Publisher of Mormon calendar featuring shirtless men excommunicated.

A man in New Zealand is claiming God ordered him to behead two women with a samurai sword.

The story seems to indicate the man's changed his story a number of times -- but I guess my question is: what do you do if you think God really is telling you to kill people?

If you're a devoted Christian who believes in a literal translation of the Bible then you'd know your crimes would be in line with the many atrocities The Lord Your God has either performed, sanctioned or demanded in the name of faith. Killing heretics (Deuteronomy 17:12), atheists and people of other religions (2 Chronicles 15:12-13), raping and killing women (Deuteronomy 22:20-21, Isaiah 13:15-18), children (Hosea 9:11-16, Ezekiel 9:5-7) and even your own offspring -- if the Bible is your touchstone on the voices you're hearing, you may believe you'd be asked to do any of these things.

Indeed, if you've read your Bible and think you're getting messages, you may realize that many biblical heroes killed on God's orders and might think yourself doomed if you hesitate (Jeremiah 48:10).

Some of this can be chalked up to the utter strangeness of the Old Testament, which many modern Christians dismiss in large chunks or almost entirely. But once you've taken an Old Testament-rooted fundamentalist line on one thing (homosexuality, sex outside of marriage, contraception, inter-faith marriage, the utter impossibility of non-Christians to enter the Kingdom of Heaven), where do you draw the line, shake your head and say some of this stuff is crazy?

And if you begin to hear voices or see signs -- do you obey them as a good Christian or seek psychiatric help and chance burning in Hell for all eternity?

Christians are hardly the only people who have to struggle with this question -- but it would seem to me that if this Christian guy in New Zealand did kill two women with a Samurai sword on God's orders, he'd have some biblical loopholes even if he has no legal ones.

If you're a Jewish prisoner in an Ohio prison, you can get a kosher meal.

But not if you're a Messianic Jew.

Leaving aside the obvious question of why people who are paying this much attention to their diet for fear of offending God are...you know...in prison...I think this is an interesting debate.

Is it your belief in things like strict dietary guidelines that make them an essential part of your spiritual life, or what your religious leaders and texts say about them?

For those who are confused: Messianic Jews are Jews who believe that Jesus (or Yeshua) is the Hebrew messiah but do not consider themselves Christians.

They are not to be confused with Jews for Jesus, whose name is much funnier and who are allowed to eat bacon cheeseburgers.

Grandpa John demonstrates the power of Christ.

Using pickles, electricity and what looks disturbingly like a miniature sex sling.

Hard to argue with that.

(Via Filled with Chocolate Pudding!)

A Dutch ban on tobacco smoking indoors has been a windfall for "The Only and Universal Smoker's Church of God," which now has Dutch citizens flocking to become "Holy Smokers" -- which could let them legally circumvent the law on religious grounds.

From the piece in the Telegraph:

Michiel Eijsbouts, founder and "Smokelighter" of the church he founded in 2001, has insisted that the Dutch smoking ban in place does not apply to members of his church under national and European human rights legislation.

"We will have to find out what the secular powers-that-be think. For us the constitution and European rules say we have the right to express our religion and we express our religion through smoking."

---

The First Commandment: smoke 'em if you got 'em!

A Moroccan woman who wears a burqua was denied French citizenship last month.

Now the country's Urban Affairs Minister Fadela Amara, herself a practicing Muslim, says she backs the decision.

From the news story:

The burqa is a prison, it's a straightjacket," Urban Affairs Minister Fadela Amara, herself a practising Muslim who was born in France to Algerian parents, said in an interview in Le Parisien newspaper yesterday.

"It is not a religious insignia but the insignia of a totalitarian political project that advocates inequality between the sexes and which is totally devoid of democracy."

--

I've been uncomfortable about the burqua question for many years -- but in the end it was a Muslim woman who brought me around to being full-bore against it. Many women in her family wore the burqua and she had become something of a black sheep for rejecting it and deciding to go to college and study science. She was speaking from experience -- not having idle coffee table chat about something she didn't understand.

"But if you asked Muslim women who wear the burqua why, wouldn't they say it's out of sincere religious belief and that they choose it?" I asked her. "Shouldn't they be allowed to make that decision, even if we don't agree with it?"

"Sure," she said. "They should be allowed to do whatever they like. But the truth that most of these women will never tell you is that they would be beaten by their fathers and brothers if they did not wear it. And the 'belief' that makes them wear it is that they are the property of their fathers and husbands, which is what they have been taught from birth. That is what you support when you say it is all right for women to wear the burqua."

Bill Maher has a religious riff from his act of a few years ago that includes a bit about the burqua. It's in the below video and begins at about the 20 minutes 30 seconds point (some strong language):

In brief, without strong language: if any religion tried to sell us on the idea that they had to keep their black men in burquas because, after all, that's just their culture -- we would lose our minds. It would be apartheid all over -- but without a viable separate but equal pretense. But when they tell us the women have to be covered in this manner...well, that's just their religion. You have to respect that.

Where do you guys come down on it?

I'd have waited.
Then again, I wait out funeral processions as well (though it can get a bit hairy on High Point Road and Wendover and ...).

Same-sex marriage is legal in two states, but not a single one will show up in the 2010 census, according to the Associated PRess.
The Census Bureau says the federal Defense of Marriage Act bars the agency from recognizing gay marriages in the nation's 10-year count, even though the marriages are legal in Massachusetts and California.

"They went to a remote region where people needed medical help and the Gospel of Christ," said the Rev. Chris Bitterman, a family friend and the assistant pastor at their church, Meadowview Reformed Presbyterian Church in Lexington. "And they took both."

That sacrifice is heavy on the hearts of the people now raising money to help the missionary family come home to bury one of their sons.

For good or for ill, the Episcopal church has always been, in some sense, "America's church."

John Hagee has successfully removed from YouTube every video of him preaching.

A seminary student apparently took the note Barack Obama tucked in the cracks of Western Wall, Israel's holiest site, and made it public.

"The ruling cuts to a conundrum in the First Amendment, which prohibits the state from establishing any religion, but also prohibits religious discrimination. Religious colleges have argued their students shouldn't be deprived of a state benefit everyone else can get."

What makes anyone think the pope will overturn church teachings on contraceptives? The devastating effect of AIDS in Africa, for example, is decades old.

Another sad day in our county's history.
The story says the alleged shooter got upset when anyone spoke about religion, that his parents had forced him to go to church. I don't think that had anything to do with it -- he just seems disturbed.

Some in the Jewish community have expressed distrust of Christians United for Israel, believing its members are only supporting Israel in their belief that an establishment of Zion is required before Jesus Christ can return.
Jews wouldn't have a part in that belief of salvation.
It's not, said the Rev. John Hagee, founder, that his group wants to speed up Armageddon
"We stand with Israel because we have a Bible mandate to stand with Israel," he said during a joint Christians United for Israel platform with Sen. Joe Lieberman.

Check out Bishop Michael Curry of the Episcopal Church, whose district runs from Charlotte to Raleigh, addressing the media during the Lambeth Conference, the once a decade assembly of bishops of the Anglican Communion, in a meeting convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Here's what he has to say about evangelism.

Alcohol is now legal in Asheboro.

And the town hasn't yet been sucked into a gaping Hellmouth.

But the day's not over.

My original lede for this story? "That sound you hear is champagne corks popping."

They thought that was a bit flip because, you know, there were also people crying.

As I reported this story there have been friends from other parts of the country who are amazed that some down here consider this a religious issue. What do you think?

Is your church, mosque or synagogue collecting back-to-school supplies for needy children in the Greensboro area?

Will you host a community day of sorts offering back-to-school services, such as free haircuts or clothing?

I know of a couple and I'd like to compile a more complete list of events and opportunities in a future column, to share with parents who might otherwise find out after the fact.

Please send details to me.

I always think it's interesting when people who some feel ought to have the right to ask for the death penalty, take another approach:

The 76-year-old says he used to support capital punishment, but now it doesn't seem the answer for what he calls "this kind of evil."

The Dalai Lama too moderate?