Tag: Christianity

Commentary: Embarrassing Gaffes Continue to Show Media’s Ignorance of Religion

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by Jarret Stepman   It’s become increasingly clear that many in our nation’s elite media know little to nothing about religion—Christianity in particular. This is a disturbing trend for the future of our country. A long list of theological gaffes by The New York Times over the years was recently catalogued in an insightful New York Post editorial by Mark Hemingway. Among the Times’ errors was an article in 2013 that referred to Easter as a celebration of Jesus’ resurrection into heaven. It soon issued a correction, since Jesus did not immediately ascend to heaven after resurrection—that was weeks later. Another piece claimed that the Holy Sepulcher in Israel is where “Christians believe Jesus is buried,” even though Christians believe Jesus was resurrected and thus would not be in a tomb. And then there was the most recent blunder, in which the Times claimed that Father Jean-Marc Fournier saved a statue of Jesus from the Notre Dame fire. What Fournier actually saved was the Blessed Sacrament—which is, of course, not a statue but the bread used in Communion, believed by Catholics to be the real body of Christ. It appears that the Times struggles to understand the phrase “the body…

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Analysis: When Tragedy Strikes, WaPo Turns Focus To The ‘Far Right’

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by Peter Hasson   The Washington Post provoked an online backlash on Monday after publishing an article that said the recent terrorist attacks targeting Christians in Sri Lanka fueled “far-right anger in the West.” The article, labeled as analysis rather than straight reporting, provided just the latest example of the Post reframing a global tragedy around the “far right.” Critics took the Post to task for making mass murder of hundreds of Christians about the “far right” and for casting skepticism on the persecution that Christians face across persecution around the world. (Pew Research Center lists Christians as the religious group most subjected to religiously motivated harassment from both state actors and non-state actors.) “To some, it was further proof that Christians in many parts of the world are under attack,” Post reporters Adam Taylor and Rick Noack wrote. National Review editor Charles Cooke tweeted in response: “For whom was it not evidence of this?” "To some, it was further proof that Christians in many parts of the world are under attack." For whom was it not evidence of this? — Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) April 22, 2019 Additionally, the Washington Examiner’s Becket Adams wrote: “Yes, right-wing reactionaries have…

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Muslims Urged to Pack Sullivan County School Board Meeting to Advocate for Textbook That Says Allah and God Are the Same

Jason M. Reynolds

One Sullivan County School Board member is opposing the body’s planned adoption tonight of a social studies textbook that says the God of Christianity is the same as Islam’s Allah, while CAIR is calling on Muslims to pack the board room. Jane Thomas told the Kingsport Times-News that the seventh-grade “My World” book is full of “incorrect statements” also present in the earlier version and will confuse students. The book equates Allah with God. “We (Christians and Muslims) do not worship the same god. Allah is not God,” Thomas said. “It presents Allah as the same god as Almighty God.” She said the Islamic holy book, the Koran, should not be presented on the same level as the Holy Bible, the Christian word of God with a New Testament including words of Jesus Christ. She also decried the inclusion of the Five Pillars of Islam in the text. Board member Matthew Spivey said, “We can’t promote any one religion over another,” according to the Times-News. An earlier version of the book also drew opposition. Meanwhile, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called on Muslims to attend the Sullivan County Board of Education meeting to oppose “Islamophobic opposition from at least one board member.”…

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Charges Dropped Against Christian Pastor Arrested at Mall of America

Anthony Gockowski

Ramin Parsa, a Christian pastor who was arrested at the Mall of America in August and charged with trespassing, was cleared of all charges during a court hearing Thursday. “Praise the Lord! The prosecution is suspended, no more criminal charges, pleaded not guilty. Thank you so much for your prayers. We have resolved the criminal case and the city is not going to prosecute me further, so the city is out of it,” Parsa wrote on Facebook. As The Minnesota Sun reported, Parsa runs Redemptive Love Ministries in Los Angeles, but visited Minnesota in August. While in the state, he took a trip to the Mall of America and ended up in what he has called a “random” conversation with two Somali women. As an ex-Muslim, he spoke with the two about his conversion to the Christian faith, and was reported to mall security by a passersby. He was subsequently arrested, taken to the basement of the Mall of America, and charged with trespassing. Parsa returned to Minnesota Wednesday evening ahead of his court hearing, and spoke at the Minnesota Capitol during a prayer rally hosted in support of him. “I’ve been through this before in other countries,” he said…

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Commentary: Former Atheist Explains How Rationality, Not Emotion, Encourages Religious Belief

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by Annie Holmquist   I recently ran across an interview with author Stephen Asma in The Irish Times. Although an atheist, Asma is a rather unique atheist because he believes religion is necessary, a fact evidenced in his recent book Why We Need Religion. According to Asma, a philosophy professor, religion does not make sense rationally, but it makes a lot of sense emotionally: “Of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, he says: ‘I agree with them that religion fails miserably at the bar of rational validity, but we’re at the wrong bar.; Religion is not necessarily meant to be true, he argues, but it’s meant to be useful. ‘Religion helps people, rightly or wrongly, manage their emotional lives’ and especially cope with pain. Asma goes on to say, “Rationality cannot do the heavy lifting that is required in the face of devastating loss. What is needed is positive emotion and pain-reduction – in a word, religion.” At first blush, such an admission seems like a backhanded compliment – a recognition that religion is a useful and needful element. On second thought, Asma’s comment seems simply to echo Karl Marx’s famous statement that religion is the opium of the people. But one of modern…

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Commentary: The Breakdown of Family and Religion Explains France’s Social Unrest

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by Star Parker   As France is gripped by civil disorder, many commentators identify, quite correctly, as the culprit the outsized burden that France’s bloated welfare state places on its citizens. According a recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the highest tax burden in the industrialized world is in France—46.1 percent of gross domestic product. In the United States, it is 27 percent, which includes taxes paid at all levels of government—federal, state, and local. Welfare state spending in France is 32 percent of GDP, almost double that of the U.S., meaning that $1 out of $3 generated by the French economy is captured by the government and redistributed into social/welfare spending. [ The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more ] But let’s recall that all this government was put in place in the name of making life better for France’s citizens. There’s plenty of analysis regarding the French situation, as there is in our own country, about how to streamline and reform government programs and deliver the same quality of services at a reduced spending and tax burden on citizens. But…

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Commentary: Enlightenment Thinkers Understood the Need for Religion

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by Jeff Minick   In January I resolved to read Will and Ariel Durant’s magnum opus The Story Of Civilization before the end of the year. It is now early November, and I have finished Volume X of this series, Rousseau and Revolution, meaning I should fulfill my self-imposed obligation under deadline. The Durants devoted the last three of these eleven volumes to the period 1715-1815. A casual observer of The Story Of Civilization might wonder why these chroniclers of world civilization spent so much ink and energy on so limited a spectrum of time and place. Were they simply enamored with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the age of Napoleon? Not at all. At the end of Rousseau and Revolution, the Durants remark, “So we end our survey, in these last two volumes, of the century whose conflicts and achievements are still active in the life of mankind today.” (Despite this farewell, the Durants added a final volume, The Age of Napoleon.) The Durants examined the political, philosophical, and scientific whirl of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and understood the grip of that age on our present-day politics and culture. Its philosophers, statesmen, and scientists—Catherine the Great,…

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Veterans Respond to Effort in Supreme Court to Remove War Memorial

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by Troy Worden   When Jake Hill heard that an atheist activist group had sued to have a historic World War I memorial pulled down because some people were offended by the monument’s Christian symbolism, the Marine got angry. “Americans of all faith backgrounds should be outraged,” Hill, a lance corporal in the Marine Corps, said. Hill, of Madison, Wisconsin, was awarded the Silver Star during the Afghanistan War for his valor in leading his squad through enemy fire in 2010 to rescue a wounded fellow Marine. He also received a Purple Heart after being wounded in action during his service from 2008 to 2013. But back home, another battle is brewing at the Supreme Court. Hill sees the latest effort to remove the 40-foot-tall Peace Cross in Bladensburg, Maryland, as one more step in a long war against religious liberty in America. “Where will this end?” Hill, 28, asked in an email to The Daily Signal. “Will they begin chiseling the crosses and stars of David off gravestones in Arlington National Cemetery next?” Another Marine Corps veteran told The Daily Signal that he would not find a broad Supreme Court ruling against religious-themed memorials appealing. “I hope that in…

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Christianity: The First Major Religion That Stripped the State of Its Theocratic Powers

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Jesus Christ

by Cuatro Jones   When discussing the history of the West and exploring the ideas and philosophies that led up to the creation of the Magna Carta and the U.S constitution, eventually the religion of Christianity must be brought forward in the discussion. Why? Well, despite the many sins of Christians (and there are many), Christianity is the first major religion that, at its founding, stripped the state of its theocratic powers over the spiritual lives of the people. In the Biblical narrative, we see Jesus of Nazareth establish this foundational philosophy when answering a challenge from the Pharisees of Judea regarding to whom they should pay their monetary offerings: God (Yahweh) or Caesar? This question was designed to serve as a trap for Jesus, as the Jews were monotheistic and theocratic, and Roman law essentially made the Emperor a god. It is at this pivotal, though often overlooked moment, that Jesus sets the standard for the modern West regarding the role of government and religion in public life, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s.” This is critical because for the first time, we see a clear and categorical line of division between the palace and the temple, set by a central religious figure. This fundamentally…

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Commentary: ‘The Bible’ Is the All-Time Bestselling Book – But Do You Know What the Next-Best-Selling Book Is?

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Imitation of Christ

by Daniel Lattier   If someone asks you to name the all-time bestselling book, you’d most likely answer “The Bible.” And you’d be right. According to Guinness World Records: “Although it is impossible to obtain exact figures, there is little doubt that the Bible is the world’s best-selling and most widely distributed book. A survey by the Bible Society concluded that around 2.5 billion copies were printed between 1815 and 1975, but more recent estimates put the number at more than 5 billion.” But you might not have heard of the second-most sold and translated work of Christianity after the Bible… It’s The Imitation of Christ, written by the medieval monk Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471). The Imitation of Christ is a 15th-century devotional work that calls its readers to a radical living of the Christian faith. In the four books that comprise it, it counsels readers to reject the “vanities of the world”, to cultivate silence and turn inward, and to “take up the cross” by embracing suffering and humility in their lives. The fact that between 1500 and 1650 over 650 editions of it were produced, in a wide variety of languages, is a testimony to a less-secularized time in the history of…

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The Archbishop of Canterbury: Islamic Rules Are Incompatible with Britain’s Laws

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by CHQ Staff   Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, and leader of the Anglican Church in England, said yesterday that Islamic rules are incompatible with Britain’s laws, which have developed over 500 years on the principles of a different culture. He added that high levels of immigration from Muslim countries can “have an impact on the accepted pattern for choosing a partner, on assumed ages of maturity and sexual activity, and especially on issues of polygamy.” Archbishop Welby’s comments, reported by Steve Doughty Social Affairs Correspondent for The Daily Mail, follow the release earlier this month of a highly critical Home Office report that said all couples marrying in mosques should also have to go through a legally-binding civil marriage ceremony to shield wives from injustices under sharia. They also reverse the position taken by his predecessor Lord Williams, who, observed Doughty, backed incorporating sharia into the British legal system. Archbishop Welby set out his reasons why sharia should not win official status in a book, Reimagining Britain. Archbishop Welby said in advance of publication that British law has “underlying values and assumptions” that come from a clearly Christian tradition. “Sharia law is not just about punishments,” he added. “It is…

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Apologetics Conference Brings Global Evangelists to Murfreesboro

Jason M. Reynolds

“I don’t have enough faith to be atheist.” That statement may make atheists scratch their heads or utter a mocking remark. However, it is the focal point of Christian apologist Frank Turek’s ministry. He will share his arguments for Christianity at the Defending Truth Apologetics Conference on Nov. 4 at New Vision Baptist Church in Murfreesboro. He will be joined by global evangelist Ravi Zacharias; J. Warner Wallace, author of “Cold-Case Christianity;” and evangelist Stuart McAllister. Defending the Truth will equip people with tools to engage non-Christians within the secular American culture, people with “a sense something is wrong with the world and everyone knows there is something wrong.” In his ministry, Turek makes the case that Christianity is more rational than unbelief. Every person has a sense of justice. What is justice? What is the source of justice? Why should we fight for justice? “None of that makes any sense unless God exists,” Turek said. “There is no justice if we are just molecular machines like the atheists say. Everybody wants to right wrongs, but there can’t be something wrong unless there is something right, and right does not exist unless a standard of right exists — that’s God.”…

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Letter to the Editor: Don’t Let America Become Like Soviet Russia

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USA USSR

  Dear Tennessee Star, My name is Florin. I am married, father of six and  a strong conservative Christian. I am this way for my own and personal salvation and my love for God. Thirty years ago I’ve escaped from the former Soviet  regime where Christians were persecuted and killed. The United States of America was the only place for refuge that was known to accept Christians like me and it was also known all over the world as a Christian Country. The United States printed the Bibles in more than one hundred languages and sent out missionaries all over the world. Ever since I immigrated to America I am a fighter for religion rights which are taken away from us Christians every day by those evil groups that are turning this country upside down and destroying it from inside out. I totally disagree with what the Knoxville mayor did. Instead of fighting for the Christian Communities in Tennessee she crashed our Bible to the ground. I am encouraging the Christians in Knoxville, TN to come out and ask for her resignation upon failure to defend the City, State and Country’s Christian Religion faith against all other atheist individuals and…

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Franklin Graham Warns Clarksville Gathering About Compromised Christianity

Wendy Wilson

  Our country is in trouble, and so are our churches. That was the message Franklin Graham delivered Thursday evening in Clarksville. He pulled no punches in describing how Christians have compromised with a corrupt culture instead of adhering to Scripture and being a godly influence. A pilot for many years, Graham compared Christians who trust their feelings more than God’s word to pilots who trust their senses instead of their instruments, which can lead to a crash. “Many Christians in today’s churches are in a spiritual fog,” he said. “But they don’t know it. They’re being blinded by this godless corrupt culture of tolerance and political correctness.” The elder son of famed evangelist Billy Graham, Franklin Graham is president and CEO of Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. He was in Clarksville as part of his Decision America Tennessee Tour. Graham is Southern Baptist but reaches across denominational lines. While he does not endorse candidates and is critical of both major political parties, Graham encourages political involvement and is seen as sympathetic toward conservative politics. He has spoken out against Islam and in defense of President Trump’s efforts to restrict immigration from some Muslim-majority countries, positions that…

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Commentary: What Happens to Christians There Will Come Here

Tennessee Star Staff

George Rasley, ConservativeHQ.com Editor The establishment Republicans like Speaker Paul Ryan and the Far-Left Soros-backed open borders crowd would like Americans to believe that unlimited unvetted immigration from Muslim countries has no negative consequences. Indeed, when confronted with the opportunity to support President Trump’s efforts to limit immigration from Syria and other Muslim terrorist hotspots Speaker Ryan said, “That’s not who were are.” But maintaining the constitutional liberties that are “who we are” is exactly what limiting immigration from anti-constitutional cultures is all about. As Giulio Meotti writing for the Gatestone Institute pointed out recently, in ancient times, Algeria and Tunisia, entirely Christian, gave us great thinkers such as Tertullian and Augustine. Two centuries later, Christianity disappeared, replaced by Arab-Islamic civilization. Is Europe now meeting the same fate? In the Middle East, “Christianity is over in Iraq” due to Islamic extremism says Meotti; in Europe, Christianity is committing suicide. Within 20 years, more babies will be born to Muslim women than to Christian women world-wide; it is just the latest sign of the rapid growth that seems to be making Islam the world’s largest religion by the end of the century, according to Meotti’s analysis of a new study released…

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Is a Populist Christian Movement Needed to Renew the Faith?

Tennessee Star Staff

George Rasley, ConservativeHQ Editor April 15, 2017 The populist movement that swept Donald Trump into the presidency here in America, forced the United Kingdom to exit the European Union and that has roiled the politics of other European countries has been driven by the ineffectiveness, arrogance, and the cultural and political corruption of the Western establishment elite. Citizens of Western democracies have finally had enough of politicians who force outrageous ideas of political correctness upon them, but leave the roads full of potholes, legions of citizens un-employed or under-employed, and neighborhoods rife with crime. And the objects of this populist rebellion are not only the politicians who have been voted out of office or defeated, like Hillary Clinton, they have been the other elite institutional enforcers of political correctness. After joining the politically correct Left in enforcing bizarre and dangerous rules allowing men to enter the women’s restrooms and dressing rooms at their stores, Target lost $20 billion in market capitalization as the company’s stock value plunged after the corporation publicly declared its support in April 2016 for the very unpopular “gender identity” transgender political agenda. The losers weren’t the elite company managers who chose to enforce their will on…

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