Prayer as a firewall

Voice of the Martyrs Canada reports that government-sponsored hackers in Iran are taking down Christian web sites with DDOS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks.

Mohabat News, which serves Persian Christians in Iran and surrounding countries, has been shut down repeatedly in the past year. In February, cyber-attacks shut down the site for two days.

On August 19, attackers overloaded the server and forced the site down for three days. Managers of Mohabat News were eventually able to transfer the website onto a more secure server operating outside the country. Other such sites, however, are not able to operate from an outside server, raising fears that they will continue to be vulnerable to attacks.

Their high-tech solution?

Please join us in praying!

  • Pray that the attacks on Mohabat News and other such sites will cease.

Yes, that ought to do it. Which is why Mohabat News moved their server elsewhere, instead of just praying about it.

 

OZ: Date change prompts accusations of ‘Christian cleansing’

The Christian Post reports that Australian education officials are planning to edit the dates in textbooks by replacing the initials BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini, “in the year of our Lord”) with the secular alternatives BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era). Stop me if you’ve heard this one: local Christians are taking this move as a deliberate attempt to eradicate Christianity from Australia.

Fred Nile, a minister in New South Wales, told The Daily Telegraph that the announcement was a “final insult” to Christians in Australia and “an absolute disgrace.”

Nile said he feels the move is an attempt to remove any traces of Christianity from the country.

“The direction of the national curriculum is towards almost a Christian cleansing to remove from our history any references to the role Christianity had in the formation of Australia and still has today,” he told The Telegraph.

Personally, I don’t much care whether you say BC or BCE, any more than I care that Wednesday is a tribute to the Norse god Woden. Its mythological significance is too trivial to fuss over. But “Christian cleansing”? For a typographical substitution? That’s a bit over the top in my book. Save the “ethnic cleansing” insinuations for actual human rights violations please.

“Missing the Point” Department

TV Station WJHG reports that “several hundred” fans and football players staged an ostensibly defiant recitation of the Lord’s Prayer just before a high school football game.

Marianna- Just before Friday night’s football game at Marianna High School, students, parents, and even the players went through with reciting the Lord’s Prayer…

One student said it should send a strong message about prayer in public schools.

“It just shows that with God anything’s possible, nothing can stop us,” said Marianna High School student Trenton Nobles.

It also shows that prayer is not being repressed in the United States. What’s illegal is for the state (e.g. school teachers, coaches, principals, etc) to dictate to students when and how they must pray. But students themselves are free to pray whenever they like. As the TV station kindly noted in their online report, the ACLU confirmed the fact that public, student-led prayer cannot legally be discouraged by school officials.

The American Civil Liberties Union was not involved in the Jackson County School Board’s decision about pre-game prayers, but it said it’s against the law for school administrators and teachers to either encourage or discourage them.

Yep, those dad-gummed atheist liberals are standing up for believers’ civil rights again. Care to guess how many believers are going to thank them for it?

Gospel Disproof #1: Creationism

I was just reading a recent news story about how a creationist organization used a combination of deception and litigation to extort $110,000 from the California Science Center and its insurers—a reminder once again that creationism isn’t just a harmless delusion. There is one thing we can all agree with the creationists on, though. Evolutionary biology is far too sophisticated and elegant to have been invented by the crude and barbaric deity imagined by the writers of Genesis.

[Read more…]

Bigotry is as bigotry does

CNN reports that Rick Santorum isn’t too happy about being labeled a bigot.

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum defended his position on gay marriage Tuesday while speaking to students at Pennsylvania State University, and slammed CNN’s Piers Morgan for questioning him as a “bigot” in a pre-taped interview that aired Wednesday night.
“I had Piers Morgan call me a bigot, because I believe what the Catholic Church teaches with respect to homosexuality,” Santorum said, heatedly. “So now I’m a bigot because I believe what the Bible teaches.”

Yup. See, here’s the thing: “bigotry” is when you pick a certain group of people to treat as inferiors—denying them the same rights as everyone else—simply because they are different in some way. The question of “bigot vs. not-bigot” is not a question of where you get your ideas from, it’s a question of whether or not you do what bigotry does.

It is nice that he gives the Bible and the Catholic Church full credit as the source of his bigotry though.

 

Obama sued for picking which laws to enforce

Hot off the newswires, WorldNetDaily is reporting that the Department of Justice—sorry, make that BARACK OBAMA’S Department of Justice (very important to note that it’s his own personal Department of Justice)—is being sued again.

Barack Obama’s Department of Justice has been sued in federal court – again – for picking and choosing which of the nation’s laws it wants to enforce.

The newest case is being brought by Judicial Watch on behalf of the Family Research Council. It focuses on the announcement last winter from Attorney General Eric Holder that his department – assigned the responsibility of defending the U.S. and its laws – simply won’t do that when it comes to the congressionally approved and presidentially signed Defense of Marriage Act.

“When Barack Obama became president, he took an oath to uphold our laws – and not just the ones with which he personally agrees,” said FRC President Tony Perkins.

Yes, he did take an oath to uphold our laws, starting with the Constitution, which the DOMA and the PATRIOT Act both violate. He’s quite right to refuse to violate the Constitution when it comes to marriage. I wish he would be equally principled in refusing to violate the First and Fourth Amendments by enforcing the PATRIOT Act. Perkins is right about there being a problem, he’s just objecting to the wrong inconsistency.