It's Mission Week... again!

It's Mission Week again on God TV — it always seems to be Missions Week on God TV! For those of you who've never seen it, Missions Week is a twice-yearly, eight day, 24 hours-a-day appeal for funds to pay for the God-awful TV channel.

A host of televangelists has been lined up to try and reach the channel's target of $10 million. There is the usual hard sell to try to bleed the faithful dry, with viewers being told that if they give, God will give much more back to them.

As I watch, 'Pastor' Matthew Ashimolowo says he is "challenging the spirit of greed" — the man clearly has no sense of irony! In October 2005 the UK's Charity Commission found that Ashimolowo had used charity funds to buy himself a car and a holiday apartment in Florida. Meanwhile, Ashimolowo is telling God TV viewers that the reason they're not married is because they're not sending their cash in!

God TV's press release tells us that it is a 'Not-For-Profit Florida Corporation with tax-exempt status from the IRS.' Why do we allow this to continue?

Update: The channel had banked less than 5% of its $10,000,000 target at the end of the scheduled Missions Week — as a result, the week has been extended as 'the devil is trying to stop God TV's funding'.

Mixed messages?

The Atheist Bus Campaign in London has provoked a lot of responses. One of the strangest is this sign paid for by US gospel singer Paul Ellingsen.
Link: Atheist Bus Campaign on Theology Now

Religious fight death the hardest

People with strong religious beliefs appear to want doctors to do everything they can to keep them alive as death approaches, the Journal of the American Medical Association reports.

Researchers followed 345 patients with terminal cancer up until their deaths. Those who regularly prayed were more than three times more likely to receive intensive life-prolonging care than those who relied least on religion.

However, because aggressive end-of-life cancer care has been associated with a poor quality of death and caregiver bereavement adjustment, intensive end-of-life care might represent a negative outcome for religious copers.

"These findings merit further discussion within religious communities, and consideration from those providing pastoral counsel to terminally ill patients with cancer," wrote lead researcher Holly Prigerson.

Update: Edward Current — Why Christians Fight To Stay Alive

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Todd Bentley marries woman he had extramarital affair with

Those who have been following the misadventures of Canadian evangelist Todd Bentley may be interested to know that he remarried a few days ago, reports Rick Hiebert in Canada's Western Standard.

Bentley has married the former Jessa Hasbrook, a former intern for his ministry. Last summer, his internationally famous revival campaign in Lakeland, Florida collapsed when it was revelead that he and Jessa had begun an "emotional affair". Charismatic leaders C Peter Wagner and Robert Ricciardelli, however, have reported that the affair was apparently sexual. Ricciardelli, furthermore, has indicated that this affair, whatever type it was, began in January of last year, which would place it well before Bentley announced that he was separating from his wife Shonnah. This is also well before Bentley brought Shonnah Bentley and his kids to Lakeland to show them to an international TV audience. Shonnah Bentley even preached in a local church to promote her husband's revival.

(Even non-contested divorces in British Columbia take at least two to five months to process. If we work backwards, it appears that Todd and Jessa Bentley could have wound up marrying as quickly as the day after Todd Bentley's divorce paperwork arrived in the mail from Canada. A five month delay until now would place the start of everything back around last November, which, interestingly, was around the same time that Shonnah Bentley and her mom Val Andres, in control of the remnant of the Fresh Fire board, issued the statement on behalf of the board that Todd was committing "adultery", and castigated the evangelist at some length.)

Last fall Rick Hiebert commented that Shonnah Bentley has a lifelong disability after suffering cancer as a teen: "Mr. Bentley must realize that if, he divorces his current wife in favor of a trophy wife, there will be speculation in the minds of some of his Internet and Christian media critics that one of the reasons that he is getting rid of Shonnah is because her disability embarrasses him — and moreover, that his theology does not work with a wife hobbling along at his side."

God as a 'fashion statement'

In a single generation, the number of people in the United States who label themselves — even loosely — as Christian has gone down 11 percent. According to the latest American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), almost all church denominations have declined since the original study was conducted in 1990.

Americans who claim no religion at all now outrank every major religious group except Catholics and Baptists. These "Nones" — a term coined by the researchers for those who answered "None" when asked about their religious affiliation — currently represent 15 percent of the population, which is almost twice as many as in 1990.

"These people aren't secularized," said Barry Kosmin, co-author of the massive study that polls more than 54,000 people across the United States. "They're not thinking about religion and rejecting it; they're not thinking about it at all."

"More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I'm everything. I'm nothing. I believe in myself,'" said Kosmin. In 1990, he concluded that many Americans saw God as a "personal hobby," and characterized the country as "a greenhouse for spiritual sprouts." Today, however, "religion has become more like a fashion statement, not a deep personal commitment for many."

Report says some Muslim schools should be closed - but doesn't have faith in the government to do it

Civitas is an independent think tank in the UK that seeks to deepen public understanding of the legal, institutional and moral framework that makes possible a free society. It has just published a report into Muslim schools in Britain.

The report claims that the aim of some Islamic schools in the UK is to capture the next generation of Muslims for fundamentalism and to turn children away, not only from Western influence, but also from liberal and secular Muslims, whom they despise perhaps with greater vehemence than non‐Muslims.

"The approach of some of the Muslim schools we have studied is the result not of violent extremism but of religious fundamentalism" says the report. "They see non‐Muslim countries as part of the realm of unbelief and they see education as a process of inoculating children against infection by Western ideas. As far as possible they try to shield children from Western influence — hence the prohibition of art, music, and drama — but above all children are taught to reject the Western tradition of learning through discussion and argument. The liberal ideals of Milton and Locke, that we should learn to be self‐critical and teach ourselves the disinterested pursuit of truth, are held in contempt."

It recommends that where schools refuse to dissociate themselves from views such as intolerance towards non‐Muslims, anti‐Semitism, a phobia of non‐Muslim society, discriminatory attitudes towards women, bigotry towards homosexuals, a horror of men and women mixing, a belief in the legitimacy of jihad, a hatred of all unbelievers, a belief that Western civilization is utterly corrupt and must be replaced by some form of Islamic super‐state, a contempt for sports, music, dance, cinema, television, art, or any other views likely to destabilize society or compromise social cohesion, they should be closed.

Unfortunately, it also believes that the UK Government's education watchdog, Ofsted, is 'unsuited to its role', and therefore not up to the task.

Link: Music, Chess and other Sins: Segregation, Integration, and Muslim Schools in Britain

The hidden contradictions in the bible (and why we don't know about them)

What is the story of Jesus' birth? How did Judas die? What did Jesus say when he was crucified?

The answers to these questions are not what you may think, and vary depending on which Gospel you read, according to Bible scholar Bart Ehrman, author of 'Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them)'.

Ehrman reveals that:

• the authors of the New Testament have diverging views about who Jesus was and how salvation works;


• the New Testament contains books that were forged in the names of the apostles by Christian writers who lived decades later;


• Jesus, Paul, Matthew, and John all represented fundamentally different religions;


• established Christian doctrines — such as the suffering messiah, the divinity of Jesus, and the trinity — were the inventions of even later theologians.

Link: Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them)

Christianity In crisis?

Nearly two decades ago Hank Hanegraaff's award-winning 'Christianity in Crisis' alerted the world to what he called 'the dangers of a cultic movement within Christianity' that threatened to undermine the very foundation of the Christianity. But in the 21st century, are there new dangers — new teachers who threaten to do more damage than the last?

According to Hanegraaff, these are not obscure teachers — the faithful know their names, have seen their faces, sat in their churches, and heard them shamelessly preach and promote the pretexts of a give-to-get gospel whilst getting richer by the day. They are virtual rock stars who command the attention of presidential candidates and media moguls. Through make-believe miracles, urban legends, counterfeit Christs, and twisted theological reasoning, they peddle an occult brand of metaphysics that continues to deceive millions around the globe.

Says Hanegraaff, "Since the original Christianity in Crisis was released, a new breed of prosperity preachers has taken Hagin's preaching and practices to unimaginable heights — or rather, unimaginable depths. Men such as Joel Osteen and women like Joyce Meyer have taken the crisis in Christianity spawned by Hagin and popularized by disciples such as Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn to levels that I could scarcely have imagined when I was writing in the twentieth century."

Link: Christianity In Crisis: The 21st Century

Vatican claims Darwin is compatible with Christianity

The Vatican has rejected the claim by Richard Dawkins that evolutionary theory proves that God does not exist, proclaiming that on the contrary Darwinian evolution and the account of Creation in Genesis are "perfectly compatible".

At a conference held to mark the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Vatican theologians said while Christians believed that God "created all things", the Vatican "does not stand in the way of scientific realities".

Rafael Martinez, professor of the Philosophy of Science at the Santa Croce Pontifical University in Rome, said although the reaction of Catholic theologians, intellectuals and priests to Darwinian theory had been "generally negative" in the 19th century, "recent declarations by Popes have asserted the full accordance of Catholic doctrine and evolutionary biology".

He said, however, that this was not widely known, and the false impression had arisen "that the Holy See is opposed to evolution". Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said there was "no a priori incompatibility between evolution and the message of the Bible".

He noted that Darwin had never been condemned by the Catholic Church, and that On the Origin of the Species had never been placed on the Index of forbidden books. Cardinal William Levada, head of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the assertion by Richard Dawkins and others that evolution proves there is no God was "absurd".

Cardinal Levada also attacked "those who have a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible which they want to see taught to their children in the schools alongside evolution or instead of it."

Link: The Dawkins Delusion

Comfort conspiracy?

Last month Richard Dawkins called Ray Comfort an 'ignorant fool'. Comfort is well-known for his embarrassing theories — just look for his video showing how the banana proves God's existence! Now Comfort says he's uncovered a conspiracy to attack his book "You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence but You Can't Make Him Think".

"If you look at the reviews on Amazon.com," he said, "you could come away thinking that this is worst book ever written. It has masses of one 'stars' with scathing reviews, saying things like 'Comfort is a charlatan' and 'Dreadful piece of drivel.'"

Comfort claims there is a conspiracy among atheists to drag his book down through their responses on the Amazon website. He said he's sure his book sales have been affected because of the negative reviews, "because people purchase upon other people's opinions."

Brazil nut

A Brazilian archbishop says all those who helped a child rape victim secure an abortion are to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church. The girl, aged nine, became pregnant with twins after she had been sexually assaulted by her stepfather. The excommunication applies to the child's mother and the doctors involved in the procedure.

Abortion is only permitted in Brazil in cases of rape and where the mother's life is at risk and doctors say the girl's case met both these conditions. The Catholic Church tried to intervene to prevent the abortion going ahead but the procedure was carried out on Wednesday.

"I believe the position of the church is extreme, radical and inadequate," Health Minister Jose Gomes Temporao said on a government radio program. "I am shocked by the radical position of this religion which, wrongly saying it is defending a life, puts another life in danger that is as important as any other."

The Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, told Brazil's TV Globo that the law of God was above any human law.

Last month a Roman Catholic priest in Brazil who defended the use of contraceptives and the rights of homosexuals was suspended by his local archbishop. The archbishop said the ambiguous views expressed over gay marriage and contraceptives were diametrically opposed to the official teaching of the Church.