Hi all,
Normally I don’t send long emails. But today’s sequence of news blips I monitor came up with an interesting collection of items.
I’ve attached three after my signature, in the order in which they came in my inbox.
My reactions were firstly, measured happiness with the first story, disturbed shock and anger with the second, then sadness and resolve in the third.
To me this is a reminder that we must be always aware of how God lives in our lives on a daily basis, and how the devil wants to interrupt that relationship.
[Soapbox speech starts]
Our kids must also be reminded of this message since their personal history is much newer than our own. For instance, it may not be a big deal to our kids to use pop stars in a Nativity scene. Certainly the power of God does not live in the mannequins or the arrangement of the scene. But bringing popular celebrities into the story of Jesus’ birth does trivialize the Christmas story and the kids aren’t aware of that.
Brings to mind a Christmas special we watched on TV for a popular cartoon called ‘Recess’ (“Recess Christmas: Miracle on Third Street”). Since it is a Disney product I expected that it would not bring much in the way of evangelical Christian messages but I was really upset when the finale of the cartoon kids’ Christmas play (which told us how much Christmas means to all of our hearts) began with Druids, proceeded with Kwanzaa, had a kid dressed as a Jewish menorah, and ended up with Santa Claus and other religious symbols all dancing on stage and singing. Hmmm seems the only major religion not represented was, uh, Jesus Himself, the reason for the CHRISTmas season in the first place. It didn’t help that the ending shot was of five of the kids laying on the ground making snow angels, forming the shape of an upside-down pentagram. I am NOT joking or paranoid, watch it for yourself when it comes on TV.
[Soapbox speech ends]
Whew had to get that out of my system, thanks for listening (reading?).
Love,
John
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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20041209/ap_on_re_us/believing_atheist
Famous Atheist Now Believes in God
Thu Dec 9, 4:57 PM ET
U.S. National – AP
By RICHARD N. OSTLING, AP Religion Writer
NEW YORK – A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God â more or less â based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday.
At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England.
Flew said he’s best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people’s lives.
“I’m thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins,” he said. “It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose.”
Flew first made his mark with the 1950 article “Theology and Falsification,” based on a paper for the Socratic Club, a weekly Oxford religious forum led by writer and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis.
Over the years, Flew proclaimed the lack of evidence for God while teaching at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading universities in Britain, in visits to numerous U.S. and Canadian campuses and in books, articles, lectures and debates.
There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife.
Yet biologists’ investigation of DNA “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved,” Flew says in the new video, “Has Science Discovered God?”
The video draws from a New York discussion last May organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese’s Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas. Participants were Flew; Varghese; Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew; and Roman Catholic philosopher John Haldane of Scotland’s University of St. Andrews.
The first hint of Flew’s turn was a letter to the August-September issue of Britain’s Philosophy Now magazine. “It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism,” he wrote.
The letter commended arguments in Schroeder’s “The Hidden Face of God” and “The Wonder of the World” by Varghese, an Eastern Rite Catholic layman.
This week, Flew finished writing the first formal account of his new outlook for the introduction to a new edition of his “God and Philosophy,” scheduled for release next year by Prometheus Books.
Prometheus specializes in skeptical thought, but if his belief upsets people, well “that’s too bad,” Flew said. “My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads.”
Last week, Richard Carrier, a writer and Columbia University graduate student, posted new material based on correspondence with Flew on the atheistic www.infidels.org Web page. Carrier assured atheists that Flew accepts only a “minimal God” and believes in no afterlife.
Flew’s “name and stature are big. Whenever you hear people talk about atheists, Flew always comes up,” Carrier said. Still, when it comes to Flew’s reversal, “apart from curiosity, I don’t think it’s like a big deal.”
Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American “intelligent design” theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life.
A Methodist minister’s son, Flew became an atheist at 15.
Early in his career, he argued that no conceivable events could constitute proof against God for believers, so skeptics were right to wonder whether the concept of God meant anything at all.
Another landmark was his 1984 “The Presumption of Atheism,” playing off the presumption of innocence in criminal law. Flew said the debate over God must begin by presuming atheism, putting the burden of proof on those arguing that God exists.
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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20041209/od_nm/italy_nativity_dc
Furor Over Scrapping of Christmas Play
Thu Dec 9,11:44 AM ET
By Philip Pullella
ROME (Reuters) – An Italian school’s substitution of a Nativity play with Little Red Riding Hood so as not to offend Muslim children has raised the Vatican (news – web sites)’s ire and sparked debate on how much traditions should change to accommodate immigrants.
The episode was the latest in a series in recent weeks which made headlines as overwhelmingly Catholic Italy comes to grips with an ever-growing Muslim population which some see as a blessing for the economy and others as a threat.
Pope John Paul (news – web sites), in a message for the Catholic Church’s World Day of Migrants, weighed in indirectly, saying Christians had to respect cultural differences but had to proclaim the gospel and defend traditions.
Last week, a public elementary school in the northern city of Treviso decided that Little Red Riding Hood would be this year’s Christmas play instead of the Christmas story.
The teachers said the famous tale was a fitting representation of the struggle between good and evil and would not offend Muslim children. The school’s traditional nativity scene was scrapped for the same reason.
In another school near Milan, the word “Jesus” was removed from a Christmas hymn and substituted with the word “virtue.” In Vicenza province an annual contest for the best Nativity scene in schools was canceled.
Conservative politicians and Churchmen blasted the moves.
“Are we losing our minds?,” said Reforms Minister Roberto Calderoli, an outspoken member of the populist Northern League. “Do we want to erase our identity for the love of Allah?”
The Vatican, still smarting from its failure to win a reference to Europe’s Christian roots in the continent’s new constitution, said Christians should hold their ground.
“It is a perfect example of how not to respect the presence of different people, in this case our Muslim brothers, by annihilating our own identity,” said Bishop Agostino Marchetto, head of the Vatican’s department for migrants.
“We have to accept others but others have to accept our identity,” he told reporters.
The Vatican has been waging a battle to keep Christ in Christmas. Wednesday it harshly criticized a Nativity scene in London which portrayed soccer star David Beckham and his wife Victoria as Joseph and Mary.
Cardinal Camillo Ruini of Rome went on national television event Wednesday to issued a battle cry over respect for traditional Nativity creches.
“These things can seem small but the spirit behind them is radically wrong and can have very heavy consequences on our young people,” he said.
Italy, with a population of 57 million, is home to an estimated one million officially registered Muslims, making Islam the country’s second largest religion. But social services groups say the number is much higher and growing.
The controversies have divided Italian Muslims, who are trying to integrate themselves in a Catholic country where they have found jobs.
“Those Christmas plays are like forced indoctrination,” said Abdel Smith, one of Italy’s most outspoken Muslim leaders, who has launched legal battles to take crucifixes from school walls.
But Hamed Shaari, head of a major Islamic cultural institute in Milan, said it was “senseless” to change the words of a Christmas song that has 2,000 years of tradition behind it.
“It’s great that people are aware of our feelings but traditions should be respected. This way, we can respect ours as well,” he said.
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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20041209/od_uk_nm/oukoe_pope_devil
Vatican university takes on the devil
Thu Dec 9, 1:48 PM ET
By Philip Pullella
ROME (Reuters) – Forget the new “Exorcist” film, the Vatican (news – web sites) is offering the real thing.
A Vatican university says it will hold a special “theoretical and practical” course for Roman Catholic priests on Satanism and exorcism in response to what the Church says is a worrying interest in the occult, particularly among the young.
This year, Italy was gripped by the story of two teenage members of a heavy metal rock band called the “Beasts of Satan” who were killed by other band members in a human sacrifice.
The deaths horrified Catholic Italy, with pages of newspapers given over to descriptions of the black candles and goats’ skulls decorating one victim’s bedroom and witness statements of sexual violence.
The Regina Apostolorum, one of Rome’s most prestigious pontifical universities, said in a statement on Thursday that such episodes should be seen as an “alarm bell to take seriously a problem which is still far too underestimated”.
“In the last few years there has been a lot of interest in Satanism and it develops because of the media. It’s not that the devil is in the media, rock and roll or the Internet but the media can be damaging when it is used the wrong way,” Carlo Climati, one of the professors of the course, told Reuters.
“For young people, interest in Satanism can start with a CD, move onto the Internet. From there, it sometimes develops into home-grown, seemingly harmless things like going to cemeteries but sometimes can lead to murders, as we have seen.”
The two-month course, which begins in February and will be limited to priests and advanced students of theology, will include themes such as Satanism, diabolic possession and “prayers of liberation”.
Satanism, the statement said, aimed to sow confusion among the young and promote a world without moral rules.
According to some estimates, as many as 5,000 people are thought to be members of Satanic cults in Italy with 17- to 25-year-olds making up three quarters of them.
Interest in the devil and the occult has been boosted by films such as “The Exorcist” in 1973 and this year’s “Exorcist: The Beginning”.
In 1999, the Vatican issued its first updated ritual for exorcism since 1614 and warned that the devil is still at work.
The official Roman Catholic exorcism starts with prayers, a blessing and sprinkling of holy water, the laying on of hands on the possessed, and the making of the sign of the cross.
It ends with an “imperative formula” in which the devil is ordered to leave the possessed.
The formula begins: “I order you, Satan…” It goes on to denounce Satan as “prince of the world” and “enemy of human salvation”. It ends: “Go back, Satan.”