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Faith Healing?????:hmm:
( http://www.kentaxrecords.com/iac ... 9&type=articles )
Blind shall see & the lame walk
January 24, 2005, 12:13 pm
EVA BELL
Deccan Herald News Service
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Besides a placebo effect or a temporary state of well-being, faith healing is mostly about being brainwashed. It is up to rationalists to expose the claims of faith healers who loot the people in the name of God, says EVA BELL.
Throughout the history of mankind, miracle workers and faith healers have surfaced sporadically in every religion, claiming supernatural powers to heal both physical and mental disease. Though many are sceptical about their powers, these men continue to flourish through popular support.
This article turns the spotlight on faith healers who masquerade under the banner of Christianity. In February 2004, the controversial tele evangelist Benny Hinn took Mumbai by storm.
His High-tech Crusade with a 1000-strong choir and soul-igniting music, his suave personality and convincing rhetoric drew more than a million people, not just from different parts of India, but from Sri Lanka, Gulf, Singapore and Canada too. All strata of society were represented in this gathering - politicians, industrialists, film stars, and ordinary people.
For those who have missed him the first time, there is good news. He will be in Bangalore by the time this article goes to print. A "Festival of Blessing" will have descended on this fortunate city!
Instant healing
We are a generation in a hurry, looking for instant healing and spiritual 'highs.' Ours is a generation obsessed with personal health. Ironically it is also an era of psychological disquiet. There is a lot of fear, hate, sorrow, anger, violence and insecurity in the world today. Medical science recognises how these emotions are responsible for hypertension, strokes, heart attacks, depression and other mental problems.
Because essential qualities of compassion, concern and commitment are lacking in health care workers, there is a general disillusionment with the entire medical profession. It is natural that people get attracted to miracle healers.
Excellent media exposure and hype invest these charlatans with authenticity. As Benny Hinn proclaimed in one of his meetings, "TV has ploughed the land and sown the seed. Tonight we reap the harvest."
Benny Hinn has his own exclusive methods. He calls it "the slaying of the spirit." Being "anointed with power," he either touches people on the forehead or neck with such force that they fall backwards. (There are catchers assigned to each recipient so that they don't hit the ground.) He also throws the "anointing" or "slaying" from a distance. Sometimes he shouts "power," takes off his coat, rubs it on his body, and throws it on people who need healing, as though the Spirit can be rubbed on to people.
This irreverence against the Holy Spirit is enough to condemn him as a charlatan. Of course, all his miracles become operative only after "seed faith offerings" are pledged by the recipient.
Some years ago it was estimated that these offerings brought in $12 million annually. Today, that amount must have trebled. For those expecting financial miracles and prosperity, the minimum acceptable sum is $100.
The inventor of the "seed faith offerings" is another controversial healer called Oral Roberts, who openly declared that all blessings were subject to offerings, and the largest donations brought faster healing.
Hinn also claims that the mantle of Catherine Kuhlmen (a healer who lived 45 years ago) has fallen on him. He even visits her grave periodically for 'anointing,' which makes one suspect he has ‘mediumistic’ abilities. He certainly has the gift of the gab and a personality that captivates.
"I am a little Messiah walking on earth," he said in 1990, "I have received a new mandate from Heaven, to bring the message of healing power to America."
Today, his healing is worldwide despite his heretical theology and doctrinal aberrations. "When Benny Hinn speaks, he speaks for effect. He tells people what they want to hear," said G Richard Fisher.
A spokesman of the Trinity Foundation in USA, which is a watchdog group that investigates the activities of Tele evangelists and miracle workers said, "He appeals to the massive greed and need of the audience. And without any results, people follow him all over the country, just to be touched by him."
"Benny has fallen in love with himself and has forgotten the Cross. What he is doing is deceptive, and gives false hopes to millions of people." (Los Angeles Times, Aug 24th, 1997).
Why are Faith healers suspect? Though Christian faith healers give themselves credibility by cloaking their activities in religious phrases, and claiming spiritual powers, the Bible cautions, "Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone into the world." (Un 4:1).
Therefore, discernment is of utmost importance. Present day healing mass melas do not resemble healing as recorded in the Bible. While in the Old Testament there were only a few episodes of healing, in the New Testament, the miracles of Jesus were to the whole man. It was not just a physical healing, but a moral renewal and a call for total commitment of faith. Many times Jesus said, "Tell no one," because he knew people would follow him with wrong motives.
Placebo effect
How are millions being eye-washed? Publicity and hype, eye-catching advertisements, and convincing foot-soldiers can brainwash vulnerable people. The influence of emotions cannot be underestimated. As early as 1890, the neurophysiologist Jean Martin Charcot said that faith healing can activate or bring temporary relief by enhancing the body's natural defences and reducing the body’s responses to stress. Patients feel better even if their actual condition is not improved.Psychiatrist Rajesh Parikh of Mumbai says that such healings have a placebo effect.
Even when a placebo is given, there is a 40 per cent chance that patients feel better, believing that they are under medication. The conviction that faith healing can relieve them might see a temporary feeling of well being.
Some diseases show natural remission over a period of time. Certain neurological diseases are self-limiting, and some benign tumours may regress spontaneously.
Merely functional symptoms may be spuriously diagnosed as illness, and even projected as organic disease.
Many times a wrong prognosis is made, pronouncing an illness terminal or incurable when it is purely psychosomatic.Demonic activity is another area where healers perform exorcism and claim cures. However one must bear in mind that they often mistake mental illness for demonic possession. People with schizophrenia and endogenous depression need a psychiatrist and not a faith healer.
Christianity is neither a form of suggestion nor a practice of magic. Though many evangelists have dissociated themselves from such miracle healers, criticism against them is muted.
On the other hand, realising that these performances are crowd pullers, about a quarter of Christian churches practise some form of faith healing.It must therefore be left to the rationalists to expose the excesses of faith healers. Says Professor Narendra Nayak of Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore, "It takes a lot of time to overcome deep-rooted superstitions and beliefs. By exposing them, we try to create scientific thinking among people."
What is Faith Healing?
They operate under a camouflage of Christian words and phrases, claiming to receive "revelations from God."
They have excellent Event Managers and PR teams who prepare the ground, months before the actual Healing Crusades take place.
A highly efficient information-gathering mechanism is in operation, with hundreds of agents circulating among the crowds. In 1986, a faith healer by the name of Peter Popoff performing at the Francisco Coliseum, was exposed using this device, even as he made a grand entry on to the stage. He pointed to a woman in a blue dress, who had earlier told his wife that she was seeking healing for her daughter, who suffered from a food allergy. But in spite of his bluff being called, people continued to believe in him and send him money.
Elderly people who have no disability whatsoever, are cornered as they enter, and made to sit in wheel chairs, with the promise of good seats in the front row. When they reach there and walk to their seats, they are declared healed.
The power of suggestion cannot be underestimated. Many healers are masters of Mesmerism. They use mind control to alter another's power of thinking.
Presumptive prayers: Some tell their patients to visualise healing, think positively, and presume that they will be healed through prayer.
This is a man-made attempt to coerce God to fulfill their wishes and perform a miracle. It can often lead to disappointment and disillusionment, because God does not give us everything we ask for.
One of Benny Hinn's miracles is worth recalling, as it involves an Indian family. The Prakash family converted to Christianity so that Benny could heal their son who was dying of a brain tumour. Normally he is careful not to parade those with marked deformities or organic disease, as these are difficult to manipulate.
However, on the insistence of the producer of the show, the boy was brought on stage in a wheelchair. Benny prayed and assured the family of a miracle. Prakash felt that God was speaking to him during the service, and immediately pledged $2000 to the miracle man. The boy was dead seven weeks later.
Allah Knows Best,Peace Yall... |
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Evangelist and the "Third World Country"?????
http://www.kentaxrecords.com/iac ... 1&type=articles
Evangelists - The Next Disaster waiting to strike the Tsunami Victims!
February 10, 2005, 9:12 am
Sarath Bulathsinghala
Another disaster, another place, this time it is South Asia’s coastal regions. The killer, a tsunami the biggest the world has seen so far in the last two centuries has struck human settlements unawares. The scale of disaster is unprecedented in terms of the cost of human lives and infrastructure damage.
At the beginning help is only local and delays unavoidable. The delays are typical be they in the third world Sri Lankan town or in the first world America. There were complains to the US Government when the help took long to arrive after hurricane Andrew and the ones that followed. The universal phenomenon of looting takes place wherever there is easy picking be it Los Angeles, California after the great earthquake of the St Andreas fault or now in Sri Lanka or elsewhere. These are to be expected. It is up to the government to exercise law and order.
Now the countries in the region have to be careful and watchful of another form of disaster waiting to happen. We have adequate warnings about this disaster and only need to take suitable precautions to meet it head on! This is disaster in the form of Evangelists! They come bearing goodwill, compassion and with heart felt condolences. What is abhorrent is when disaster come bearing holy books and rosaries to change life as we know it. All such efforts in the past have led to divisiveness, disunity and broken homes.
It is customary for the evangelist to follow aid teams to disaster struck communities. They follow like vultures after the kill to pick and clean the bones of what is left of the living – their dignity. Human misery is rich and fertile grounds for the bible waving hordes that come to strike and convert. This has happened in the past wherever there is misery be it refugees centers set up due to political turmoil or disaster struck areas elsewhere. We must not allow this to happen in Sri Lanka, India, Thailand or Indonesia. It must be clear this is not Christianity. They come to find more slaves for the modern Holy Roman Empire and its mutants elsewhere in the world. This is all the more important because it is possible that most of the aid coming from the Western countries is diverted through various Christian Church affiliated organizations and NGOs.
Sri Lanka has suffered immeasurably by the meddling of the Christian Church in her zest for conversions and through the ethnic war they created and helped to finance in the past two decades. They have created and funded separatist movements and carried out unethical conversions with impunity elsewhere in the world too. Rebels in Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh in India, Karen rebels in Burma, the Hmong rebels in Vietnam (and the list is growing after the new Papal dictat announcing the 21st Century as the time for the conversion of Asia.) and their growing militancy bear ample testimony to the works of these evangelists. The end result is more misery, death and destruction.
What evangelists come to do is willful and premeditated. It is disasters planned and executed to strengthen the armies that feed and arm God based institutions so that the bishops, cardinals, the popes and their minions spread around the world can continue to live enchanted lives while collecting money from the poor, spreading ignorance, giving sanctuary to drug dealers, slave drivers, pimps and pedophiles. Conversions enable these institutions to continue to fool the world in a time when their traditional hunting grounds are getting depleted of people whom they can deceive and rob as they did in the past. They come to rob the third world countries of their young, the impressionable and now the worst - the depressed and the displaced.
We want the world to know that Sri Lanka is a majority Sinhala Buddhist country with a rich culture dating back some 2500 years and more. If a country has a flavor it is the Buddhist flavor that permeates the country from West to East and from North to South with a touch of Hinduism, Christianity and Islam here and there. We are as much a multicultural and multi-religious country as Spain, France, Germany or Norway and better. We have lived in harmony with our brethren of other faiths during most of our recorded history. Our history bear witness to Sinhala Buddhist kings saving Muslims from the Catholics Portuguese and Catholics from the Protestant Dutch. This is in contrast to countries mentioned that had histories of religious intolerance, papal inquisitions, and pogroms and of other acts and crimes against humanity.
What we don’t need at this time of misery and despair are more evangelists to come and tell us about their absentee God and all this devastation and misery happened for His Greater Glory. Sorry to say at this moment those traumatized can only read His name backwards! We don’t want to see the Bibles or the Cross the symbol of pillage, death, destruction, of crusades now of the cancer of Evangelism waved in front of the innocent victims to traumatize them more and deprive them of their last vestiges of dignity and add more misery to the physical and emotional injuries they have already suffered. At this moment what they last want to hear is how God is great or All Loving and All Merciful. Evidence of his mercy and greatness is all around the coast line of South Asia. It is there in the faces of the babies he has killed. His presence is drenched with the smell of death, decay, putrefaction and unimaginable destruction. Now He is threatening the wounded and the maimed with his creations of death carrying diseases.
What has flowered immediately is the compassion of our own compatriots from within and outside Sri Lanka, because Loving Kindness, Compassion, Empathy and Equanimity in the face of disaster are the hallmarks of our great religion and our culture. We also have an overflowing of the milk of human kindness, compassion and assistance flowing from the rest of the world in spite of this ineffective and lame God.
Our quiet and innocent Buddhist philosophy can better explain the disaster that struck our nation without having to resort to an all powerful and all merciful God. We can find more elegant explanations and ways to drown our sorrows and find solace in Buddhist philosophy. We know that life is unsatisfactory, is not all milk and honey and why the life stream continue to exist in endless cycles of birth, decay and death. When misery strikes there is no need to point fingers or find scapegoats. We understand it is the life stream personified that weaves the web of life and keeps us mired where we are. We have a clear path to follow to escape the vagaries of this Unsatisfactory Existence called life. We know that it is greed, lust and ignorance that keep us marooned in the ocean of Samsara. Because there is the made, the conditioned and the transient there is an unmade, unconditioned, and intransient state called Nibbana – our goal.
What actually happened was a disaster that was in the making for many millions of years. According to experts the stress caused by the formation of the Himalayas is now causing the tectonic plates further south to bend, crack and move. This is many millions of years before the birth of this God less than 10,000 years ago!
So the message to those who send humanitarian aid in this time of dire need to the affected areas of this God created disaster is not to send Evangelists. We can easily do without the Evangelists! Sri Lanka is not the Amazon nor the wilds of Borneo to be ‘civilized’ in the Christian mould! We are sick of the “cock and bull” stories and Grand Mother’s tales the Evangelist want us to hear. To the compassionate humanity in the West - We understand you and respect you but please don’t Evangelists! Right now with furor on unethical conversions already in the background the presence of Evangelists in South Asia’s affected areas will be in such bad taste. If they come then they come at their own peril!
Allah Knows Best,Peace Yall... |
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Watch Out from this American Evangelist...most of them are pro-zionist christian just like any American Presidents!!!Here is an article taken from an India websites....
http://www.kentaxrecords.com/iac ... 3&type=articles
The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America
February 13, 2005, 1:46 am
By DAVID VAN BIEMA CATHY BOOTH-THOMAS/DALLAS; MASSIMO CALABRESI; JOHN F. DICKERSON/WASHINGTON; JOHN CLOUD; REBECCA WINTERS/NEW YORK; SONJA STEPTOE/LOS ANGELES.
Time Magazine Feb. 7, 2005
There is no pope, no central ruling body. American Evangelicalism--with its home-schooling Fundamentalists and PTA-attending megachurch moms, its neo-Calvinists and Pentecostals, its multiple denominations and thousands of unaffiliated churches--seems to defy unity, let alone hierarchy. Yet its members share basic commitments: to the divinity and saving power of Jesus, to personal religious conversion, to the Bible's authority and to the spreading of the Gospel. Those same understandings unite the generation of influential leaders who channel conservative Christianity's overflowing energies. TIME's list of 25, composed with the help of preachers, politicians, scholars and activists, deliberately leaves out some familiar figures--Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Don Wildmon--whose stories are well known. Instead, we focus on those whose influence is on the rise or who have carved out a singular role for themselves. The following pages serve as a primer to their growing force in American life. --By
David Van Biema
RICK WARREN
America's New People's Pastor
These are heady times for Rick Warren. His book The Purpose Driven Life, which says that meaning in life comes through following God's purposes, has sold more than 20 million copies over the past two years and is the best-selling hardback in U.S. history. When he took the podium to pray on the final night of Billy Graham's Los Angeles crusade at the Rose Bowl in November, the 82,000 congregants cheered as if Warren had scored the winning touchdown. And on the eve of the presidential Inauguration, Warren, who pastors the 22,000-member Saddleback megachurch in Lake Forest, Calif., delivered the Invocation at the gala celebration. Later he met with 15 Senators, from both parties, who sought his advice and heard his plan to enlist Saddleback's global network of more than 40,000 churches in tackling such issues as poverty, disease and ignorance. And when 600 senior pastors were asked to name the people they thought had the greatest influence on church affairs in the country, Warren's name came in second only to Billy Graham's. Although Franklin Graham is heir to the throne of the Billy Graham organization, many believe that Warren, 51, is the successor to the elder Graham for the role of America's minister.
JAMES DOBSON
The Culture Warrior
James Dobson is tired of being misunderstood. The founder of Focus on the Family wants everyone to know that his sprawling campus in Colorado Springs, Colo., is devoted to his radio program, publishing empire and maintaining his 2.5 million--strong e-mail list of supporters. While it may be true that only a sliver of the activities there are political, Dobson stepped down as president of the organization in May 2003 so that he could become involved in politics. Now he's not only advocating policies calling for a ban on gay marriage and for restraint of the judiciary but also threatening to target Democratic Senators at the polls if they don't vote the way he likes on President Bush's judicial nominations.
It's not certain, however, whether Dobson, 68, can translate his considerable influence into political muscle. White House officials consider his demands too absolutist and impractical. "We respect him greatly," says a Bush aide, "but his political influence is not everything people might think." Indeed, Dobson seems to exercise greater sway outside the political arena, where the trained child psychologist has offered families a Christian alternative to modern mores. Says Dobson: "We're involved in what is known as a culture war that is aimed right straight at the institution of the family."
HOWARD AND ROBERTA AHMANSON
The Financiers
Money makes the Word go round, and this wealthy, conservative Republican couple takes a dizzyingly ecclectic approach to funding evangelism. The projects that savings-and-loan multimillionaires Howard and Roberta Ahmanson have paid for over the years through Fieldstead & Co., a private philanthropy in Irvine, Calif., form a cornucopia of faith-based activism, including an institute linked to the antievolution intelligent-design movement and a study of social endeavors by Third World Pentecostal churches. The couple have been accused over the years of having an extremist agenda, mostly because a onetime pet charity, the Chalcedon Foundation, advocates the Christian reconstructionist branch of theology that says gays and other biblical lawbreakers should be stoned. Howard distanced himself from those views and resigned from the foundation board years ago. The couple, both 55, now are warning powerful conservative Christians about the pitfalls of hubris in the aftermath of their victories over liberals last November. Says Roberta: "Christlike humility and [improving] the lives of human beings should be the goals."
DIANE KNIPPERS
A Think Tank With Firepower
When liberal Democratic Congressman Howard Berman of California called her last September seeking counsel, Diane Knippers, president of the conservative Institute on Religion and Democracy (I.R.D.), knew that her organization had become a major force. Berman was upset that the Presbyterian Church (USA) had voted to consider divesting from some companies doing business in Israel to protest the country's treatment of Palestinians. He wanted to confer with her because I.R.D. had issued a report criticizing such decisions, which it saw as singling out Israel while largely ignoring alleged serious human-rights abuses by Saudi Arabia and North Korea. "It was gratifying that he read and appreciated our work," says Knippers, 53. On another front, she was among the conservative leaders who helped persuade the Bush Administration to press for a cease-fire in the Sudan civil war and an end to the oppression of Christians there. But I.R.D., which receives major funding from the Ahmansons, can be a divisive force as well. Its championing of conservative reforms within more liberal Christian denominations has helped create deep fissures in those bodies, especially concerning homosexuality. "I.R.D.," says Randall Balmer, head of the religion department at Barnard College, "is starting to have the kind of impact that think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Brookings Institution enjoy." Knippers should expect more calls from Capitol Hill.
MICHAEL GERSON
The President's Spiritual Scribe
For a White House speechwriter, coining flowery phrases for your boss is less important than accommodating his speaking style and deepest convictions. For Michael Gerson, 40, George W. Bush's chief scribe since the 2000 presidential campaign (he will become a policy adviser in the West Wing), breaking that code meant knowing as much about the New Testament as about Bush's Texas roots. That proved easy. The former journalist shares Bush's devout Christian faith and his view that the role of Providence in human affairs should be reaffirmed in the public square.
Though even some G.O.P. supporters have criticized the President for his regular religious references, such lines are not likely to disappear from his speeches. "Scrubbing public discourse of religious ideas," says Gerson, "would remove one of the main sources of social justice in our history." |
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RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS
Bushism Made Catholic
When Bush met with journalists from religious publications last year, the living authority he cited most often was not a fellow Evangelical but a man he calls Father Richard, who, he explained, "helps me articulate these [religious] things." A senior Administration official confirms that Neuhaus "does have a fair amount of under-the-radar influence" on such policies as abortion, stem-cell research, cloning and the defense-of-marriage amendment.
Neuhaus, 68, is well-prepared for that role. As founder of the religion-and-policy journal First Things, he has for years articulated toughly conservative yet nuanced positions on a wide range of civic issues. A Lutheran turned Catholic priest, he can translate conservative Protestant arguments couched tightly in Scripture into Catholicism's broader language of moral reasoning, more accessible to a general public that does not regard chapter and verse as final proof. And there is one last reason for Bush to cherish Neuhaus, who has worked tirelessly to persuade conservative Catholics and Evangelicals to make common cause. It's called the conservative Catholic vote, and it played a key role last November.
T.D. JAKES
The Pentecostal Media Mogul
Even in a profession peopled with multi-taskers, Bishop Thomas Dexter (T.D.) Jakes stands out. Last year the African-American preacher's R-rated religious movie about sexual abuse, Woman, Thou Art Loosed, cracked the box-office top 10. His self-empowerment book He-Motions: Even Strong Men Struggle was a best seller. And his record label Dexterity Sounds/EMI Gospel won its first Grammy. Jakes' teachings of faith, family and financial prosperity reach far beyond the Potter's House, his 35,000-member suburban Dallas church. This year he has two more movies in the works and plans a business-networking cruise to Alaska, a leadership conference in London and the second annual Mega Fest, a gathering for families that is expected to draw 200,000 people to Atlanta in August. A master of pop psychology, Jakes, 47, represents a new wrinkle for Evangelicals, the neo-Pentecostals, who combine intense spirituality with a therapeutic approach. Dealing with critics of his popular style has taught Jakes a few lessons of his own: his latest book is titled Ten Commandments of Working in a Hostile Environment.
BILLY AND FRANKLIN GRAHAM
Father and Son In the Spirit
He has had the ear of Presidents for five decades, but except for his public disavowal of racial segregation, Billy Graham, 86, has stuck to soul saving and left the political proselytizing to others. He explained his self-imposed separation of church and state in the language of a Gospel preacher: "It's not what I was called to do." His son Franklin, 52, the anointed successor to the Graham evangelical empire, has no such reticence. "As a minister, I have every right to speak out on moral issues," he says. And he has, frequently and freely opining on subjects ranging from homosexuality ("I don't believe in the lifestyle") to the Iraq war ("I don't advocate war, but it's important to support our government"). Some suggest the difference in approach is the result of temperament and target audience. "Dr. Graham, having [ministered] to many Presidents, is more private about his counsel than Franklin, who speaks more to average Americans than their leaders," says Rod Parsley, pastor of the World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio. "But we're thankful he's raising his voice on issues central to our faith." JOYCE MEYER
A Feminine Side Of Evangelism
It is the stories from her personal history--her abuse as a child, her failed first marriage--that resonate with Pentecostal Joyce Meyer's predominantly female audience. Based in Fenton, Mo., Joyce Meyer Ministries teaches Bible to a virtual congregation. She is a traveling road show with a multimedia connection to followers. Meyer, 61, offers a gospel of prosperity that promises that God rewards tithing with his blessing. But her own conspicuously prosperous lifestyle--which, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, includes a $2 million home and a $10 million jet--concerns some Christians. Meyer's spokesman says 93% of the $8 million her ministry takes in each month goes to more than 150 charities worldwide, but the Christian watchdog group Wall Watchers has asked for an IRS investigation into the ministry's finances. Meyer says an investigation does not worry her, and she continues to deliver her uplifting message on more than 600 TV stations and 400 radio stations as well as in 70 books and scores of stadium-filling appearances.
RICK SANTORUM
The Point Man On Capitol Hill
The Senate's third-ranking Republican may be a Catholic, but he's the darling of Protestant Evangelicals. Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference Committee, is the standard bearer of social conservatives on the Hill, regularly and vocally taking the point position against gay marriage, abortion rights and judges who defend either. He speaks monthly with evangelical leaders, hearing their concerns and briefing them on the status of legislation, while his staff regularly taps evangelical broadcasters and activists to help mobilize support for their common agenda. In the new congressional session, that includes pushing laws aimed at limiting access of minors to interstate abortions and giving legal rights to fertilized eggs in utero. Though highly controversial for his verbal attacks on gays and supporters of abortion rights--he once likened homosexual sex to bestiality--Santorum, 46, is said to have presidential ambitions. "Never say never," he says--music to evangelical ears. LUIS CORTES
Bringing Latinos To the Table
In the summer of 2000, a fleet of dark, unmarked vehicles pulled up to the North Philadelphia office of the Rev. Luis Cort閟 Jr. As neighbors watched in amazement, armed men hustled a mysterious visitor inside. What happened next launched the remarkable ascent of a Hispanic Baptist minister until then little known outside Philadelphia. The visitor was G.O.P. presidential candidate George W. Bush, on a low-profile visit to woo Cort閟 and other Hispanic leaders. Over the next few hours, Cort閟 and Bush formed a bond that has vaulted the minister to the top tier of the fast-growing Hispanic Protestant community. With grants from Bush's Faith-Based Initiative and the cachet that comes from his Bush connection, Cort閟, now 47, has expanded his two-decade-old organization, Nueva Esperanza (New Hope) nationwide, building houses in poor communities, offering start-up loans to Hispanic businesses and launching an AIDS-awareness program. In 2002 Cort閟 established the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast, addressed annually by Bush and attended by a bipartisan slate of political heavyweights. "Part of integrating is understanding power," says Cort閟. "Our people have power, but they have never used it." Now he's showing them how.
TIM AND BEVERLY LAHAYE
The Christian Power Couple
In his role as minister and organizer, the Rev. Tim LaHaye, who will turn 79 in April, somehow never achieved the name recognition of, say, Jerry Falwell--or for that matter of his wife Beverly LaHaye, 75, founder of Concerned Women for America, one of Washington's most influential antiabortion and anti-gay-marriage organizations. But it is a measure of Tim LaHaye's reach that his role in founding Falwell's Moral Majority is only his second most notable venture. (Falwell was inspired to start the group in 1979 after seeing how LaHaye had organized scores of fellow pastors to work for conservative political causes in California in the '70s.) It wasn't until 15 years later that LaHaye got the idea for a novelized account of the Second Coming. The result, Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth's Last Days (1995), launched a literary empire. The book and its 11 sequels have sold more than 42 million copies (not counting spin-offs like kids' books, CDs and greeting cards) and set the image that many people--believers and non-believers alike--now have about how the world will end. "In terms of its impact on Christianity," says Falwell, "it's probably greater than that of any other book in modern times, outside the Bible." |
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CHARLES COLSON
Reborn and Rehabilitated
The spectacular Christian rehabilitation of Charles Colson--the man who once advised Richard Nixon to firebomb the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank--began after Colson's Watergate prison term, with his best-selling conversion narrative, Born Again. His resurgence accelerated as he founded Prison Fellowship Ministries and built it into a $50 million organization that operates in all 50 states and 110 countries. His ministry's success (a University of Pennsylvania study found that graduates of the prison program were 60% less likely to be reincarcerated than was the average con) and his campaign for humane prison conditions helped define compassionate conservatism and served as a model for the faith-based initiatives that Bush favors.
Colson, 73, is now regarded as one of evangelicalism's more thoughtful public voices. And, says Ted Olsen, online managing editor of Christianity Today: "If he gets on a bandwagon, it's likely to move." After decades of relative abstention, Colson is back in power politics. He helped cobble together an alliance of Evangelicals and Catholic conservatives, advised Karl Rove on Sudan policy and put his prestige behind an anti-gay-marriage lobbying body, the Arlington Group. And he has recouped one more lever of power: in 2000 Florida Governor Jeb Bush reinstated the rights taken away by Colson's felony conviction--including the right to vote.
DOUGLAS COE
The Stealth Persuader
Many people think Congress is the host of the gala annual National Prayer Breakfast, which takes place this week. It is not. The breakfast is organized by 33 members of Congress who belong to a well-connected but secretive Christian group called the Fellowship Foundation, which is run by Douglas Coe. Coe, 76, has been called the "stealth Billy Graham." He specializes in the spiritual struggles of the powerful.
Several members of Congress live in rooms rented in a town house owned by a foundation affiliated with the group. Coe and his associates sometimes travel (on their own dime) with congressional members abroad and--according to investigations by the Los Angeles Times and Harper's--have played backstage roles in such diplomatic coups as the 1976 Camp David accords. Yet Coe also befriends dictators. "He would still hold out hope that these people could be redeemed and try to work through them to help the people over whom they have authority," says Richard Carver, president of the Fellowship's board of directors. Some skeptical Evangelicals criticize Coe's indiscriminate alliances and his downplaying of Jesus' divinity in favor of his earthly teachings--which allows Coe to pray with Muslim and Buddhist leaders. But few turn down an opportunity to confer with him.
J.I. PACKER
Theological Traffic Cop
When it comes to doctrine, Evangelicals practice the equivalent of states' rights. Encompassing huge, philosophically distinct denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention, the Pentecostal Assemblies of God and thousands of independent "Bible churches," the movement has no formal arbiter. Nonetheless, J.I. Packer, 78, an Oxford-trained theologian, claimed the role informally with his 1973 book, Knowing God, which outlined a conservative Christian theology deeper and more embracing than many Americans had encountered. It did real justice to hard topics such as suffering and grace. And, says Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington think tank, "conservative Methodists and Presbyterians and Baptists could all look at it and say, 'This sums it all up for us.'"
That appeal led to Packer's current role as a doctrinal Solomon whose pronouncements as executive editor at the magazine Christianity Today exert influence beyond its 340,000 readers. Mediating debates on everything from a particular Bible translation to the acceptability of free-flowing Pentecostal spirituality, Packer helps unify a community that could easily fall victim to its internal tensions.
DAVID BARTON
The Lesson Planner
Even before he got directly involved in politics, David Barton was a major voice in the debate over church-state separation. His books and videotapes can be found in churches all over the U.S., educating an evangelical generation in what might be called Christian counter-history. The 51-year-old Texan's thesis: that the U.S. was a self-consciously religious nation from the time of the Founders until the 1963 Supreme Court school-prayer ban (which Barton has called "a rejection of divine law"). Many historians dismiss his thinking, but Barton's advocacy organization, WallBuilders, and his relentless stream of publications, court amicus briefs and books like The Myth of Separation, have made him a hero to millions--including some powerful politicians. He has been a co-chair of the Texas Republican Party for eight years, is friends with House majority leader Tom DeLay (whom he has advised on the Pledge Patriot Act, which seeks to keep the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance) and was tapped by the Republican National Committee during its election sprint as a liaison to social conservatives. Those elected as a result of his efforts need not feel lonely in Washington: Barton conducts tours of the Capitol, during which he shows his rare copy of the Bible that Congress once printed--for use in the schools.
MARK NOLL
The Intellectual Exemplar
The scandal of the evangelical mind," Mark Noll wrote a decade ago in a book bearing precisely that title, "... is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." Noll wasn't subscribing to the old caricature of conservative Protestants as Scripture-handcuffed rubes. True, he was merciless in describing the anti-intellectual streak that led many mainstream arbiters to put quotes around the term evangelical scholarship. But his book went on to argue that the problem was not intrinsic--that a "high" view of the Bible and high-level participation in American intellectual life could coexist.
Noll is proof. His powerful yet evenhanded work on the evangelical role in American history earned him a guest professorship at Harvard. The Atlantic Monthly, another blue-chip validator, called his book America's God "almost certainly the most significant work of American historical scholarship" in 2002. He has also been an institution builder, co-founding the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College, a leading Christian school, and helping corral millions in grant money for other intellectual outposts. The community as a whole, he says, has not overcome its general torpor. But he is encouraged that ever more scholars are surmounting this to do what he calls "first-rate work" by anyone's standards. "And hundreds of younger people," he adds, "are coming along."
RALPH WINTER
A Global Mission
With his impassioned call in 1974 for Christians to serve the world's "unreached peoples" by looking beyond national borders, Ralph Winter revolutionized what remains (even today) the true lifeblood of Evangelicals--missionary work overseas. Even at 80, Winter generates new strategies from his California-based Frontier Mission Fellowship. Trained as a civil engineer, linguist, cultural anthropologist and Presbyterian minister, he describes himself as a "Christian social engineer." Working through the William Carey International University and the U.S. Center for World Mission, which he founded, he is producing a new generation of Christian message carriers, some native, ready to venture out to places with such ready-to-be-ministered flocks as Muslim converts to Christianity and African Christians with heretical beliefs. Says Winter: "It's this movement, not the formal Christian church, that's growing. That's our frontier." |
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RICHARD LAND
God's Lobbyist
You can chart Richard Land's clout by his phone log. The 58-year-old Texan, the Southern Baptist Convention's main man in Washington, recalls that the Reagan Administration returned his calls promptly; the first Bush White House less so and Clinton's staff (eventually) not at all. Now? The men around his longtime friend George W. Bush don't sit around waiting for Land's call. They reach out to him, individually and as part of a weekly teleconference with other Christian conservatives, to plot strategy on such issues as gay marriage and abortion.
Land, who helped engineer his 16-million-member convention's 1979 shift from moderacy to hard-line conservativism, has a hand in most of its key policies, from its 1995 apology for having supported slavery to its 1998 statement that wives should submit to the leadership of their devout husbands. Since arriving in Washington in 1987, Land has cultivated dozens of sympathetic members of Congress. Princeton- and Oxford-educated, he is as formidable a public spokesman as he is in Washington's corridors and regularly battles culture-war foes on venues such as Meet the Press. "People think they're going to be dealing with some bootstrap preacher," says Larry Eskridge, associate director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College. "But he can match pedigree and training with the best of them."
STEPHEN STRANG
Keeper of "The Faith"
Invitations to the White House are becoming regular occurrences for Stephen Strang. The former journalist, 54, has been a Bush favorite ever since his homegrown Christian publishing house, Strang Communications, released The Faith of George W. Bush, the first spiritual biography of the President, in 2003. "We didn't write it to help Bush, but it no doubt helped elect him," declares Strang.
In the world of Christian publishing, Strang combines a sense of mission with sharp business acumen. Over the past 30 years, he has built his company, based in Lake Mary, Fla., into a $33 million business that churns out seven magazines and 100 books a year. Niche offerings like The Bible Cure health series are wildly successful, but the company is seeking more crossover hits like G.P. Taylor's Shadowmancer, which has been hailed as Harry Potter's "Christian cousin." Strang's lead publication, Charisma, chronicles the fast-growing charismatic movement and has become powerful enough to wrangle a Bush interview last year.
TED HAGGARD
Opening Up the Umbrella Group
At a meeting with President Bush in November 2003, after nearly an hour of jovial Oval Office chat, the Rev. Ted Haggard, 48, got serious. He argued against Bush-imposed steel tariffs on the grounds that free markets foster economic growth, which helps the poor. A month later, the White House dropped the tariffs. Haggard wasn't alone in faulting the policy, and he doesn't claim to be the impetus, but as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, he gets listened to. He represents 30 million conservative Christians spread over 45,000 churches from 52 diverse denominations. Every Monday he participates in the West Wing conference call with evangelical leaders. The group continues to prod the President to campaign aggressively for a federal marriage amendment. "We wanted him to use the force of his office to actively lobby the Congress and Senate, which he did not adequately do," says Haggard. He is also working to broaden his group's agenda. A document issued last fall offered a theological justification for civic activism by U.S. Evangelicals, calling on them to protect the environment, promote global religious and political freedom and human rights, safeguard "wholesome family life," care for the poor and oppose racism. Says Haggard: "With the growth of Evangelicalism worldwide, we have to be involved in political and social action to impact the culture worldwide."
STUART EPPERSON
A High-Fidelity Messenger
Long before Rush Limbaugh proved that radio listeners would flock to unapologetically opinionated chat, 10-year-old Stuart Epperson was reading Bible verses from a radio station his brother built in their family's Virginia farmhouse. By age 36, Epperson had bought an AM station in Roanoke, Va., that would be the beginning of a religious and political broadcasting powerhouse. Salem Communications, the company Epperson, now 69, later founded with his brother-in-law Edward Atsinger, owns 104 radio stations in 24 of the top 25 U.S. markets and reaches an estimated 5 million listeners a week. The broadcaster's stations offer Christian music and teaching, as well as conservative talk shows that engage listeners not just to consider hot-button issues like abortion and stem-cell research but also to weigh in with letter-writing campaigns and phone calls to politicians.
BILL HYBELS
Pioneering Mass Appeal
Where do pastors go to learn how to make a stirring performance for their flock? There is an oracle of the presenters art, and his name is Bill Hybels. Founder of the Willow Creek Community Church in the Chicago suburb of South Barrington, Ill., Hybels was a pioneer in attracting an upscale, youthful following with an informal yet rousing and contemporary service. Now 52, he leads a network of 10,500 churches and trains more than 100,000 pastors each year. But, he says, spawning a movement that helped fuel the rise of Evangelicalism wasn't his intent when he took an entrepreneurial approach to overhauling the average church service 30 years ago. His goal was simply to hook nonmember "seekers," who dropped by on Sunday hoping for spiritual connection. His formula of live bands' performing contemporary Christian tunes, easy-to-follow sermons, short services--and free child care--now attracts 17,500 worshippers each week, and membership has grown to more than 6,000. Some conservative Evangelicals denounce megacongregations as devotion lite, delivering plenty of entertainment but asking for little commitment. However, for the millions of worshippers who want relevant spirituality delivered with the same custom-fitted, on-demand convenience they get from secular merchants, Hybels' creation is the answer to their prayers.
BRIAN MCLAREN
Paradigm Shifter
Asked at a conference last spring what he thought about gay marriage, Brian McLaren replied, "You know what, the thing that breaks my heart is that there's no way I can answer it without hurting someone on either side." You might call his a kinder and gentler brand of religion. At a mere 48, McLaren, a nondenominational Maryland pastor, qualifies as elder statesman of a movement called the "emerging church." Its disciples, mostly 35 or younger and including mainline Christians and Catholics, have in recent years moved from cyber bulletin boards to pulpits of their own. Their goal: to deconstruct traditional church culture yet remain true to Scripture. A typical emergent church service is likely to include digital imagery and open dialogue.
McLaren's 2001 book, A New Kind of Christian, resonated with ministers worldwide and is enormously popular in seminaries. If his movement can survive in the politicized world of conservative Christianity, McLaren could find a way for young Evangelicals and more liberal Christians to march into the future together despite their theological differences.
JAY SEKULOW
The Almighty's Attorney-at-Law
If God is heading to an appeals court, Jay Sekulow is likely to be sitting at the counsel table. His Washington-based American Center for Law & Justice has argued and won several high-profile religious-freedom cases, including Supreme Court decisions that allowed Bible-study clubs on public-school campuses and that protected the right of antiabortion demonstrators to rally outside abortion clinics. Sekulow, 48, who was raised Jewish but converted to Christianity in college and now considers himself a "Messianic Jew," formed the law center with a group of other conservative litigators in 1990. Today the 700,000-member center has become, with a budget of $30 million, a powerful counterweight to the liberal American Civil Liberties Union. The group's latest battles are supporting the congressional ban on partial-birth abortions and pushing, in an unusually bold and public way, for President Bush's judicial appointments. "The President has shown the kind of nominees he likes for the courts," explains Sekulow, "and I'm very comfortable with that." --By Cathy Booth-Thomas/Dallas, Massimo Calabresi and John F. Dickerson/Washington, John Cloud and Rebecca Winters/New York, and Sonja Steptoe/Los Angeles. With reporting by Amanda Bower/New York, Rita Healey/Denver, Sean Scully/Philadelphia and Elaine Shannon/Washington
JOHN STOTT
Inspiration Across the Sea
Although his home base is All Souls Church Langham Place in London, John Stott is one of the most respected and beloved figures among believers in the U.S. Stott, 83, was present at the creation and is a principal framer of the 1974 Lausanne Covenant that sketched out what was then called neo-Evangelicalism. Stott practices a pious austerity that, were he Catholic, might be called saintly. He plunges the rich royalties from his more than 40 unassumingly brilliant books into a fund to educate pastors in the developing word. He lives in a two-room flat, except for four months a year spent writing in a Welsh cottage that until 2001 was lit by gaslight. His ministry board fitted it with electric lights, but most Evangelicals would have said he was sufficiently enlightened--and had enlightened them--already.
Allah Knows Best,Peace Yall... |
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Benny Hin the mystic healer???? This is an article came from India,all the conflict was based on India situation regarding the evangelist activities there!!!check it out.....
I'm collecting money on behalf of Jesus: Benny Hinn
January 21, 2005, 2:39 am
by Kiran Konaki
Thursday, January 20 2005 18:42 Hrs (IST)
indiainfo.com
A so-called crusader led a two-day crusade a few years ago at the Queen's Park Savannah, Port-of-Spain in which he said, "I cast out more devils than I think I've done in a long time. I mean they were screaming everywhere."
He went on to state that he converted mostly Hindus, which make up 30 percent of the population (of an African country), during his crusade.
The alleged crusader says, that all idol worshippers - Hindus - are followers of prostitution, black magic and many more filthy expressions.
Discuss this topic
Now, who is this so-called crusader?
Benny Hinn is his name, who claims to be the mystic healer, with whom Jesus allegedly speaks and who collects money on BEHALF of Jesus!!!
Benny was born in Israel, but several times has made claims of being Greek, Arab and other nationalities, what ever he felt was necessary at the time.
He immigrated to Canada and went to school in Toronto. Benny (who has no formal theological training) has apparently based his style on another questionable "faith healer" Kathryn Kuhlman.
He first started his Christian ministry in Toronto in the 1980's, branched into the very lucrative television market in the 1990's and in the last couple of years has branched out to the world.
Benny has a collaborator, named Pastor Paul Crouch, who is the head of Trinity Broadcasting Corporation (the largest Christian broadcasting network), who has asked his viewers (followers) to donate money generously and he said that the network needs Eight million US dollars to spread the Gospel throughout India and SAVE One billion souls from damnation.
Several Christian churches have called him a con man, a cheat who fleeces money from gullible people and his promise to people is that he will show Jesus alive (physical manifestation) on the stage, that too, during his discourse.
Few Examples:
A few examples of his cheating tricks and their results;
Benny Hinn preys on the most vulnerable and desperate people of society, the ones that medical science can no longer help, and worst yet the gullible. In a CBC program 'Witness', out of the 78 or so miracles that Benny claimed, he only gave out five addresses for a follow up.
Three of them are:
# The gentleman who was hurt in an industrial accident and had limited painful mobility of his legs, Benny made the claim that he was one of the healings, but a follow up showed that he was worst off than before he went to Benny.
# A second and more tragic was a woman with lung cancer, again Benny made the claim that she was healed and paraded her around on stage, she died later.
# The most tragic and the most despicable was the tragedy of the Prakashs family, a family that converted from Hindu to Christianity for the sole purpose of getting God and Benny to heal their dying son from a brain tumour. Benny agreed to bring the wheel-chaired boy upon the stage to be prayed for, (in normal circumstances, you will never see obvious deformities or medical problems paraded in front of the flock, they are much harder to manipulate), he also told the parents to expect a miracle. After the show, Prakash, the boys father, stated that God spoke to him during the service, and that he was going to send Benny $ 2000, seven weeks later the boy was dead.
Benny Hinn is conducting a three-day 'Prayer Meeting' at Jakkur Airfields, Bangalore beginning from Jan 21 to Jan 23, 2005. The event is being organised by "Festival of Blessings".
In spite of several representations, which opposed the discourse, Chief Minister Dharam Singh has categorically stated that the discourse will go on.
The first sings of protest actually was ignited by some pamphlets distributed and circulated by the organisers and Hinn's followers, which described idol worshipping is similar to prostitution and black magic.
The Hindu Jagran Manch supported by Bharatiya Janata Party protested against this blasphemous write-ups and filed cases against the organisers as wells as the State Government.
The BJP and Vishwa Hindu Parishad have given an ultimatum to the Government of Karnataka to ban the event, failing which they have threatened to launch a massive protest in Bangalore on January 21. Interestingly, BJP MP and former DIG H T Sangliana has confirmed his participation in Benny Hinn's prayer meeting.
A few Hindu religious Mutts, namely Murugarajendra Mutt, Sringeri Shankara Mutt and Vokkaligara Mutt held a dharna (sit-in) to oppose this large-scale conversion attempt in the garb of spiritual discourse. Whether they will succeed in stopping this veiled misdemeanour or whether Benny will continue his conning stunts? wait and see!
Allah Knows Best,Peace Yall.... |
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Idolatary and Christianity....:ah:
http://www.kentaxrecords.com/iac ... 1&type=articles
A Semitic faith condemned to idolatry
February 8, 2005, 11:16 pm
By M.S.N. Menon
Organiser
February 13, 2005
It is the case of the Christian missionaries (of Benny Hinn, for example) that Hindus worship idols. They do. But they are free to go beyond idol worship to meditation (with eyes closed, dhyana)—from the worship of a personal God (monotheism) to meditation over a God without form or attributes (monism). This is Advaita.
But there is no way a Christian can bypass Jesus Christ and seek a formless God. (The very thought is blasphemous to Christians.) He is thus condemned to remain, with his idols and symbols, a monotheist. He is condemned to worship, to remain apart from God.
If you ask me which path I prefer, I say without hesitation: The Hindu path, for my goal is to be as perfect as God. Transform and transcend—this is the essence of the Hindu faith. Both are not open to Semitic faiths.
Early Christianity saw nothing wrong with idols and images. It was free from Jewish follies. In the Roman catacombs (underground places of Christian worship and burial) are to be found the first visual pictures of the Biblical story. These were painted between the 2nd and 4th centuries a.d.
This tradition must have continued, for the most famous painting of all—the ‘Creation of Man’ by Michelangelo—was done in the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican in the 16th century under the direct supervision of a Pope. God is depicted here as an old man with a beard, but of powerful build, reaching out his hand to touch the extended hand of Adam.
In fact, no religion can rival Christianity in the multiplicity of images. In some of the largest Catholic churches of France, there are as many as 3,000-4,000 statues. Christian sailors got their hands tattooed with the figure of the Madonna for protection. Pope Gregory II defended the use of idols. These idols were never seriously challenged till the Reformation.
Christians also worship the cross. It is a symbol. According to the Christian tradition (contested by Islam), Jesus was crucified on a cross. Hence it became a religious symbol. The fact is: crosses were venerated even before the advent of Christianity by various pagan cults. It was a symbol of fire, which was obtained by rubbing two sticks against each other.
Early Christianity frowned upon it. But it gained acceptance after St. Helena, the mother of the Roman emperor, Constantine the Great, discovered the cross on which Jesus was crucified during her visit to the Holy Land in the 4th century a.d. Well, such is the tradition.
But the shape of the cross which was used by various sects of Christianity was not uniform. This is rather curious, for once they accepted the cross discovered by Helena as the one on which Jesus was crucified, the Christian authorities should have standardised the shape of the cross. The fact that they did not calls for an explanation.
One is, therefore, forced to admit that the use of the cross too was one of the many pagan traditions adopted by Christianity. This also explains why some Christian sects are reluctant to use the cross.
As in Judaism, so in Christianity, God is described in human terms. For example, the Common Prayer says: “Our Father, which art in Heaven.” The Apostles Creed says: “He (Jesus) ascended to Heaven and is sitting on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty.”
The Reformation was a revolt against the Papacy. It was alleged that the Popes had Romanised and paganised Christianity, that idol worship was a pagan practice and that it violated the Jewish tradition, which is why the Protestants gave up idols. Obviously, they knew not why the Jews hated idols.
Times change. Concepts change. Gods change. Yahweh was an “old man with a white beard”. This image is no more acceptable to Christians. Pope John Paul II says that God “is not an old man with a white beard”. And he has referred to God as ‘mother’ too. The Hindus knew of these problems 3,000 years ago. They called God ‘It’. The Christians laughed at the Hindus.
But did not Jesus himself call God his ‘Father’? Does it mean that the son did not know his ‘Father’? Christianity cannot go beyond its anthropomorphic images.
Today enlightened Christians do not take the Biblical story seriously. Almost the entire scientific community rejects the story of the Genesis. “The hypothesis of a pervading spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken,” says the poet Shelley. And this is a pagan idea.
But, here, we are in the realm of Vedanta, the final reach of the Hindu mind in its quest for the nature of God, the final formulation. Christianity failed to reach out to Advaita. It opted for a personal God. But a personal God calls for images and symbols. Christianity is condemned to idol worship.
Allah Knows Best,Peace Yall.... |
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The topic speaks itself...:lol ,this article was based on India experience with the Missionaries activities there...
http://www.kentaxrecords.com/iac ... 9&type=articles
Questioning the Missionary Madness
July 13, 2004, 3:01 am
Sanjai Patel
May 2004
Bangalore, India
We have been seeing a lot of Christian conversion activity lately. This was the third set of missionaries to come to our house to "convert" us in the last month, when my father decided to engage with them.
Two Christian ladies with a child came to our house. They said they have come to find out whether there is peace in the world, and if there is no peace, what can be done. They started talking about Jesus. They were subtly putting across that Jesus was the savior and we should follow him. My father quickly got the hint
Christian missionary: Do you want to know who created the world?
My father: I would like to know who created the creator!
Christian missionary: Silence
My father: Conversion to Christianity is not the solution. What about Christianity’s treatment of women in the scriptures. Compared to Hinduism, where there are so many female goddess and so many female models to follow.
Except Mary, how many are there in Christianity to follow? How many female Christian priests are there?
Christian missionary: Very few
My father: Why the discrimination?
Christian missionary: No answer.
My father: Is divorce a good thing?
Christian missionary: Divorce is not good
My father: Are you aware of the rate of divorce in America? Don’t you feel there is lot of work for Christians to do in America itself than convert people in India?
My father (continuing) : All said and done, our SC/ST population is actually growing, whereas if Christianity is so kind, why did they wipe out the natives in America ? How is it that Christianity, which preaches kindness and service, did not treat Red Indians humanely?
Christian missionary: Silence
My father: All religions have some good points and some bad points. In light of the changing circumstances, re-interpret the religions, take up the better qualities and leave out the negative qualities. As far as I am concerned, I have lot of respect for a true Christian. Jesus says, "If a man slaps you on one cheek, turn the other." .and yet most of the major wars have been fought between Christian countries. Jesus says, "If a man asks for the coat, give him the cloak too" and yet, to a certain extent, it is the rich Christian countries exploit the poorer countries. When Christian societies themselves face so much of problems, what it the point in conversion?
My father (continuing): Don’t you think it is better if you go around preaching Hindus to be better Hindus, Muslims to be better Muslims, Christians to be better Christians, each following the nobler qualities preached by his own religion.
Christian missionary: We have been asked to deliver these pamphlets. Can you please keep these?
My father: Look what I discussed with you, are you convinced? Go and discuss with the people that sent you and come back with the answers.
Of course they have not come back since!
Allah Knows Best,Peace Yall.... |
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Evangelism & the Goverment policy???
http://www.kentaxrecords.com/iac ... 1&type=articles
Evangelism in Social, Domestic and Foreign Policy
February 26, 2005, 9:11 am
By Norman Council
Newtopia Magazine
Evangelism. e穠an穏el穒sm ('-v n j -l-?z m)
1. Zealous preaching and dissemination of the gospel, as through missionary work.
2. Militant zeal for a cause.
-American Heritage Dictionary
America is in the grip of an evangelical movement. This movement is not, as one might assume given the primary definition of evangelism, propagated entirely by the 44% of Americans who make the personal claim of being "Born Again." This evangelism is not even, in any specific sense, dedicated to the "spreading the gospel" of Jesus Christ, although its leaders often articulate its agenda in Christian evangelical rhetoric. Though it has its roots in Christianity, this evangelical movement, which controls the domestic and foreign policy processes in this country, is purely political in nature.
SPREADING THE "GOSPEL"
The born-again have a penchant for proselytizing. This is not unique to those in the Christian tradition, but to most experiences of religious epiphany. There is a connection between conversion and zealotry that arises - if one wishes to be charitable - from the desire to share that which has brought joy and enlightenment.
Whatever the basis of the impulse, conversion and evangelism are inextricably linked in a pattern that has been the source of more destruction of human life than any other, save raw aggression itself. Nowhere is this pattern clearer or more deliberate than in the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition. From the exhortation to Israelites to "Tear down [Canaanite] altars, smash their standing stones, cut down their sacred poles and burn their idols," (Deut 7:5) to the Islamic conquest of the Mediterranean basin, to Torquemada's Spain to the Zionist recapture of Palestine, no inclination has caused greater human suffering then that which arises from the unshakable conviction that one is acting in concert with the will of God.
In every case these atrocities are to be traced to the conversion, the conviction and the commitment to evangelism of the individual. Were it simply an impulse to make others worship one's own god, evangelism would be dangerous enough, but it is the mixture of evangelism with a politico-social agenda that makes it truly deadly. For the evangelist often does not simply wish to change the heart and mind of the individual, he or she often seeks to change the society in which he lives, seeks to make the world around him more consistent with his understanding of its relationship to his beliefs.
POLITICAL EVANGELISM
George Bush and his administration embody the dual meanings of evangelism listed above. Mr. Bush, who has let it be known that he himself is a born again Christian, makes no bones about declaring his faith nor about his feeling that God whispers in his ear: "I could not be governor if I did not believe in a divine plan that supersedes all human plans.. My faith frees me. Frees me to put the problem of the moment in proper perspective. Frees me to make decisions that others might not like. Frees me to try to do the right thing.."
Though Bush is by no means the only President who has made it clear that he is a Christian, biographer Steven Mansfield says about Bush that "[he is] is among a small number of American presidents to have undergone a profound religious transformation as an adult... he came to the presidency, then, with the zeal of the newly converted."
However, it is not Christianity that is the true basis of Bush's evangelical zeal. Nor is it his simple faith that is of concern. Jimmy Carter was also Born Again, and even Clinton, the great deceiver himself, sprinkled his rhetoric with biblical references. Bush's evangelism is much more directly observable as he forwards neo-conservative social policy.
CHRISTIAN POLITICS
Despite consistent efforts to turn Ronald Reagan into a minor deity, the philosophical progenitor of our current conservative government is Barry Goldwater. In his speech accepting his party's nomination as its candidate for President in 1964, Mr. Goldwater set the tone that has been carried forth by today's conservative Republicans. The principles he outlined - limited government, a strong military, limited restraint on capitalist enterprise and strong moral authority derived from religious belief - were and remain the pillars of conservative thought. He also encapsulated the rational for conservative radicalism in his statement that "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
Garnering only 39% percent of the popular vote (the greatest popular vote defeat up to that day), Goldwater's defeat was in fact a victory for the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Goldwater was the first to be successful in attracting the south to the Republican Party, and, despite Russell Kirk's assertion in 1953 that a tradition of American conservatism had existed since the founding of the country, it was Goldwater who energized fledgling conservative Republican cadres and began the march toward political dominance.
But it was a grassroots evangelical Christian campaign that made that dominance possible.
In her book Spiritual Warfare: the Politics of the Christian Right, Sara Diamond, attributes the genesis of the religious right to the religious cultism that evolved from remnants of the counterculture of the 1960's. Disillusioned by war and the failure of idealism, the refugees of the counterculture were readily co-opted into evangelicalism by organizations such as the Campus Crusade for Christ. By the `80s this backlash against the "anything goes" mentality of the `60's was completed with the emergence of a reactionary religious right that helped Reagan get elected and move forward his conservative agenda.
Sojourners, a progressive evangelical organization, once traced the rise of the "New Christian Right" to the "Third Century" movement which began in 1974. It was in that year that insurance magnate Arthur DeMoss, Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, Richard DeVos of Amway and Rep. John Conlan of Arizona founded "Third Century Publishers." The company was established for the purpose of promoting literature designed to link a comprehensive conservative political agenda with born-again Christianity.
In a meeting in 1975 convened to solidify the financial base for Third Century Publishers, Conlan and Bright established a process to train Third Century's regional directors in strategies to gradually take positions of leadership with the government. Conlan told regional directors that Bright would be working behind the scenes with his Christian business contacts to secure financing. Realizing that they needed a tax-exempt foundation that could receive donations, they took over the Christian Freedom Foundation, an organization started in the 1950s to promote conservative economics, which had fallen on hard times. Eventually the Christian Freedom Foundation hired Ed McAteer as its director.
Ed McAteer - sometimes referred to as the godfather of the Religious Right - had retired from his position as a sales marketing manager for the Colgate-Palmolive Company to become the national field director of the Christian Freedom Foundation. He soon moved to the Conservative Caucus and worked as its national field director until he established the Religious Roundtable in 1979.
Named the Council of 56 Religious Roundtable (56 was the number of signers of the Declaration of Independence), the organization's statement of purpose listed its activities as: national affairs briefings, national leadership seminars, rallies, media appearances, personal appearances, and the distribution of cassette tapes. The philosophy of the Roundtable promoted a strong military, strong law enforcement and opposed abortion, pornography, divorce and rights for gay people. The group was strongly pro-Israel. The Roundtable called itself a public education group and a clearinghouse for information from other groups of the Right. |
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Through these organizations McAteer and the Roundtable coordinated a national grassroots movement that was preternatural in its reach. Some members of the Roundtable included:
* Beverly LaHaye - Founder of Concerned Women for America, the nation's largest politically active conservative women's organization.
* Tim LaHaye - Writer of the "Left Behind" series of evangelical fiction, Foundere of the Tim LeHaye Ministries and founder in 1981 of the Council for National Policy (CNP - see below)
* Gary Bauer - President of Family Research Council; Founder and chairman of Campaign for Working Families; Chairman of Citizens Committee to Confirm Clarence Thomas (1991);
* Bill Bright - Founder of the Campus Crusade for Christ, which now has 24,000 full time staff members, and more than 500,000 trained volunteers serving in 191 countries
* James Dobson - Originator of "tough love" family practices and host of the radio ministry, "Focus on the Family," heard daily on more than 3,000 radio facilities in North America and in 15 languages on approximately 3,300 facilities in over 116 other countries. It is estimated that his commentaries are heard by more than 200 million people every day, with 2.3 million subscribers to his ten monthly magazines.
* Ron Godwin - Former Liberty University Professor, Moral Majority and CNP member; in 1987 appointed Senior Vice President of the Washington Times Corporation. The paper is owned by arch-conservative cum new messiah, Sun Yung Moon, also a Roundtable benefactor.
* Robert Grant - Founder/Chairman of the Board, Christian Voice, a political action group composed of largely Pentecostals, which operated out of the Heritage Foundation; President, American Christian Cause; Chairman of American Freedom Coalition; Coalition for Religious Freedom; co-publisher Presidential Biblical Scoreboard and the Candidates Biblical Scoreboard.
* Alan Keyes.- African American conservative talk show host of "The Alan Keyes Show: America's Wake-up Call" (1994-99) on WCBM Radio in Baltimore and simulcast on America's Voice/Political News Talk satellite and cable TV network. America's Voice is on 66 cable systems. (As an ambassador to the UN Keyes promoted the Reagan policy of opposing sanctions against South Africa's Apartheid regime.)
* Dr. D. James Kennedy - Founder (1974) Coral Ridge Ministries. Now airs on more than 600 stations, four cable networks, and to 145 nations and 125 ships at sea on the Armed Forces Network. It is available to 73 percent of the nation's television households and has the greatest number of TV station affiliates of any religious program in the U.S. Other Kennedy broadcasts include Truths That Transform, which airs on more than 700 radio facilities across America, and The Kennedy Commentary, which is heard on nearly 500 radio facilities. Altogether, nearly 3 million people listen weekly to CRM programming on radio or television
* Pat Robertson - founder in 1960 of the Christian Broadcasting Network, which provides programming by cable, broadcast and satellite to approximately 180 countries. It is seen in 96% of the television markets in the United States
* Ralph Reed - As executive director of the Christian Coalition in the 1990's, he built one of the most effective grassroots organizations in modern American politics. During his tenure, the organization's budget rose to $27 million, and its membership to two million members and supporters in two thousand local chapters. He was a senior advisor to the campaign of George W. Bush in 2000 in both the primaries and the general election.
* Phyllis Schlafly - Founder in 1972 of the Eagle Forum to support the "pro-family" (i.e. Anti ERA) movement. Schlafly's 3 minute commentaries (running since 1983) are heard daily on 460 stations. Her radio talk show called "Phyllis Schlafly Live" (running since 1989) is heard weekly on Saturdays on 45 stations.
* Paul Weyrich - A founding president of the Heritage Foundation. Founder and past director of the American Legislative Exchange Council in 1973, whose agenda includeed rolling back civil rights, challenging government restrictions on corporate pollution, and limiting government regulations of commerce, and privatizing public services Weyrich also chairs National Empowerment Television (NET), a closed-circuit satellite program for activists across the U.S.literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works
Other groups represented on the Roundtable included:
* " Billy Graham Evangelistic Association,
* Moral Majority (which Ed McAteer, along with Howard Phillips [Founder & Chairman, The Conservative Caucus in 1974], Richard Viguerie [arch-conservative co-founder of The Conservative Caucus], and Paul Weyrich, helped Jerry Falwell to start)
* Church League of America
* National Religious Broadcasters,
* Plymouth Rock Foundation
* National Association of Evangelicals
* Gideon Bible,
* Wycliffe Bible Associates, and
* Intercessors for America.literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works
This is but a partial listing of the vast network of conservatives and evangelicals who began in the mid-seventies to make a concerted effort to infuse government in America with conservatism and evangelical Christian Morals. Ronald Reagan was their first major success. George W. Bush is their crowning achievement.
FROM RELIGIOUS IDEOLOGY TO POLITICAL ACTION
Dissatisfied with efforts of the Conservative Caucus and the Religious Roundtable, John Birch Society leaders Rep. Larry MacDonald, (D-Ga.) and William Cies recruited Tim Lehaye, and, using funding provided by conservative millionaires Nelson Bunker Hunt and T. Cullen Davis founded the Council for National Policy (CNP) in 1981. Among the earliest recruits to the CNP were brewer Joseph Coors, Louisiana State Rep. Woody Jenkins, and a young marine major on the staff of the National Security Council named Oliver North. By 1984, the CNP had 400 members whose were and are (the organization now maintains a membership of about 500) a Who's-Who in American conservative politics.
There was a tremendous overlap in membership between the Religious Roundtable and the CNP. But in addition to its evangelical members, the CNP also had strong associations with members of government. Nationally elected officials who were or are members of the CNP include Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX), Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN), Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX), Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX), Rep. Jack Kemp (R-NY) Rep. Bob Dornan (R-CA), Rep. Ernest Istook (R-OK), Rep. Barbara Vucanovich (R-NV), Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-NC) Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS), and Sen. Don Nickles (R-OK). (for a complete list of current and former members of the CNP see http://watch.pair.com/cnpdbase.html)In addition to elected officials, appointed officials in the government, including former Attorney General Ed Meese, current Attorney General John Ashcroft and Health and Human Services head Tommy Thompson have been associated with the CNP. In 1995 Senator and Presidential Candidate Bob Dole addressed the CNP and in 1999 Texas Governor George Bush addressed them as well (the text of his comments have never been released), in September of 2003 Candidate for Governor of California State Sen. Tom McClintock left California to address the CNP meeting in Colorado. Clearly the CNP has become a power broker in electoral politics in the United States.
In part this is because the CNP brings a tremendous amount of money to the table. By 1998 the CNP had contributed more than two million dollars to individual Representatives and Senators with the greatest amount - more than $200,000 - going to CNP member Jesse Helms. This large sum pales though in comparison to the more than 50 million that has been contributed by political action committees associated with the CNP in the period ending in 1998. (For a complete listing of contributions up to 1998 see http://garciapublicaffairs.com/CNP$$.htm)
The contributions, amounting to further tens of millions, continued in the 2000 and 2002 election cycles and continue in the 2004 cycle. (Track contributions by industry or interest at http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/alphalist.asp )
This remarkable marriage of evangelism and politics was made all the more potent by its lack of a counterpart among moderates or liberals. As unions became businesses or were busted by the government and traditional constituencies gained more independence, the voting base that had once existed for liberals and moderates deteriorated, leaving little in the way of meaningful opposition to the conservative's grassroots campaign. September 11th, 2001 and the conservatives ruthless exploitation of it sealed the deal. |
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EVANGELISM AND GOVERNMENT POLICY
Consider this: "During the more than half century of my life, we have seen an unprecedented decay in our American culture, a decay that has eroded the foundations of our collective values and moral standards of conduct. Our sense of personal responsibility has declined dramatically, just as the role and responsibility of the federal government have increased. The changing culture blurred the sharp contrast between right and wrong and created a new standard of conduct: 'If it feels good, do it.' And 'If you've got a problem, blame somebody else'."
This statement, made by George Bush in 1999, is standard neo-conservative relgio-political rhetoric. It was made to play to the evangelicals that Karl Rove had been lining up since 1994. As was this: ".government should welcome the active involvement of people who are following a religious imperative.because I know that changing hearts will change our entire society."
For a good idea of what the inclusion of "people who are following a religious imperative" in the formation of government is, one need look no further than the Texas Republican Party platforms for the last 6 years (http://www.rlctx.net).
These documents read like they were written by R. J. Rushdoony (a CNP board member whose Christian Reconstruction movement believes that society should be "reconstructed" to conform to Biblical laws. For a complete discussion go to http://www.religioustolerance.org/reconstr.htm.) Among other things the platforms advocate:
* " The elimination of Supreme Court review of laws regarding abortion, religion, or anything else related to the Bill of Rights. In these areas, Congress should be allowed to pass any laws it wishes.
* The elimination of the wall of separation between church and state.
* The criminalization of homosexual relations.
* A constitutional amendment outlawing abortion of all kinds.
* Treating homosexual people as child molesters who should not be allowed to visit their children unsupervised.
* The teaching of the biblical story of creation science classes.literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works
Reflecting conservative "free enterprise" interests, these platforms also say that:
* Social Security should be abolished.
* The federal income tax should be abolished.
* The federal minimum wage should be abolished.
* The 10th amendment statement should be interpreted to restrict federal intervention on a wide variety of fronts, from environmental protections to voting rights
* The United States should leave the UN.literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works
While George Bush probably would not consider himself an evangelist, it is clear that his domestic policies to date have been focused on the reformation of our society along strict lines in accordance with his religious beliefs. Consider the above list and then think about what Bush, his party, his administration and his counterparts in Congress have attempted to implement.
Consider President Bush's declaration of National Sanctity of Human Life Day on January 19, 2003 or the recent decision by his administration to allow federal funds to be used to build centers where religious worship is held. The past three years have seen legislative success in taking the first steps toward defining a fetus as a person with rights protected by the constitution. In the President's 2003 State of the Union address he went even further, coming very close to defining the human life as beginning at the moment when sperm fertilizes egg. In his the most recent State of the Union address he asks for a constitutional amendment codifying the religious concept of marriage as sacrament restricted to heterosexual couples. Conservative legislators were successful in including language in the No Child Left Behind Act supporting the teaching of Creationism (re-framed as Intelligent Design) in school science curricula. The Supreme Court has ruled that taxpayer dollars may be used to fund religious education and has made a whole spate of decisions that support the state's right to exception from federal law. Bush has been very clear about his desire to put another ultraconservative on the Supreme Court to further its conservative judicial activism.
It is very clear that the political ground is being made fertile for the seeds of a society ruled by fundamentalist Christian principles.
EVANGELISM IN FOREIGN POLICY
The last point of the Texas Platform, regarding the removal of the US from the United Nations, is consistent with old line Goldwater and John Birch Society rhetoric. But, despite the long time relationship between the religious right and conservative political figures, in the international field the Bush administration is proselytizing from a different evangelical viewpoint - that of the neoconservatives who have taken control of the party in the years since the Reagan Administration. Although there are significant areas of overlap, what we now see in foreign relations has to do with a single rigid idea: the conviction that free market based capitalistic democracy is the only legitimate form of government. In the pursuit of belief he has demonstrated a belief that America stands above the rest of the world.
Even before the attacks on September 11, the Bush administration began to dismantle or reject treaties that would bind the United States to a larger international community. The United States rejected the Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gases, withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, quit the Land Mine Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and refused to support or allow itself to be made subject to the International Criminal Court. |
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Following 9/11/01 and the government's shift in focus from a war on terrorism to unilateral intervention in Iraq, the attacks on internationalism took on a much more vociferous tone. Bush said that UN would be irrelevant if it did not support his war agenda and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld referred to France and Germany, who opposed military action against Iraq without U.N. endorsement, as "old Europe," and the newer potential members of the European Union, such as Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, as "new Europe." Rumsfeld also grouped Germany with such nations as Cuba and Libya because they refused to support the US war on Iraq. B
While to some this policy of instilling divisiveness amongst our European allies makes no sense, in choosing to divide Europe into old and new, Rumsfeld may have been consciously exacerbating tensions within the European Union, straining to the breaking point the ties of a more unified Europe to America. Undermining Europe in this way would certainly have been consistent with Cheney's previously articulated policy of weakening any who would stand in the way of US policy of democratic evangelism.
In 1992, in a draft planning document drawn up when he was Secretary of Defense Cheney argued that the United States must "discourage the advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." Cheney felt that America should "retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing.those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends.."
We see echoes of the Cheney policy in National Security Strategy issued by the White House in September 2002. That document describes a will to maintain whatever military capability is needed to defeat any attempt by any state that might oppose the will of the United States or its allies, and to discourage or prevent any potential adversaries from building up their own forces to equal or surpass ours. Together, the Cheney memo and the National Security Strategy outline the essence of the "Bush Doctrine": U.S. global domination. Within this doctrine, no power will be allowed to challenge American leadership or, even "to aspire" to a role inconsistent with American policy - As James Chase puts it "surely this is the authentic voice of American neo-imperialism."
Despite traditional conservative disdain for Bush's imperial policy, there is one area of overlap between the concerns of the religious conservatives and neo-conservatives in the administration. That lies in the United States policy regarding the Middle East. Here again we feel the fine hand of Ed McAteer.
McAteer is what he refers to as a "Christian Zionist." In so describing himself, McAteer is aligning with the fundamentalist concept of "premillennial dispensationalism" which leads him to the conclusion that Israel must establish a state in the Middle East so that the prophecy outlining the conditions for the return of the Messiah can be fulfilled. As McAteer has said ""I believe that we are seeing prophecy unfold so rapidly and dramatically and wonderfully and, without exaggerating, it makes me breathless."
In what can only be described as the strangest bedfellows in politics, fundamentalist Christians, conservative Likudists and neo-conservatives in the Bush Defense Department have joined together to put pressure on the administration to avoid any action that is not directly premised on the idea of the preservation of the state of Israel. McAteer has met with Arial Sharon and is a strong supporter of the Likud Party. Richard Perle (former chairman of the Defense Policy Board) and Douglas Feith (Undersecretary of Defense for Policy) in 1996 developed a policy paper for the Likud party urging it to repudiate the Oslo accords, reoccupy the territories and crush Arafat's government. From this partnership and its rationale, arose American policy regarding Iraq, a policy based in the idea that instilling a democratic government in the Arab Middle East will secure Israel's future.
Anyone who was surprised by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil's revelation that planning for the attack on Iraq predated 09/11/01 has simply not been paying attention. This idea of "regime change" has been around since 1992, and was articulated clearly in a letter to President Clinton and signed by Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretary of Defense), Perle, Feith and Zalmy Khalilzad (Nominated by President Bush in September 2003 as Ambassador to Afghanistan). "We urge you" the letter says, ".to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts." In this policy there is an alignment between the Christian Zionists, who equate America's "war on terror" with that of Israel, and the neo-conservatives even though McAteer's group strongly opposes Bush's "Road Map to Peace" because it calls for ceding territory to the Palestinians. Relations between the Christian Zionists and Wolfowitz remain tight and it is Wolfowitz above all who was the architect of the Iraq strategy.
Although President Bush eschewed the notion of "nation building" in the 2000 electoral campaign, he was either lying then or was been easily swayed by the neo-cons in the administration, following the attacks on 09/11/01, into a policy of unilateral (if necessary) intervention into the sovereign state of Iraq on the premise of its role in the "war on terrorism."
In June 2002, Bush argued that "a new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region." In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in February 2003, he defined an ambitious role for America and "the civilized world" in the transformation of the Middle East."
And in his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush made this clearly presumptive and predictive point: "all people have a right to choose their own government, and determine their own destiny-and the United States supports their aspirations to live in freedom." Though benign in context, the message here is clear. The United States will move to impress democracy and free market economics on the world.
This is the new evangelism: the Pax Americana. Similar to its predecessor in Rome some 2000 years ago, its purpose is to unite the world, albeit this time under the American concept of democracy.
These evangelistic efforts, both domestic and international, have changed the face of America. And, despite the internecine struggles within the Christian fundamentalists, the neo-conservatives and the "paleo-conservatives" who insist that Goldwater had it right, it is a movement that is moving inexorably forward.
Norman Council is a behavioral healthcare administration professional, an assistant professor, elected representative in his hometown of Lansdowne Pennsylvania and a freelance writer of fiction, poetry and political commentary. His commentary pieces have been published by NPR, the Philadelphia Inquirer and several smaller periodicals.
http://www.kentaxrecords.com/iac ... 1&type=articles
Allah Knows Best,Peace Yall..... |
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What a lame tactic...........:hmm: ,this tactic is a classic one!!!
http://www.kentaxrecords.com/iaca/tactics_education.htm
Conversion Tactics - Education
- picture; Innocent Indian children being brainwashed and forced to read the Bible in a Christian School. -
Missionaries have set up thousands of Christian schools, colleges and other education institutions in India, through funding from foreign churches. These schools are simply established for subtle proselytization of the masses. Because many of these schools were set up in India under British rule, there is a common misconception that these schools have a higher standard of education and discipline.
It is very important that all children be raised in their respective religious traditions. The first impressions are the most lasting, and they are what the children have to deal with throughout their lives. This is because early impressions are locked in the memory pattern of their subconscious minds. And Missionaries make use of this fact, to attempt to subtle convert children at a young age.
Though these institutions are open to people of any religion, they discriminate against non-Christian faiths and attempt to convert students by the following means:
1. Curriculum Control - The entire education system in Guyana is controlled by that dominant class that promotes Westernized and Christian orientation. Having appropriated the power to define and delimit what is legitimate and not, this social bloc has monopolized the curriculum constructing it in a way that deliberately emphasizes western and Christian mores while at the same time deliberately excluding and de-emphasizing anything Hindu and Islamic in particular and Indian in general. By just going through the textbooks produced in Guyana one can hardly imagine that this is a country with a population that is half Hindu and Muslim
.2. Dominance of Missionary Schools - Over the years there have been successful attempts through the instrument of the state to de-emphasize Hindu and Muslim contributions to the development of education in Guyana while at the same time reinforcing and glorifying the Christian contribution. In 1976 all denominational schools (and other institutions) were required by the government of the day to change their names in order to de-link them from their religious and ethnic background.
While the government made sure that schools with Indian, Hindu and Muslim names complied with the requirement, Christian schools were never really affected. Thus Indian Educational Trust College became Richard Ishmael Secondary, Muslim Trust College became Brickdams Secondary school, Hindu college became Cove and John Secondary and Maha Sabha Secondary became Leonora Secondary. On the other hand, officially and otherwise, St. Stanislaus, St. Joseph's, St. Rose's, St, Agnes, St. John's, Sacred Heart, Stella Maris, Christ Church and others have retained their former names and their distinctive histories.
3. Defamation - Under the guise of moral education in schools when a Hindu or Muslim child is forced to listen to a Christian functionary who by force of habit and dogmatic indoctrination must invariably, subtly and otherwise, denigrate the Hindu and Muslim traditions, this is in violation of the fundamental right and the civil liberty of the child.
Priests, nuns and teachers in Christian schools often defame and blasphemize Hinduism and other religions in their regular lessons. Hindu students who graduate from such institutions usually do not convert to Christianity, but through the influence of their Christian mentors, they end up mocking temples/mosques, scriptures and their own religious leaders for the rest of their lives.
4. On Campus Prayers – Most Christian institutions have mandatory daily prayers. In many schools, non-Christian students are unjustly forced to attend Christian masses and recite Christian prayers.
In other schools, non-Christians have their respective prayer sessions at the same time. However, the Christian prayers are held in air-conditioned chapels, while non-Christians wishing to pray must hold their services outside in the hot Indian sun. Naturally, many non-Christian students will decide to seek shelter in the chapel and are essentially forced to attend Christian services.
5. Christian Only Teachers - Some Christian schools only employ Christian teachers and lecturers for all subjects. These Christian teachers often defame other religions and preach about Jesus Christ in the middle of physics, chemistry, etc. lectures to students who have come to learn their academic material and not about Chrstianity.
6. Beatings – In Assam, India, at the English medium Ashapalli High School it is mandatory for all students to attend church every day before classes begin. Even after following the bigoted ways of this missionary school, the Hindu and Buddhist children are ill-treated and physically abused by the Christian staff of the school.
Kalindi Rani Chakma was a class VIII Buddhist student of the school; therefore she was abused mentally and physically on a daily basis by her Christian teachers. One such revolting incident has put her future academic career in jeopardy.
One evening Kalindi Rani was called to the Principal, H. Lamare's residence due to alleged non-compliance of her daily routines. Once there Kalindi Rani was incessantly caned by Lamare. She begged for him to stop, but he continued to beat her because of his blind hatred for all Hindus and Buddhists. While he beat her he asked her, "Why don't you believe in Christ? What is the use of worshipping Buddha and Kali?
As a result Kalidi Rani went into shock and suffered several painful bruises throughout her whole body. She did not attend school until the day after the incident. When she went back to school, once again, Lamare abused her-both verbally and physically. She is now terrified of attending school.
Lamare did not punish Kalindi Rani because she did not complete her daily tasks. He beat her like a mad man because she was a heathen pagan who did not worship Christ. He has been given the divine sanction to do so by the Church establishment in India. Like all Christians, he too was brainwashed to believe that followers of Christ are superior to the “heathen pagans”!
7. Scaldings - In another display of Christian Missionary barbarism, a nun belonging to the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, scalded four little Hindu girls with a hot knife.
Sister Francesca is the nun in charge of Missionaries of Charity's Mahatma Gandhi Welfare Center. A young Hindu girl named Kavery was playing inside the center with three other girls when the nun approached them and accused them of stealing money. The nun then heated a knife on an electric heater and pressed in on the hands of the four children.
When Kavery's father, Kabiram, heard about the incident he went to the Bowbazar police station to file a complaint, but the police refused to register a case until the local residents forced them to do so. The head of Missionaries of Charity, Sister Nirmala, said that as a disciplinary action she has asked the guilty nun to discontinue her duties and take rest for the time being! Is this a punishment or a reward for following the torture of non-Christians?
SummaryThough the reputation of Christian educational institutions in India claims to be of high standards in academics, we can see that these institutions in fact have the lowest standards when it comes to morality. Children who attend these schools are subjected to physical abuse, verbal defamation of their respective religions and daily brainwashing of Christian fundamentalism. In the end, there is no reason to send children to such cruel and criminal institutions, as it is not one’s academic background but one’s morality that makes a person.
Allah Knows Best,Peace Yall.... |
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Wasn't this "spreading by sword" ?????? this article is based on India,this is the tactics used in India by the missionaries....
http://www.kentaxrecords.com/iaca/tactics_violence.htm
Conversion Tactics – Violence
While Christian Missionaries preach of peace, love and harmony, their most effective tool for conversions is violence and they will not hesitate to use it. There are hundreds of violent attacks by Christian Missionaries every year. Most of these attacks can be categorized into the following:
1. Divide & Convert (Tahiti) – One of the most efficient way and brutal ways that Missionaries have converted large amounts of people is by dividing and conquering. Missionaries will persuade a leader of a tribe that they will arm him and allow him to defeat a rival tribal if he converts to Christianity. After the conquering and pillaging of the opposing tribe, under the rule of the converted leader, both tribes convert to Christianity. One classical example occurred is the story of how the South Pacific was converted:
In 1797, thirty years after the discovery of Tahiti by Wallis, the first missionaries landed on the island. The missionaries, sent by the London Missionary Society, tried for seven years to convert the natives but were unable to make any headway.
It was then that they discovered, as if by miracle, the proper method of converting the Tahitians. They discovered that the local chief, Pomare, liked alcohol (distilled by the missionaries) so much that he became an alcoholic. Addicted to the distilled spirit (perhaps the "holy" spirit), Pomare agreed to back the missionaries in their work of conversion. Pomare, supplied with western firearms, easily subdued his native opponents. Upon his victory over his rivals, the whole island was forcibly converted in one day.
Then the process of inculcating "Christian virtues" began. Persistent unbelievers, those who refused to be converted, were executed. Singing was banned (except for hymns) and all forms of adornment, flowers or tattoo were disallowed. Of course, surfing and dancing were not permitted as well. The punishment for breaking any of these rules included, among others, being sentenced to hard labor.
Within thirty years of missionary control, the population of Tahiti fell from an initial estimate of 20,000 to 6,000. On another island, Raiatea, a man who was able to forecast the weather by studying the behavior of fish was executed for witchcraft. The missionaries continued this tactic from island to island and managed to convert the whole South Pacific.
Though this method was used centuries ago, it is still a commonly used tactic used by Christian Missionaries in tribal areas of Asia and Africa.
2. Terrorist Organizations (North-East India) – These relatively small armed tribal groups are eventually nurtured by Missionaries into violent and sadistic terrorist groups:
On December 4th, 2000, Christians converts under the direction of Missionaries, desecrated an ashram (Hindu religious retreat) set up by murdered Hindu leader Shanti Kumar Tripura. . They desecrated Hindu idols and destroyed photos of the slain religious leader revered by both Hindu tribals and Bengalis. The Christian converts also raped two female devotees and brutally attacked two men who had come to the ashram for puja (religious rituals).
The next day, Christian converts brutally desecrated another ashram at Jirania Khola and forced the inmates to stop all Hindu rituals and practices at gunpoint. A group of seven armed converted Christian terrorists barged into the ashram and threatened the 150 Hindus with dire consequences if they continued to perform Hindu rites at the ashram. The terrorists fled only after a large group of locals rushed to the ashram.
Due to threats by violent Missionaries and their Christian converts, altogether 11 ashrams, schools and orphanages set up by the murdered Hindu leader in various parts of the state have been forcibly closed down by the Christian fundamentalist terrorist organization known as “National Liberation Front of Tripura” (NLFT).
In early October the same Christian fundamentalists had issued a diktat ordering the indigenous tribal Hindus to stay away from Durga Puja celebrations (Hindu Festival) and warned that any tribal members seen taking part in the festival would be instantly killed. In its official public statement, the NLFT said it wanted all tribals in Tripura to become Christians. They also stated that salvation for Tripura lies only in Christianity and would eliminate anyone who dared to come in the way of their plans to forcibly convert all of Tripura to Christianity.
NFLT is still an active and powerful terrorist organization that operates in Northeast India. They have converted many Hindus and tribals forcibly at gunpoint, and are involved in rapes, and assassinations. They continue to receive arms as well as moral and financial support from Western Christian organizations and Missionaries.
3. Manhunts (South America) - Another method, aptly called "manhunt", involves the missionaries going out, sometimes in motorized vehicles, hunting for natives to integrate them into reservations set up for missionary work. The New Tribes Mission (NTM), for instance, went on such a manhunt in Paraguay. Five missionized natives were killed in one such manhunt. Those unconverted natives were taken to the NTM camp in Campo Loro. Within a short while, according to Survival International, all had died of new diseases they had no immunity to. Stung by criticism, the best reply the NTM 's Director in Paraguay could muster was: "We don't go after people anymore. We just provide transport."
In another such "manhunt" in 1979, also in Paraguay, one of the frightened natives fell down from a tree and broke her leg. (Her right breast had already been shot off by a previous encounter with the missionaries.) She was compelled, with her broken leg, to walk back to the mission camp. She subsequently died. |
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4. Kidnappings - In conjunction with the "manhunt", converted natives are trained by the missionaries to carry guns. The "newly contacted" natives are then rounded off to the mission camp. One American organization, Cultural Survival, reported in 1986 that natives in the NTM camp in Paraguay kidnapped and forced into missionary schools.
5. Forced Captivity – In one such Missionary camp, a witness described the situation of the kidnapped captives:
”I … saw two old ladies lying on some rags on the ground in the last stages of emaciation and clearly on the verge of death. One was unconscious, the second in what was evidently a state of catalepsy...In the second hut lay another woman, also in a desperate condition and with untreated wounds on her legs. A small, naked, tearful boy sat at her side...The three women and the boy had been taken in a recent forest roundup, the third woman having being shot in the side while attempting to escape.”
6. Genocide (Brazil) – There are many accounts of genocide committed by Missionaries but they rarely reported in Christian media because of the perverse nature of the crime and because they are usually committed against remote tribals. One of the most horrific massacres was of Brazilian tribals by the grossly misnamed Indian Protection Service, which Christian Missionaries supported and often assisted in killings.
In just a few years, the following tribes population was reduced due to Missionary genocide:
• Munducurus tribe: reduced from 19,000 to 1,200
• Guaranis tribe: reduced from 5,000 to 200
• Cajaras tribe: from 4,000 to 400
• Cintas Largas: from 10,000 to 500
• Tapaiunas: completely extirpated
• Other tribes were reduced to only a few (one or two!) individuals and some by only a single family.
The Missionaries employed some of the following methods in their killings:
• The Cintas Largas were attacked by dropping dynamites from airplanes.
• The Maxacalis were given alcohol and then shot down when they became drunk.
• The Nhambiquera were killed in huge numbers by machine gun fire.
• Two Patachos tribes were exterminated by giving the unsuspecting Indians smallpox injections.
• Some of the Indians were murdered by presenting them with food laced with arsenic and formicides.
• One missionary persuaded 600 Ticuna Indians that the end of the world is taking place and they will only be safe on a ranch. On that ranch the Indians were made slaves and tortured.
• The Bororos tribe was banned from performing customary religious rites on the dead. Deprived of their cultural identity, the Bororos, instead of converting, committed suicide on by one, until the tribe was extinct.
7. Intentional Denial of Medicines- In another New Tribes Mission (NTM) mission camp, many of the natives either died from starvation or from diseases transmitted by the missionaries for which they had no immunity against. In one such mission camp in Paraguay, the German anthropologist, Dr. Mark Munzel, reported that food and medicine were deliberately withheld by the missionaries. From a total of 277 natives in April 1972 only 202 survivors were left three months later. A US congressional report confirmed that 49% of the camp population had vanished!
In Bolivia, William Pencille, of the South American Missionary Society, was called in to help when white ranchers moving into the tribal areas came upon the Ayoreos. Pencille persuaded these natives to stop resisting the encroachment of the cattlemen and to settle on a patch of barren land beside a railroad tract. The natives, having no resistance to common diseases of the "modern" man, began to die. Throughout all this Pencille had the means to save the lives of these people. He had access to many modes of transport, including an airplane, and to funds which could easily have been used to buy medicines for them. Yet this is what he said: "It's better they should die. Then I baptize them (on the point of death) and they go straight to heaven."
Summary
The above is only a small sampling of the atrocities that have been committed by Missionaries. It can be seen that Missionaries do not hesitate rape, torture, enslave and murder in order to forcibly spread Christianity. Though all these events occurred in the past, some occurred as recently as only a few years ago, and they still continue today on an even larger scale unreported by Western media.
*pictures: Bodies of Hindus killed for refusing to convert by Christian converts,armed by Southern Baptist Missionaries.*
Allah Knows Best,Peace Yall....... |
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Watch out for this organization or various church missionaries,all of these are blacklisted in India....most of them comes from America!!! maybe they already here, all of them belief to be funded by the zionist freemasons millionare.......so watch out and be careful with their lies,they are best in this kind of thing!
http://www.kentaxrecords.com/iaca/action_blacklist.htm
The Blacklist
Major Conversion Programs operating in India
The American Leprosy Missions
BCM International, Inc.
Baptist Bible Fellowship International
Baptist International Missions
Baptist Mid-Missions
Baptist Student Center
Baptist World Mission
Bethany Fellowship Missions
Conservative Baptists International
Child Evangelism Fellowship Inc.
Childcare International
Christian Broadcasting Network
Christian Church of North America Missions
Christian Churches/Churches of Christ, c/o Mission Services Association
Christian and Missionary Alliance
Church World Service and Witness Unit of the NCCUSA
Church of God in Christ, Mennonite General Mission
Church of the Nazarene, World Mission Division Info
Compassion International, Inc.
Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross Generalate
Elim Fellowship World Missions Department
Emmanuel Baptist Church
Evangelical Free Church of America, Board of Overseas Missions
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Division for Global Mission
Foursquare Missions International
Free Methodist World Missions
General Conference Mennonite Church Overseas Mission
General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists
Global Outreach Mission
Globe Missionary Evangelism
Gospel for Asia, Inc.
Grace Ministries International, Inc.
Holt International Children's Services, Inc.
Holy Cross Mission Center for Cross-Cultural Ministries
International Mission Board, Southern Baptist Convention
International Missions, Inc.
International Pentecostal Holiness Church World Missions Ministries
La Salette Missionaries, Province of Mary, Queen of Peace
Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Board for Mission Services
Lutheran World Relief
MAP International, Inc.
Men for Missions International
Mennonite Central Committee
New Tribes Mission
OMS International, Inc.
Oblates of Mary Immaculate, U.S. Consulate
Operation Mobilization
Partners International
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Worldwide Ministries Division
Reformed Church in America, General Synod Council, Mission Services
SIM (Society for International Ministries) USA
Salesian Missions
Salvation Army, U.S.A.
Society of Mary, Province of New York, Marianist Provincial House
Society of the Divine Word, Chicago Province
Society of the Divine Word, Southern Province of St. Augustine
Southern Baptist Convention
Teen Missions International, Inc.
The Bible League
The Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, U.S. Province
Trans World Radio
United Methodist Church General Board of Global Ministries
United Methodist Committee on Relief
United World Mission, Inc.
WEC International
Wesleyan World Missions
Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, Bd for World Missions
World Mission Prayer League
World Partners of the Missionary Church
World Vision
Allah Knows Best,Peace Yall.... |
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People of India calls for the goverment to banned the evangelist from operating in their country...???hmmm,does it has something to do with the America liars Benny Hinn??....check this out;
http://www.christianaggression.o ... S&id=1110826126
Western Christian Evangelicals in India: A Call for a Ban
Posted March 15, 2005
Yoginder Sikand
The heated controversy over the visit to Bangalore of the American Christian evangelist fraud Benny Hinn had hardly abated when posters came up on the city’s walls announcing the impending arrival of another team of foreign evangelists in the city. Displayed on the posters inviting the denizens of Bangalore for yet another Gospel revival meeting were faces of two white men dressed neatly in suits, identified as pastors from Germany, and their local host, a south Indian Pentecostal priest.
I had missed Benny Hinn’s hugely controversial show, having been out of Bangalore when he arrived in town along with his large retinue, and I decided that I just had to attend this one. And so I found myself one hot evening two weeks ago in a football stadium in a Tamil-dominated locality in Bangalore.
A large stage had been set up at one end of the stadium, below which plastic chairs were placed in rows. Stalls had come up displaying evangelical literature in Tamil and Kannada, CDs and tapes of visiting American evangelists (including the notorious Benny Hinn) and stickers with such curious slogans as ‘Christ is THE ONLY way to salvation’ and ‘Christ is THE Lord’. Nearby, street vendors did brisk business selling chips and popcorn as the crowd filtered in.
The programme started with a Tamil devotional hymn sung by a group of women neatly attired in white saris. Then, a Tamil pastor, the host of the evening’s event, stood up and spoke into a mike. Barring ‘Yesu’ (Jesus) and ‘Bible’ I could not understand a word of what he said, I must confess. As his sermon progressed he raised his tempo to a furious pitch, thundering away, till at last he announced the arrival of the evangelists from Germany.
Two fancy cars then drove into the stadium, and out stepped the four white German evangelists—two men and two women. They strode up to the stage, and the men on the dais stood up to shake hands with them. The Tamil pastor introduced them to the crowd, and invited one of the German men to deliver a speech. The man—rather plain looking—lumbered over to the microphone, and announced how very pleased indeed he was to be in Bangalore and how grateful to the Lord he truly was for having given him the opportunity of coming all the way from Germany to fulfill his evangelical obligations. As he went on, he, like the Tamil pastor before him, grew increasingly loud and aggressive till at last he was in a frenzy, screaming at the top of his voce. The only path to salvation, he thundered, was through Jesus. Jesus alone, he insisted, angrily contorting his face and hollering as if possessed by some strange spirit, was the way to eternal bliss. Meanwhile, he had worked the crowd into a frenzy, with men and women shrieking their Hallelujahs aloud and lifting their hands in prayer to invisible heavenly beings.
I do not know if their prayers were met, but mine—that the man be forced to retire to his seat at once—certainly were, as the Tamil pastor announced that his German guests were now going to sing a song in praise of ‘Jesus, the King of Kings’. I must admit the tune was catchy and quite enjoyable, although I cannot say the same for the lyrics, which, extolling Jesus as the only way to heaven, were, of course, entirely predictable. As the song proceeded, a member of the German team, a scrawny woman wearing a sleeveless blouse, broke into a hip-hop sort of dance, while the others swayed from side to side in passionate gyration. Then, explaining what this evangelical rock show was intended to be, the leader of the team, a particularly stern-looking man, announced: ‘Jesus loves music and so we are singing to please him!’. This was then dutifully translated into Tamil for the benefit of the audience.
The song-cum-jig soon gave over, after which the head of the team grabbed the mike and bellowed into it. ‘Praise be to the Lord Jesus, in whose name we have come all the way to your beautiful city of Bangalore’, he announced, while the audience responded with loud claps. Like his colleague who had spoken earlier, he went on to repeat the same hackneyed tale, of Jesus being the only path to God. Jesus had come to defeat Satan, he declared, and those who wanted to be saved had no way out but to accept Jesus as their Master. He hammered home the same point tirelessly, as his voice ascended into a crashing crescendo, being amplified many times over through massive loudspeakers. ‘Ours is a God of power, not a dead deity’, he screeched at the top of his voice, as the audience below threw up their arms in supplication.
‘Yes, our God has powers to drive away the demons and evil spirits and to cure the sick’, he declared. ‘That’s what is written here in the Bible’, he thundered, thumping away at a book placed on the podium. And, to ‘prove’ the point, he turned to the audience and announced that all sick, dumb, deaf or blind people present could come up to the stage and be miraculously cured, ‘in Jesus’ name’. |
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Author
