Ancient Christian ruins discovered under former ISIS-held territory

Ancient Christian ruins discovered under former ISIS-held territory

For more than two years, ISIS forces who occupied this northern Syrian city paid little attention to the tip of an old gate on an empty mound of land where they dumped trash.

This Easter, don’t forget persecuted Christians in the Middle East

This Easter, don't forget persecuted Christians in the Middle East

Today, over 1 billion Christians worldwide celebrate the death and resurrection of their Savior Jesus Christ, remembering that Jesus was ridiculed and persecuted in his life. Celebrants this week should remember that their brothers and sisters throughout the Middle East are joining in Christ's suffering to this very day, facing ridicule and persecution that is driving them to leave the lands they have lived in for thousands of years.

Professor Used Shroud of Turin To Create ‘Precise’ 3D ‘Carbon Copy’ Of Jesus

Professor Used Shroud of Turin To Create 'Precise' 3D 'Carbon Copy' Of Jesus

A University of Padua professor used the Shroud of Turin to create a 3D carbon copy of Jesus, allegedly revealing Christ's true features. Giulio Fanti, a professor of mechanical and thermal measurements and a scholar of the Shroud of Turin, used his own measurements of the impression on the shroud to create the carbon copy, according to Aleteia.

Billy Graham was a pernicious influence on the White House

Billy Graham was a pernicious influence on the White House

In life and in death, Billy Graham has been depicted as a benign counselor to presidents. On Wednesday, he became the first religious leader to lie in state at the US Capitol. Now, we owe ourselves a reckoning with Graham, who spread his brand of evangelical Christianity around the world while having unfettered access to the Oval Office for decades.

US CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS FIGHTS OBAMA WAR ON RELIGION

Via-Breitbart

This is not about access to contraception, which is ubiquitous and inexpensive, even when it is not provided by the Church’s hand and with the Church’s funds. This is not about the religious freedom of Catholics only, but also of those who recognize that their cherished beliefs may be next on the block. This is not about the Bishops’ somehow “banning contraception,” when the U.S. Supreme Court took that issue off the table two generations ago. Indeed, this is not about the Church wanting to force anybody to do anything; it is instead about the federal government forcing the Church—consisting of its faithful and all but a few of its institutions—to act against Church teachings. This is not a matter of opposition to universal health care, which has been a concern of the Bishops’ Conference since 1919, virtually at its founding. This is not a fight we want or asked for, but one forced upon us by government on its own timing. Finally, this is not a Republican or Democratic, a conservative or liberal issue; it is an American issue.

Four in 10 Americans Believe in Strict Creationism

Via-Gallup

Some Context on the Wilders Case

Via-NRO

By Nina Shea

Geert Wilders is the latest in a lengthening roster of Europeans who have been criminally prosecuted for criticizing Islam. Under the slogans of stopping “Islamophobia” and banning “defamation” or “insult” of Islam, for two decades a concerted demand has been made for the West to enforce Islamic blasphemy rules, as is customary in certain member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

The Netherlands has been among the many EU states struggling to comply. In the name of liberalism, it has enacted laws criminalizing “hate speech,” with grossly illiberal results. A sample of the Dutch cases shows that the desire to protect minorities is a self-deluding piety in these circumstances. What really lies at the root of these vaguely defined and arbitrarily adjudicated cases is fear of Muslim violence.

One of the earliest such Western cases occurred in the Netherlands in 1992, a few years after Iran’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie triggered murders of “blasphemers” connected with his book The Satanic Verses. A Muslim cabaret artist of Pakistani background, “Zola F,” was found guilty of authoring an unflattering book about Muslim immigration, entitled The Impending Ruin of the Netherlands, Country of Gullible Fools. This created the anomaly of a white court condemning a brown immigrant for “racist hate speech.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim of African heritage who became a Dutch parliamentarian, was similarly prosecuted. She was charged for criticizing the Islamic teaching on killing homosexuals. Already known for her role in co-directing Submission (the film on abuses against Muslim women that led to the 2004 murder by a Muslim extremist of her co-director, Theo Van Gogh), she announced plans for a sequel on the treatment of homosexuals in Islam. This prompted the Netherlands’ main Muslim lobby to register a complaint that her remarks were “blasphemous and have been received with a great deal of pain by the Muslim community.” In 2005, after two years of legal proceedings for “incitement” to hatred, during which time she received numerous death threats and had to go into hiding, a court finally decided that although she had “sought the borders of the acceptable,” her speech did not warrant prohibition, and she was let off.

Hate-speech arrests occurred in the aftermath of the Van Gogh murder. When an artist in Rotterdam painted a street mural that included the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” next to the date of Van Gogh’s murder, a local mosque leader complained to police that the message was “racist.” The police, on orders of the mayor, sandblasted the mural and arrested a television reporter at the scene and destroyed his film. Another Dutch man hung in his window a poster for a far-right movement that stated, “Stop the tumor that is Islam. Theo has died for us. Who will be next?” After being convicted by two lower courts, he finally prevailed on appeal.

Widespread Muslim violence and protest over the Danish cartoons of Mohammed has put Dutch officials on high alert for provocative caricaturists. In 2008, after an Internet monitoring group reported him to authorities for cartoons deemed insulting to Muslims, the edgy Dutch cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot was arrested. Police seized his computer’s hard drive and cartoon sketches. The cartoons in question opposed Muslim immigration in various tasteless ways. Nekschot remains under suspicion of “insulting people on the basis of their race or belief, and possibly also of inciting hate,” and could face two years in prison or a $25,000 fine if prosecuted. During the course of this case, it was revealed that the Dutch government had established an “Interdepartmental Working Group on Cartoons,” apparently to apprise officials of any drawings that Muslims could find insulting.

The Wilders case is not unique, but it is important. It demonstrates the continued willingness of authorities in Europe’s most liberal countries to regulate the content of speech on Islam in order to placate Muslim blasphemy demands. Few such cases end in conviction, but their chilling effect on free speech within and on Islam continues to widen.

— Nina Shea directs the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and co-authored the forthcoming book Silenced (Oxford University Press), on contemporary blasphemy rules.

Obama and the Evil Squatters

Via-American Thinker

By Robin of Berkeley

"God is dead," according to the existentialist Nietzsche. He might as well have been talking about Berkeley, California.

Think I'm exaggerating? Take a trip out west and spend a few days on Telegraph Avenue. Then wander over to the downtown area, Shattuck and University. If you're really the daredevil, do so after dark, when the mean streets look positively Kafkaesque.

When I say God is dead in Berkeley, I don't mean just that parts of the city look like a hellhole. I'm referring to the militant anti-God vibe. While Berkeley has always had its atheists, a shift has taken place in the last decade or so. People are not merely declining a life of the spirit. Many are openly hostile toward anything or anyone having to do with God.

This wasn't always the case. When I first landed in Berkeley in the early '80s, it was a spiritual hub. There were Jesus-freaks and Jews for Jesus. The followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, the sannyasins, were resplendent in red. The Hare Krishnas danced and chanted and rattled their tambourines along Telegraph Avenue.

Having been raised secular, I drank it all in like a person starved for sustenance. I immersed myself in the spiritual cornucopia, dancing with the Sufis and chanting with the Tibetans. I'd spend weeks at a time on silent retreats, gratefully sitting with gifted teachers such as Ram Dass and Stephen and Ondrea Levine.

But the times, they are a-changing. Rajneesh was deported under sketchy circumstances. Ram Dass had a catastrophic stroke in 1997.The Levines also became ill, and they can no longer travel. Berkeley's younger generation is laser-focused on their iPhones, not on salvation.

But what's most worrisome is not merely the indifference toward spirituality. If people choose to be atheists or agnostics, that's their right. But people out here aren't just making a personal and private decision. They are rabidly and vocally anti-God.

This antipathy is front and center in some unlikely places. There's increasing animosity towards 12-step programs because they're rooted in Christian theology. But the rebellion is not just from without, but also from within. In some AA meetings, members use their check-in time to lambaste Judaism and Christianity.

Consequently, Berkeley Christians share their religion in whispered tones. A person who has an appetite for worship may remain hungry for fear of ridicule. While it's perfectly acceptable in Berkeley to live openly as a bisexual, transgendered, or crossdresser, don't dare divulge a love for God. If you do so, expect public disapproval, even contempt.

And yet, why don't residents see the obvious: that's there's a connection between abandoning God and the un-Godliness of Berkeley's streets? The streets are filthy and uncivil; the crime rate spirals out of control. Because if God and His followers are chased out of town, what is left?

The radicals would argue that without a pesky, oppressive God, people are liberated. With no repressive authority spoiling the fun, the world becomes idyllic.

But when you obscure the sunshine, only darkness remains. Seal the windows, close the blinds, and what do you have? People alone in a pitch-black world, with nothing to shield or soothe them.

And the estrangement is palpable not just in Berkeley, although the alienated are concentrated here. The militant atheists are saturating the media, the schools, the entire culture with its witch's brew. The Left, as always, is at the helm. Obama covers up crosses at Notre Dame University; he deletes the Creator from the Declaration.

Obama and the Left want our country untethered from the steadfast grip of God. Spiritually impoverished, lost in space, the masses will cling to the teat of the government. Bereft of the Divine, they're shackled to the Gospel of Obama.

There are inevitable, and disastrous, consequences for slamming the door on God.

See for yourself. Come walk the streets of Berkeley, or the nearby cities: San Francisco, Oakland, or Richmond. Look deeply into people's eyes and behold the anger, the desperation...or see nothing at all.

Because when a city, or a nation, buries God, what is left is an excruciating, unfathomable void. And in the ever-widening chasm, dark forces -- the evil squatters -- take up residency

Easter Interview: Sunday Tea with Miss Mary M.

Via-The Patriot Post


By Paul Greenberg

"The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away. ... Then she runneth and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him....

"And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou hast borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master."

--From the Gospel according to John

I've become an old woman now, and it all makes a kind of sense to me, the way a joke does when it finally dawns on you, and you have to laugh out loud. Of course! Everything falls into its absurd, magnificent place in a blinding flash, like fireworks exploding out of the pitch-black sky, sending pattern after pattern high above and all around, ever closer and closer, and you're a child again in the arms of your father, and you've never seen anything so beautiful or overwhelming.

What a solemn little fool I was, don't you know? I was expecting the worst, of course. As we all were, I suppose. Oh, we of little faith! Or else we wouldn't have believed the worst when actually the best was at hand. The worst, we are always prepared to believe. The best takes faith.

Some more tea, dear? Yes, it is good. Orange pekoe, I think they call it, delicate but with sweet undertones, it says on the box, whatever that means. I myself have no idea. But I used to believe that sort of thing -- that one could go by the label, by outward things.

That's why I'd read the script so wrong that first Easter. I was all set to see a tragedy, you see, and instead it turned out to be a comedy, the grandest and most glorious of comedies, complete with the happiest of endings.

That's the way it was with me, anyway, that Sunday morning. The emptiness of it, the hopelessness of it, I understood. I'd been prepared for it by the kind of life I'd led. I knew what men are like, what life is like, and that neither ends well. I'd swallowed every cliché: Don't get your hopes up, promises are made to be broken, never give a sucker an even break ... and all the rest.

I was perfectly prepared for how Good Friday would be, but Easter Sunday? That was quite beyond me at the time, my dear. How could I have understood? You might as well have tried to describe sight to the blind, music to the deaf, belief to a cynic. My reality was limited to the evidence of things seen, the substance of things feared.

The empty tomb should have been proof of hope; I saw it only as cause for despair. We see what we train ourselves to see.

So when I saw the gardener -- who else could he be? -- I wept and wailed and pleaded. I wanted to wallow in my grief; that was one thing I thought no one could take from me. My dear, I held on to it like a treasure.

Then I heard my name. How puzzling: How could the gardener have known me? That's when I turned. And I realized who had spoken to me, who The Gardener was, and the whole, fake world was gone, the curtain lifted, the night shattered forever as the sun rose that first Easter morning. He had risen.

Funny how all you need is to be called by your right name and turn. You have to turn, you know. So you can really see. Only then does everything fall into place.

Surely you've felt that way when you've been in love, wanting only to serve the other, asking for nothing else, knowing it to be the purest happiness. This was like that, only forever.

More tea, dear? No? Perhaps something stronger? I'd join you in a sherry, but I don't need it. I've been intoxicated with life and love ever since that moment when it hit me. The gardener! My dear, I had no idea.



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