A Chicago judge will decide this month whether a city code prevents protesters who oppose Scientology's teachings from expressing their discontent any time the church's doors are open or only during its conventional Sunday worship service.

Jennifer Hoyle, a spokeswoman for the city's law department, said that in preparation for the hearing, the city is examining the factors that led to the citation as well as the wording and intent of the ordinance.

Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ReligionNewsBlog/~3/nHbsJlf-FkA/opponents-fight-to-protest-outside-church-of-scientology

A woman was charged with child neglect Tuesday in connection with the death of her 9-year-old son, for whom she had not sought medical attention because of her religious beliefs, court records state.

Susan Grady told Detective Mikka Mooney that she is a member of the Church of the First Born and “believes in faith-based healing through prayer,” according to the affidavit.

Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ReligionNewsBlog/~3/CndYU8P5El8/woman-who-relied-on-faith-healing-charged-with-neglect-after-son-dies

A group of men arrested in Denmark on Wednesday were about to mount a “Mumbai style” attack on the Danish newspaper that ignited Muslim fury around the world by publishing satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005, the head of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service said.

The men had been under surveillance for months, and were among 200 radicals identified in a recent Swedish intelligence report, according to intelligence sources in Scandinavia.

Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ReligionNewsBlog/~3/ZRLoSH0qEok/police-arrest-5-muslims-in-danish-terror-plot

A judge in San Angelo, Texas, on Wednesday entered pleas of not guilty on behalf of polygamous sect leader Warren Jeffs, who is scheduled to go on trial next month on bigamy and sexual assault charges.

Jeffs, 55, leads the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, also known as the FLDS. The charges stem from an alleged spiritual marriage to a 12-year-old girl.

Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ReligionNewsBlog/~3/M0yN_wixA8A/polygamist-leader-warren-jeffs-pleads-not-guilty-in-texas

One of the two main political parties of the indigenous people in Bangladesh’s southeastern hill tracts prevented Christians from celebrating Christmas, sources said.

The United People’s Democratic Front (UPDF), which has demanded that Christian converts return to Buddhism, threatened tribal Christians of at least seven churches in Khagrachari district, some 300 kilometers (180 miles) southeast of the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka.

Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ReligionNewsBlog/~3/sbpEGrIFrM4/rebel-group-in-bangladesh-prevented-christmas-worship

Americans are increasingly drifting away from the religious beliefs they grew up with: 15 percent of the U.S. population now claims no religion, up from 8 percent in 1990, according to the latest American Religious Identification Survey, released in 2008.

One religion website is tapping into this questioning with a new feature called Soul Secret, inspired by Frank Warren's popular PostSecret project, in which thousands of people across the country have mailed in their anonymous, briefly worded secrets on a decorated postcard. That project has spawned a book, a website and an art exhibit.

Soul Secret, part of the 18-month-old website www.Patheos.com, tells readers: "Sometimes our deepest convictions don't match what we have been taught to believe, and it's not always easy to share them with others. Here is your opportunity: Say what you really believe, and do so anonymously."

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Please click HERE to access the rest of this article. And have a look at their website, where you may be able to inject some of your own Urantian wisdom into the mix...

Read more: http://www.truthbook.com/blogs/dsp_viewBlogEntry.cfm?blogentryID=1417

Controversy over building plans for an Islamic community center and mosque near New York's ground zero ignited a national debate about religious freedom that kept the story in the news for months.

The story was recently voted the No. 1 religion story of 2010 in the annual Top 10 Religion News Stories of the Year poll for members of the Religion Newswriters Association, based in Columbia, Mo. The Islamic center's leading proponent, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, was voted the 2010 Religion Newsmaker of the Year.

As newsmaker of the year, Rauf beat out Pope Benedict XVI and Sarah Palin, who argued in her second best-selling book that candidates for office should take a public Christian stand.

Here are the Top 10 Religion Stories of 2010:

1. A proposal to build an Islamic center and mosque near ground zero leads to a national debate on religious freedom as the 9/11 anniversary approaches. Public opinion and outcry over the mosque reached a peak when a pastor of a small Florida church threatened to burn a Quran in protest, a bravado that fueled fears of international backlash against the United States until the pastor backed down.

2. The catastrophic earthquake in Haiti sparks international relief efforts from varied faith-based groups. Efforts from Idaho Southern Baptists lead to child-smuggling accusations, and leader Laura Silsby is imprisoned for four months.

3. Pope Benedict XVI is accused of delaying church action against pedophile priests in the U.S. and other countries while he led the Vatican office in charge of discipline from 1981 to 2005; several bishops resign.

4. The rise of the tea party movement. Mormon Glenn Beck pushes a Washington rally. Midterm election results are mixed. A tea party candidate who loses, Delaware candidate Christine O'Donnell, was pilloried for responding to critics with an ad that stated, "I am not a witch."

5. President Obama signs the health care reform bill for which many faith-based groups labored. Catholic bishops voice a strong opposition to the bill because of the belief that it provides funding for abortions.

6. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) votes for the fourth time to lift the ban on non-celibate gay clergy and succeeds. The Episcopal Church is asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury to take a lesser role in the Anglican Communion after a lesbian assistant bishop is ordained.

7. Churches and ministries continue to struggle during the economic slump: the Crystal Cathedral declares bankruptcy; the Lutheran publishing house, Augsburg Fortress, drops its pension plan; Focus on the Family cuts 110 employees; and the Seventh-day Adventist publishing arm removes top executives.

8. Several suicides are attributed to bullying of homosexual students, including a New Jersey college student whose roommate allegedly video taped him during a sexual encounter. Several religious voices take part in the “It Gets Better” YouTube video project to encourage gay youth not to succumb to depression or suicide.

9. The U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey released by the Pew Forum reveals that atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons are the most knowledgeable when it comes to general religion questions.

10. The U.S. Supreme Court convenes for the first time ever without a Protestant member (six Catholics and three Jews). The court hears arguments in the case of the Kansas church that loudly protests at the funerals of servicemen; the decision is expected in spring 2011.

-- Religion Newswriters Association

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Please go to "external source" to access this website, which has a few very interesting tidbits of religious news, past and present...

Read more: http://www.truthbook.com/blogs/dsp_viewBlogEntry.cfm?blogentryID=1415

LONDON – It’s been a better year for God. After withering literary assaults on the Almighty from the Oxford academic Richard Dawkins, the essayist Christopher Hitchens, and others, believers have hit back.

Best of all has been The Case for God by the brilliant religion writer Karen Armstrong. More important still is the news that more people (certainly in Britain) are going to Christian churches of all denominations. Moreover, the Pope made a very successful visit to Britain in September. We know already about heavy attendance at the country’s mosques.

At this time of year, of course, many Christians who are not regular churchgoers attend the Nativity services. Carols, church bells, and mangers are still at the heart of mid-winter festivities, alongside the consumer binge. This year, however, the “big spend” in Europe may have been inhibited by the big winter freeze and the big austerity programs across most of the continent.

Even in the most Godless households, most children in Western societies probably know the details of the Christmas story. The travelers who can find no room at the inn. The birth of a baby in the stables. The arrival of the wise men bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

We learn about all this at the same time as we are told about Father Christmas, his Lapland reindeers, and his sacks full of presents. We rapidly lose our belief in that winter myth. But we tend to retain into adulthood the same views of God that we formed in childhood. An old man with a long beard watches over us, and most of us retain a pretty literal opinion of the stories about his Son told in the Bible’s New Testament.

It is this God that atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens attack. And, with such a target, it is not very difficult to poke holes and pile on the ridicule. Leave aside the fact that you can make an even stronger case against Godlessness – remember the atrocities of atheist totalitarians in the twentieth century – and consider the assault on those whose commitment to literal interpretations of religious texts means that they deny science and reason. To them the world was made in six days; evolution is a fanciful tale.

Those of us who think that science and religion dwell in different domains, and who recall that Socrates argued that science did not teach you about morality or meaning, find that our case is undermined by the literalists and fundamentalists in every religion...

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A very thoughtful - and Urantian (whether he knows it or not) - take on the realities of religion in modern America. This is one worth reading...please click HERE to access the entire article.

How do we minister to this confused world? Visit www.Truthbook.com for some refreshment and inspiration... here is our page of Spiritual Studies...be grateful for the sanity that we find in The Urantia Book

Read more: http://www.truthbook.com/blogs/dsp_viewBlogEntry.cfm?blogentryID=1416

 

I have a confession to make.

One of my childhood heroes — right up there with “Little House” author Laura Ingalls Wilder, Celtic great Bill Russell and jazz pianist Dave Brubeck — was cartoonist Charles M. Schultz. I still cannot believe that Schultz died (February 12, 2000) only hours before his poignant farewell to his readers ran in American newspapers.

I remain an avid reader of the “Classic Peanuts” feature and, to tell you the truth, some of the strips remain so current that it seems like Schultz is still at work, taking the latest fads in pop psychology and weaving them into his dry punchlines.

This brings us, of course, to the annual broadcast of the “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” This cartoon classic remains one of the highlights of America’s mass-media holiday blitz, which makes me wonder why glass-tower Grinches at ABC elected to run it on Dec. 7th this year, instead of on the Sunday night before Christmas or, better yet, on Christmas Eve.

If you are interested in the fascinating story behind this classic, by all means check out the Washington Post feature that ran in Michael Cavna’s Comic Riffs weblog. I have been so busy the past few days (it’s exit week at the Washington Journalism Center) that I didn’t notice whether or not this story ran in the dead-tree-pulp Style section. I hope that it did.

Schultz was a Christian believer, but one whose faith evolved quite a bit as he aged. He was raised as a Lutheran and as an adult taught Sunday school (oh to be a fly on that classroom wall) in a United Methodist church. In his final decades, he simply called himself a “secular humanist,” but without actively denying his faith.

As you would expect, there is a religion angle in the Christmas special. It’s impossible to talk about Schultz’s life without mentioning his insistence that the always wise Linus van Pelt be allowed to recite Luke 2:8-14, from the King James Version of the Bible, in the script — forming the emotional peak of the show. Feel free to watch the attached YouTube video, if you have forgotten this scene.

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Please click through on "external source" (below) to access the entire article, which highlights the controversy that Schultz's video engendered.

From The Urantia Book:

"To you, Mary, I bring glad tidings when I announce that the conception within you is ordained by heaven, and that in due time you will become the mother of a son; you shall call him Joshua, and he shall inaugurate the kingdom of heaven on earth and among men." 122:3.1

Read more: http://www.truthbook.com/blogs/dsp_viewBlogEntry.cfm?blogentryID=1409

USA (MNN) ? A study published this week in the journal American Sociological Review hints that church is a social club after all.

Rather than satisfaction in an interpersonal relationship with God, the researchers think that the happy people they found in church congregations may be finding their fulfillment from closer ties to earthly neighbors.

The report said that personal happiness couldn't be attributed to individual prayer, strength of belief, or an understanding of God's love and presence. Instead, researchers found empirical survey data showing that the happier a person reported themselves to be, the more close friends they had in their religious congregations.

Evangelist Sammy Tippit summarized the findings from the article this way: "People who have 10 more friends in church are happier than people who have 10 or more friends in the secular world, but it doesn't have anything to do with God. "

He also notes that the researchers don't make a distinction between faith as a way of "being" and religion as a way of "acting." Or perhaps they made too clear a distinction and compartmentalized friendships from the ethos that governs the motivation behind how people live their values.   

Tippit says, "The people who have 10 or more close friends in church are the people who are the more involved, the people who have been walking with Christ the longest. The people who have the strongest faith are the ones who are the most involved. So how do you separate their faith from their friendships? "

It's more than the social ties that create this bond being explained by the report. "The tie that binds us is the Spirit that dwells within us. The study has taken some tangible things, made some great observations, and then drawn conclusions about the INtangible. They got out of the realm of science and into the realm of personal bias."

How does a believer explain that bond found in a church halfway across the world in sweet worship? How can you quantify a relationship created by instant closeness? The Gospel calls it Love, as in, "By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another."

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Please click on "external source" (below) for the complete article.

Perhaps the sense of society, friendship and belonging that one finds in a religious group is nothing more nor less than the experience of the Brotherhood of man. And contrary to what Mr Tippit has said in the above article, it really does have everything to do with God, in my opinion...

Please see our topical study on the Brotherhood HERE

Read more: http://www.truthbook.com/blogs/dsp_viewBlogEntry.cfm?blogentryID=1410