Mighty Things Through Faith

Written by Dr. Bill Bright

“And so [Jesus] did only a few great miracles there, because of their unbelief.” Matthew 13:58

It was my first visit to Nazareth, and through a series of fortuitous circumstances, I found myself enjoying lunch with one of the city’s prominent leaders. As we talked together in the crowded dining room our conversation turned to Jesus Christ, and ultimately this gentleman bowed his head and began to pray aloud, inviting Christ to be his Savior and Lord.

The change seemed to be immediate and dramatic, and follow – up has proven that God did meet him and change his life. During the course of our conversation, he indicated that what I had shared with him was a new truth. Though he was religious and active in his church, he never had been told that he should receive Christ.

Ray Comfort Recruits Team of Christians to Answer Atheists on Facebook

Evangelist and author Ray Comfort could 

use a hand in handling all the comments 

and questions he receives on Facebook.

The Christian Post reported that evangelist and author Ray Comfort could use a hand in handling all the comments and questions he receives from atheists on Facebook, so he's recruited a team of 

Christians to join the conversation. Comfort says his controversial posts can at times receive more than 1,000 comments, and one of his posts was seen by more than a million people, many of them nonbelievers.

"It suddenly dawned on me how Facebook is an incredible medium for the gospel ... think of what it would cost and how much work it would take to have a Billy Graham-type crusade that reached 1.2 million people. But we can reach that many at no cost and with just a click of a keyboard button."

Does Athiesm Require Faith?

"The fool has said in his heart that there is no God." - Psalm 14:1

One day, someone caught the comedian W.C. Fields reading the Bible and asked what he was doing. His reply was "just looking for loopholes."* There are a lot of people who read with the same intention of disregarding any evidence.

There are only three options to explain our existence, one is to believe in God, another is agnosticism which states there may be a God but I haven't found proof. The last is atheism where one will state they know God does not exist. Atheism is not just a non-belief in God but a willful denial of his existence. Agnosticism is where one admits that they do not know if God exists.

Relax, Parents: There's No Need to Put the Christ in Christmas

By Amanda Marcotte

The Rockettes don't flash their legs to celebrate the Virgin Birth.

Photo by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images

In our age of neurotic parenting, it should come as no surprise that irreligious parents might succumb some to the evidence-free claims of many that children must be raised in a faith tradition in order to achieve some ill-defined "values". Andrew Park at Salon has a piece up about his attempts to inject a little religion into the holiday festivities. (By "religion", he of course means "Christianity", because as concerned as he is about exposing his children to faith traditions, he isn't concerned enough to start fasting for Ramadan and teaching his children about the prophet Mohammed.) 

As Long as the Candle Burns

“Then ten of Joseph’s brothers went down to buy grain from Egypt.” — Genesis 42:3

This Torah portion for this week, Mikeitz, is from Genesis 41:1–44:17 and 1 Kings 3:1–4:1.

By the time Jacob’s sons go down to Egypt because of the famine in Canaan, Joseph has been gone for 22 years. So the Sages find it strange that in the Scriptures, the ten brothers are referred to as “Joseph’s brothers.” They haven’t had anything to do with Joseph for over two decades and they certainly hadn’t acted much like brothers the last time they saw Joseph! Wouldn’t "Jacob’s sons" have been a more appropriate term?

The Sages explain that they are called “Joseph’s brothers” in order to teach us that when they came down to Egypt, they were indeed behaving like family. They had long regretted their act of selling Joseph and were desperate to find him. But that leads to another question: Why would they even imagine that Joseph would still be alive? The life expectancy for slaves in Egypt wasn’t very long!

Jamie Foxx Blasphemes, Calls Obama Lord and Savior

11/27/2012 RAY RISER

 

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Jamie Foxx (Facebook)

Respect for Barack Obama as the president of the United States is one thing. Worshipping him as a deity is quite another.

Comedian Jamie Foxx is beginning to draw fire for his idolizing comments about the commander-in-chief during the recent Soul Train Music Awards in Las Vegas. During the broadcast, aired last Sunday on BET, Foxx urged the audience to “give an honor to God—and our Lord and savior, Barack Obama.”

The statement received a rousing ovation from the audience, and another when Foxx repeated Obama’s name.

Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who has been an outspoken critic of the president’s liberalism, said in a statement Monday that Foxx’s “epiphany is startling.

Survey finds record 19 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans

Posted on 21 July 2012

(RNS) Unbelief is on the uptick. People who check “None” for their religious affiliation are now nearly one in five Americans (19 percent), the highest ever documented, according to the Pew Center for the People and the Press.

The rapid rise of Nones — including atheists, agnostics and those who say they believe “nothing in particular” — defies the usually glacial rate of change in spiritual identity.

Barry Kosmin, co-author of three American Religious Identification Surveys, theorizes why None has become the “default category.” He says, ”Young people are resistant to the authority of institutional religion, older people are turned off by the politicization of religion, and people are simply less into theology than ever before.”

Kosmin’s surveys were the first to brand the Nones in 1990 when they were 6 percent of U.S. adults. By the 2008 survey, Nones were up to 15 percent. By 2010, another survey, the biannual General Social Survey, bumped the number to 18 percent.

Poll: Nearly 80 percent of Americans are Christian

As Christmas nears, more than three-quarters of Americans identify themselves as Christian, Gallup reports.

Pollsters found that 78 percent of Americans identify with Christianity.

Overall, more than 82 percent of Americans have a religious identity, with this breakdown:

— Protestant/other Christian: 52.5 percent

— Catholic: 23.6 percent

— Mormon: 1.9 percent

— Jewish: 1.6 percent

— Muslim: 0.5 percent

— Other non-Christian religion: 2.4 percent

— None/atheist/agnostic: 15 percent

— No response: 2.5 percent

The findings fit the trend of an increasing percentage of Americans who do not embrace a formal religious identity. In 1951, 1 percent of Americans did not have a religious identity, compared to 24 percent identifying as Catholic and 68 percent claiming a non-Catholic Christian faith.

Where's God When It Hurts?

This question has probably created more atheists than any other question. Worse, the seething anger that sometimes lies behind it has probably created more insane people than any other. And justly so. While faith in God doesn't logically stand or fall just on this matter, it hinges on it more than any other so far as our experience of the life of faith is concerned.

If that offends some of you, well, tough. True, we have no right at all to expect or demand a suffering-free state of false bliss that would leave each and all of us as bored dilettants living a sterile and stupid life. That is, if you can call something 'life' which has no challenges, no repentances, no learning, no growing, all of which only come through trial, error, taking part, success, pain, loss, and suffering. (We can safely ignore the many fools who think that way.) But does there have to be the kind of suffering that some people go through?

Suffering of apparently unquenchable pain, immeasurable loss, utter hopelessness, total abandonment? Suffering that will end in a slow death, like lung cancer? The very fact that there is such suffering gives good cause to doubt not only the value of the whole human race, but also the existence of any God that can be said to care in the slightest for what's been created, any God who has power over all things, any God who is anything other than a horrible brute who finds sadistic whimsical joy in squeezing every last drop of suffering out of those who've been created. It would seem to rule out anything even vaguely resembling the God that Christians speak of -- and rule in a God who deserves our utter hatred not our worship.

Except for one thing ........

.... except that God knows this is true, and set out to do something about it. Not by overriding the freedom God had put into nature and into creatures, especially the human ones. Not by working instant repairs on the universe so that all is blissfully well (that would be a jerk-God, a more powerful version of the fools I wrote off earlier), or by pulling a string here or there from a distance. But by choosing to fully take part in what is happening. The choice : soiled ancient diapers, skinned childhood knees, and dirtied adult feet. 

God felt what acceptance and rejection are like at a human level. God walked among people in the same way they walk among each other, talk to them at their level, with their sufferings small and large, face to face, person to person. God taught them in their language, with sound waves instead of spiritual whispers, from within their tradition, from within the world they knew, a world teeming with truth smothered in their own lies. But even more : God had to face the ultimate in human rejection -- to be publicly executed for having spoken and lived the truth. 

That's something not even God wanted to go through, but the whole point of it all was to go through things that no one wants to go through, if that's what it takes to complete the task at hand, for real. (In fact, that's what 'for real' is all about.)

Every Christmas, Christians celebrate (or are supposed to celebrate) this choice. Every Good Friday, Christians mourn (or are supposed to mourn) how far it had to go. Every Easter, Christians revel in the empty tomb, the risen and present Lord of all, whose love meant that death could not be -- must not be -- the final answer.

Jesus was that choice. Jesus is the divine answer to suffering. Jesus is the answer a Christian has to the problem of suffering. Jesus knows. Jesus cares. And Jesus is suffering alongside each one who suffers, ever more so as the suffering increases. The 'why' of suffering is a mystery; you'll never know the reason why, or even if there is a reason. The reply of God is no mystery, or at least, no more mysterious than love itself.

"You need not cry very loud; God is nearer to us than we think." ------ Brother Lawrence

But He's Not Here Anymore ...

Yet Jesus is not the Christian's answer to suffering by Himself. The phrase that the New Testament used for describing the fellowship of Christ's followers is "the Body of Christ". There are many angles to this, angles which are marital, sexual, medical, and so on. But let's use a biological angle, one that the apostle Paul used: Jesus is the head of the Body. That, of course, means that Jesus is not the arms, legs, hands, and such. That is what the believers are. As Paul saw it, they are a unit, a whole, just as a human body is a whole, yet each believer is an identifiable part with a function in the overall Body.

Jesus is no longer physically here. His role as head is signaled to the Body through the Spirit, the nerve impulses that cause the Body to work. Jesus can no longer hold the hand of the sufferer, wrap His arms around them, and give the comfort of a physical embrace. He can no longer move His legs to where the sufferers are, so that He can physically address them face to face, look them in the eyes, grasp hold of their needs, render through sound waves the needed words of comfort or challenge, lay hands to bring physical healing. That role is to be done by the Body of Christ in the physical world -- that is, by the believers, as a whole, in subgroups and organizations, and as people.

If you want to see a key part of God's answer to suffering, look into a mirror. If what you're looking at isn't much of an answer to anyone's suffering, then pray that the Spirit's signals start directing you.

gotquestions  http://www.spirithome.com/suffering.html

My sister is making me go to church, help please?

• Posted by Seth Hunter peterson on January 13, 2012 at 10:00pm
• View Blog

My 20 year old sister is forcing me a 16 year old, to go to church because I am an Atheist (well humanist),and she claims she knows more on the subject than me. Her words on Christopher Hitchens were "He was just mad at God because he had cancer" and Carl Sagan "Devil Worshiper" I did not mention Richard Dawkins because she might have said something more ignorant....But she is making me go to "find all the answers and restore my faith in God". Do I go? Do I absolutely refuse? (Tried that actually resulted in "your a minor you have no choice"), or Do I "forget" and sleep in? Either way, I need advice also, if she makes me go, do I stand up and point out all the fallacies or do I just sit there and ignore every ignorant word? Edit: and NOW she wants to make me join a Youth Group! Dear Flying Spaghetti monster please guide me with your noodly appendage through this train wreck of crap my sister is making me do!

http://www.thinkatheist.com/profiles/blogs/my-sister-is-making-me-go-to-church-help-please 

FLORIDA ATHEISTS SCRUB AWAY HIGHWAY BLESSING WITH ‘UNHOLY WATER’ BECAUSE THEY‘RE NOT GOING TO TOLERATE ’BIGOTRY’

Christopher Santarelli

The latest fight between atheists and religious groups leaves one asking who really crossed the line.

Polk County, Florida, sits smack in the middle of the Sunshine State containing several highways drivers travel through to make their way between major cities in the state. Last year, area religious leaders formed a group, Polk Under Prayer (PUP), that decided to bless the Pasco-Polk county line along Highway 98. PUP’s director said the act was done so that “God would protect us from evildoers, mainly the drug crowd, that they would be dissuaded to come in to the county.”

This gesture has apparently offended area atheists deeply enough that they felt the need to organize an event Saturday to symbolically scrub away the holy oils used by PUP to bless the county line. Bay News 9 reports that the atheists, organized by Humanists of Florida, used “unholy water” to remove the blessing and wash the road because it made them feel uncomfortable:

“But Humanists of Florida members don’t see it that way. They say it makes them feel unwelcome.

‘It sends a very bad signal to everyone in Polk County, and (anyone) who travels through Polk county who doesn’t happen to be Christian,’ Palmer said, ‘This event is not about atheist rights; this is about welcoming everybody into Polk county.’

So they took their ‘unholy water’ and washed the road.

It’s been an ongoing feud between the groups in the county: the atheists are also unhappy with prayer bricks PUP members buried along I-4 and various other roadway leading in to the county, engraved with Psalm 37.

‘For the wicked shall be destroyed, but those who trust the Lord shall be given every blessing,’ Geringswald (PUP director) said, reading the psalm from his Bible.

Geringswald said PUP is trying to do something positive – to keep crime out and encourage faith. He says they also plan to run TV ads later this year that will say they are trying to send a positive message about criminals turning their lives around.

The humanists say they don’t plan on stopping their protests any time soon.”

Ellen Beth Wachs, the president of Humanists of Florida Association and Atheists of Florida, further explained to ABC News the motivation of the eight atheists who scrubbed Saturday:

“’This anointment ritual was to call out the angels to check each car that entered the county, to make sure they were Christian, and if they weren’t Christian, they would either follow Christian beliefs or get put in jail,’ Wachs told ABC News.

Wachs said the eight members of the Humanists of Florida Association who brought buckets of water to the roadway today did so in jest.

‘They understand that a year later, there’s no oil left on the roadway. It’s just a symbolic gesture to show that we can poke a little bit of fun at the Polk Under Prayer gesture. We’re not going to tolerate their bigotry,’ Wachs said.”

Atheist groups have found themselves in national headlines of late for campaigns against those with religious believes that raise the question of which side is really intolerant. American Atheists carried out a multi-state campaign around the holiday season last December, posting billboards on major highways that associated Jesus Christ, Santa Claus and the Devil, to myths. The same group filed a lawsuit last summer to stop a steel cross found at Ground Zero from being displayed at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. ABC News reports on the latest clash between atheists and religious groups in Florida:

(H/T: Fox News)