How are Christians treated in Egypt?

The double-standard that allows for no minority religious rights in much of the Middle East is beyond belief. In fact, it's a tenet of Islam that non-Muslims should have second-class "dhimmi" status. Watch this video to see the plight of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the recipient of billions of dollars in U. S. aid.

Can you shake the hand of a Jew?

I received this commentary from Glory of Zion:

"So they served him [Joseph] by himself, and them by themselves, and the Egyptians who ate with him by themselves, because the Egyptians could not eat bread with the Hebrews, for that is an abomination to the Egyptians" (Genesis 43:32; emphases ours).

The verse above was included in the Torah Reading for this week, and released in us a corresponding note to a bizarre happening at the recent "Annapolis" conference. Referring to her childhood as an African American girl in the segregated American South, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was quoted as saying, "I know what it is like to hear that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are a Palestinian. I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness." Yet at the conference, bowing to Saudi demands, the Americans refused to allow the Israeli delegation to enter the hall through the same door as the Arabs. The Israeli Foreign Secretary Tzipi Livni was reportedly required by Rice to instead enter the conference hall through the service entrance. At a meeting of foreign ministers, Livni was driven to explain, "Why doesn't anyone want to shake my hand? Why doesn't anyone want to be seen speaking to me?" This at a conference to which Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries had been invited for "contributions" they might have towards furthering peace between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

In fairness, I'm aware from other reports that Ms. Rice also drew parallels between her childhood sense of terror and the Israelis' fears of terrorism, but why should the U. S. government bend over backwards to legitimize the hatred of Jews?

Atheists in Vernon

From Channel 8:

A sign posted by Atheists in the Rockville's Central Park has people talking, prompting calls to the town hall and the local clergy.

The Connecticut Valley Atheists posted the three-sided sign, which some call a billboard, and it was the only sign in the town center marking the Holiday season. Two sides of the display feature the Twin Towers, framed by the words "Imagine No Religion."

Yawn. What is interesting here is the equation of all religions here, as if religion in the abstract, or the religious impulse in human beings knocked down the Twin Towers. What atheists and others of a liberal bent are afraid to do is point out that the impulse of some religionists is to kill all who disagree with them, and intimidate others from speaking. That religion is not Christianity.

National Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church this Sunday

Come Brother Andrew speak this Sunday at 7:00 pm at Wintonbury Baptist Church in Bloomfield about secret believers on the National Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church.

Brother Andrew is the founder of Open Doors International and author of the international best-seller, God's Smuggler.

This event is free of charge.

The rise of Asian Christianity

Section of the Great Wall of China

As the risk of generalizing, it will come as no great revelation to anyone who has spent much time with Asian Christians that they are people of prayer and passion for souls. So it's not surprising to see so much in the news lately about the rise of Asian Christianity, including its missionary thrust. Part of this is due of course to the hostage situation in Afghanistan, but this has really only spotlighted the trend in Korean and other Asian missions work for a wider audience.

This week's National Catholic Reporter featured a column called The uphill journey of Catholicism in China, which discussed the massive growth of Pentecostal and Charismatic groups in China, while noting the relative lack of success of Roman Catholics here.

Perhaps the most remarkable burst of religious energy is in China's Pentecostal Christian population. At the time of the Communist takeover in 1949, there were roughly 900,000 Protestants. Today, the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, which puts out the much-consulted World Christian Database, says there are 111 million Christians in China, roughly 90 percent Protestant and mostly Pentecostal. That would make China the third-largest Christian country on earth, following only the United States and Brazil.

The Center projects that by 2050, there will be 218 million Christians in China, 16 percent of the population, enough to make China the world's second-largest Christian nation. According to the Center, there are 10,000 conversions in China every day.

Religious data is notoriously imprecise in an officially atheistic state, and not everyone accepts these eye-popping estimates. In the 2006 update of his book Jesus in Beijing, former Time Beijing bureau chief David Aikman put the number of Protestants at 70 million. Richard Madsen, a former Maryknoll missionary and author of China's Catholics, told me he would put the number still lower, at 40 million. That's in line with the CIA World Factbook, another widely consulted resource.

Various reasons are suggested for the relatively slow growth of Catholicism, but the writer, reporter John L. Allen, Jr., suggests the answer lies in the Pentecostals' expectation of the miraculous.

How would a "Christianized" China affect the region - and the world? Allen says,

By universal consensus, China is an emerging global superpower. Its economy grew at an average annual rate of 9.4 percent over the last 25 years, and today has a GDP of $11 trillion, making it the second-largest economy in the world after the United States. Foreign companies have poured more than $600 billion into China since 1978, far eclipsing what the United States spent rebuilding post-war Europe in the Marshall Plan. China now has a middle class of 200 million people, 80 million of whom are quite well-off. The country exports more in a single day than it did in all of 1978.

How things shake out religiously, therefore, is of tremendous strategic importance, even for people who don't feel any particular spiritual stake in the result. If Christianity ends up at around 20 percent of the population, for example, China could become an exponentially larger version of South Korea (where Christians are between 25-50 percent of the population, depending upon which count one accepts) -- a more democratic, rule-oriented, basically pro-Western society. On the other hand, if dynamic Muslim movements create an Islamic enclave in the western half of the country, with financial and ideological ties to fundamentalist Wahhabi forms of Islam in Saudi Arabia, at least that part of China could become a wealthier and more influential Afghanistan. If growing religious pluralism in China becomes fractious, it could mean that a well-armed and wealthy superpower is destabilized by internal conflict, posing risks to global peace and security.

Asia Times columnist Spengler discusses Allen's article in a piece entitled Christianity Finds a Fulcrum in Asia, exploring both the religious and geopolitical aspects:

Where traditional society remains entrenched in China's most backward regions, Islam also is expanding. At the edge of the Gobi Desert and on China's western border with Central Asia, Islam claims perhaps 30 million adherents. If Christianity is the liquidator of traditional society, I have argued in the past, Islam is its defender against the encroachments of leveling imperial expansion. But Islam in China remains the religion of the economic losers, whose geographic remoteness isolates them from the economic transformation on the coasts. Christianity, by contrast, has burgeoned among the new middle class in China's cities, where the greatest wealth and productivity are concentrated. Islam has a thousand-year presence in China and has grown by natural increase rather than conversion; evangelical Protestantism had almost no adherents in China a generation ago.

Read more here.

Photo by Michael Mooney, some rights reserved.

Cal Thomas defends anti-islamist comments

This is different from making anti-Islamic comments. I hope we can make the distinction. Please pray for the gathering of Muslims in Hartford this weekend.

Can you be both a Muslim and a Christian?

No, of course not.

But a Seattle Episcopal priest, the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding, is now claiming to be both.

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost demolishes this sort of nonsense by reminding us:

While she rejects such orthodox Christian beliefs as the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, she believes that Jesus died on the cross and was resurrected. This belief is, as she readily admits, in conflict with the teachings of the Quran. When it is pointed out that she has violated the law of non-contradiction, Redding responds, "That's something I'll find a challenge the rest of my life."

Of course there is no "challenge" in reconciling the two views since they are completely incompatible. The matter is not one of challenge but of impossibility. The law of non-contradiction is non-negotiable. Just because one wants to feel that the two religions are ultimately compatible does not make them so.

It would be easy to dismiss Redding's unsophisticated beliefs as the confusions of a rather dim dhimmi. But this Episcopalian Muslim is representative of the muddled understanding of pluralism that pervades American culture....

Truth is incompatible with non-truth, which is why we must reject all self-contradictory claims made by others and root them out of our own belief systems. In rejecting contradictory thinking we accept an uncomfortable truth: true tolerance sometimes requires being intolerant of willful stupidity.

This is exactly so. When will people drop the pretense of calling themselves Christians when they refuse to acknowledge the core doctrines of the faith - and most especially who Jesus is?

Bristol native under police guard in Turkey

Please pray for this brother, a Bristol, Conn. native and Christian worker, as he and his family attempt to move out of the nation of Turkey for their own safety. In the wake of anti-Christian persecution and murders, all Christians in the Middle East need our support and prayers.

Have those intolerant Christians finally met their match?

There are few people more frightening in our society than the intolerant Christians. As we all know, Christians (especially those benighted souls who actually read and believe the Bible) are a font of all sorts of societal ills. Their intolerant and bigoted ways have oppressed millions of freedom-seekers throughout the centuries. And if we're not careful, their insistence on biblical morality could bring our society back to those dark days of a couple of years ago, before there were even civil unions.

Is there any force more destructive to personal rights than these Christians?

I hate to scare our readership, but apparently our media has learned that there are other religions in the world capable of inflicting harm on people - and they do it using their religion as justification!

One particular religion has been making news in some country called Malaysia, where a woman who had converted to Christianity (?) could not have this decision legally recognized by the government. Leaving aside for the moment the question of why a country would even require that a person's religion be legally recognized, this seems rather intolerant. Even Time magazine seemed a bit troubled by this.

It also seems from the news that people who follow this other religion have special cities where no one other than believers is allowed to go under pain of arrest. (Not even Jerry Falwell could have pulled that one off!)

I'm a little confused because I would expect our media and our leaders to be alarmed at this kind of intolerance. They are probably just too busy worrying about the intolerant Christians and will probably tackle this other group later. Hopefully this other group doesn't have any harmful intentions towards Western countries.

First the Christians and now these people, whoever they are.

What's the world coming to?

What's in a headline?

As I was scanning the news this morning, I noticed this irony: right after the headline which said, "Falwell's Death Draws Mixed Editorials" was another one stating, "Gay Episcopal bishop to enter civil union with partner."

While Evangelicals would say that Jerry Falwell's church and university ministries have done much to advance the Kingdom of God, it's clear that his societal mission was a failure. When I was a younger man and there was a lot of noise about the Moral Majority, no one could have imagined that 25 years later there would be "gay weddings." (Not to mention gay bishops.)

Even our recent pro-life and pro-family victories (for which, lest I be misunderstood, we give thanks) are not victories in the true sense - they were holding actions in which some holes in the dike have been plugged.

Although there are hopeful signs in many places, for the most part the moral tide is still working against traditional Christian morality. Within the past one or two years a new and vociferous atheism has taken the field. Other powerful opponents such as militant Islam are vying for supremacy through political intimidation and skillful use of the language of rights and discrimination.

Let's continue to work and pray for the salvation of men and women and the transformation of society. I'm hopeful because I believe Christians have seen the limits of what political action per se can do in our nation.