eChurch Blog

A seriously refreshing article from the Pajamas Media Blog, written by Adam Graham

Michael Moore has been bashing capitalism, its excesses, and its lack of concern for workers and their exploitation. A story that backs Moore up comes from a reliable source. It’s a story of naked capitalism ignoring the rights of workers and arbitration.

A farmer had some crops that needed to be harvested and he hired day laborers, agreeing to pay them $100 for working a 12-hour shift. The farmer was in a hurry to get his crops harvested, so he went out again two hours into the shift and hired more workers. He continued to look for laborers throughout the day, bringing in more laborers every hour. Finally, at seven o’clock, one hour before sunset, he brought in a dozen more workers to help finish the job.

He then lined the workers up to give them their pay and he paid first the workers who had only worked an hour. Those who stood, sweat dripping from their bodies from a 12-hour shift, smiled when they saw the one-hour hires get $100. They figured that meant they’d get paid extra. But to their horror, the farmer also paid them only $100.

They confronted the capitalist with the charges of favoritism and unjust discrimination. Rather than offering arbitration, the farmer responded, “I’m not doing you any wrong. Didn’t you agree to work for $100? Take your money and leave. I’ll pay the people who worked an hour the same as I paid you. Isn’t it lawful for me to do what I want with my own money?”

Who is this capitalist exploiter of workers who thinks he can pay people whatever he wants?

Most theologians will tell you this landowner represents none other than Christ himself. The names, currencies, and exact quotes have been changed, but the essence of the story Christ told in Matthew 20 hasn’t. It’s a helpful story to remember when Michael Moore is out telling us that capitalism is anti-Jesus.

Moore’s statement is one of two grave theological errors that liberals commonly make when recruiting religion to their cause. At best, he’s doing eisegesis, where, rather than trying to figure out what stance the Bible takes on an issue, the debater comes to the Bible with a point of view and then cherry-picks scripture to support that view, ripped from any context.

Thus, passages written to explain how individuals ought to govern their lives are taken to explain what government ought to make individuals do. Scriptures that explain how the church should take care of the poor are used to show how government ought to take care of the poor. Scriptures that show how the early church in Jerusalem entered into a voluntary association to share everything are used to explain why the government ought to force others to share. That Jesus warned of the danger of spiritual emptiness in reliance on riches is proof that the government ought to be able to play Robin Hood. Because Jesus told one specific rich young man that he should give all he had to the poor, redistribution of wealth should reign supreme.

However, most liberals don’t show any respect for the Bible in making the argument “what would Jesus redistribute?” Instead, two assumptions are made: 1) Jesus was a compassionate and reasonable person and 2) the positions of the left are compassionate and reasonable. Therefore, Jesus would agree with the left.

In the hands of such armchair theologians, Jesus is treated the same way fictional heroes such as Captain America and Superman are by the liberals who control the media. Captain America began his career as the most patriotic of heroes and ended it an uncertain liberal twit. Superman began as the paragon of virtue and was transformed into the type of guy who takes Lois Lane to the Fortress of Solitude for some hanky panky so nobody would feel challenged by a hero that was too virtuous for our age.

Jesus is no different to Moore and his ilk, just a figure who can be spun to fit the paradigm of the leftist elite. However, to achieve this end, Christianity must be deconstructed. The inconvenient words of the Christian scriptures must be ignored. The Old Testament must be ignored and it must be said that the apostle Paul was not inspired by God, but speaking out of turn when he said that those who refused to work should not eat. Vital aspects of the Christian faith such as salvation and the resurrection are de-emphasized in favor of social programs.

The result of this tinkering is a meaningless, irrelevant Christianity where faith is put not in the power of God, but the power of the state to force us to do the right thing or else. Thus, the liberal’s Jesus is not Holy God who came down to save man, but a nice guy who said some good things in hopes that we would realize our need for a powerful state to give us national health care.

If Jesus is merely a Superman the left can spin as a Middle Eastern Oprah with a beard, who cares if capitalism is anti-Jesus? I might as well declare capitalism anti-Babe Ruth and reconstruct the Bambino as someone who, given the poor circumstances of his birth, would reject capitalism. As the mass exodus from liberal churches shows, few care what an irrelevant Jesus recreated in the image of the modern man has to say. It doesn’t matter to most that a centurion standing at the death of this fictional Jesus would say, “Surely, this man was a nice guy with a small carbon footprint.”

The reason Moore and friends rarely cite the full body of scripture is that, read in context, there’s no justification for a socialist interpretation of the text. In Romans 13, Paul describes the function of government as “being a terror to evildoers” and warns that the state doesn’t bear the sword in vain. He never talks about the state as a provider.

In the most misunderstood passage of scripture, where the church had all things in common, a man sold his property but held back a portion of the funds. Note he was not condemned for holding back the funds, but for lying about how much he sold it for and pretending to have given it all. The apostle Peter declared, “While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal?” (Acts 5)

The Old Testament is even more interesting because, according to scripture, God established the framework for a national government in ancient Israel. God could have invented socialism and called for the forced redistribution of wealth. He could have created a state that would meet the needs of all Israel. Instead, the Pentateuch creates no central state and charges village elders with enforcing the Biblical law, which required moral behavior and justice. The Bible did call for the people to give a tenth of all their increase to God; however, God never gave anyone the power to enforce it.

The only central government God ever had was the intermittent presence of judges, who would help deliver the nation from their enemies and then serve as a judge until their death. The people decided they wanted a king like all the other nations. Or as the liberals would have said, “No other nation in the industrialized world doesn’t have a king.”

God agreed to grant their request, but ordered Samuel to warn the people what a king would mean. 1 Samuel 8:17 sums up the point of the speech well: “You shall be his slaves.” And the Bible records king after king proving God right through their foolish, petty, and oftentimes evil and murderous reigns.

The Bible is clear about the folly of living a life focused solely on acquiring riches and the spiritual emptiness that results. However, it is also clear on the dangerous folly of looking to the state as a messiah. Those who seek to create an anti-capitalist, pro-statist Christianity imagine one error can be corrected by practicing another vigorously.

Adam Graham is a contributor at Race42012.com and host of the Truth and Hope Report podcast. His personal site is Adam’s Blog.

Previous related posts:-

Whose authority? – Decisions on sex education and crucifixes in classrooms are highly illiberal intrusions into our lives and those of our children

The recent decision by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) condemning the display of crucifixes in Italian public schools could result in the removal of all public displays of a Christian origin in all public buildings of Europe under the newly passed Lisbon Treaty, a British legal expert has warned.

The EU has barred crucifixes in Italian state schools. Are Nativity plays next?

Classroom crucifix violates human rights, European court rules

Media Education Headlines: Sex and drug lessons from age 5 & Sex education opt out is reduced

The head of the Greek Church, Archbishop Ieronymos is urging Christians across Europe to unite in an appeal against a ban on crucifixes in classrooms in Italy.

Will school nativity plays be banned by Europe?

The Catholic Herald by Neil Addison

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decision that crucifixes must be removed from Italian school rooms has been greeted with fury in Italy, but for the rest of us the question is whether the case has implications outside Italy. In my view it has extremely serious implications for Europe generally and for Britain in particular.

The judgment in the case has not yet been translated into English, but the ECHR has issued an English press release. The facts are that the applicant, Soile Lautsi, is a Finnish lady who is married to an Italian; they have two children who went to the local state school where, in accordance with Italian law, each classroom had a crucifix on the wall.

As many commentators have pointed out, this law dates from the time of Mussolini and the Lateran Treaty (cue for boo, hiss, references to Fascism etc); however, the law was confirmed by the Italian government as recently as 1984 and the validity of the Lateran Treaties was specifically referred to in Article 7 of the 1947 Italian constitution. That constitution in Articles 8 and 19 also guarantees freedom of religious belief and religious practice and the right not to have a religion, and so Mrs Lautsi and her children were not required to attend Catholic religious ceremonies and could withdraw from religious education classes. The sole thing they had to put up with was being taught in classrooms with a crucifix on the wall and that apparently was unacceptable to Mrs Lautsi.

According to the ECHR, she considered that having the crucifix in the classroom was “contrary to the principle of secularism by which she wished to bring up her children”.

When her application to have the crucifix removed was rejected by the school, she went to the Italian courts, which decided that the crucifix was not merely a symbol of Christianity but was also a “symbol of Italian history and culture, and consequently of Italian identity”. Mrs Lautsi then went to the ECHR claiming that the presence of the crucifix contravened Article 9 and Article 2 of the first protocol of the convention which protect freedom of religion and the right of parents to have their children educated “in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions”. Astonishingly, the ECHR agreed with her and decided that the mere presence of the crucifix constituted the “imposition” of a religious belief by the Italian state.

I say “astonishingly” because the ECHR decision goes against a basic principle of European human rights law known as the “margin of appreciation”, which is the element of discretion given to different countries on how to organise their educational systems. In its decision the ECHR said the state “was required to observe confessional neutrality in the context of public education”. In doing this it ignored the different historical and legal frameworks for education in different European countries and has in effect imposed on the whole of Europe the French concept of compulsory state secularism in education.

In addition, the ECHR has ignored its own previous case law regarding the “margin of appreciation” which it has used in the past to defend secularist policies pursued by governments. In the cases of Sahin vs Turkey and Dogru vs France, the ECHR upheld national laws which banned Muslim girls from wearing headscarves, Jews wearing yarmulkes, or Christians wearing crosses etc in school, even though the ECHR accepted that many European countries did allow these to be worn; it supported the right of each country to make its own decision.

For the ECHR it appears that the “margin of appreciation” only works in one direction, namely allowing governments freedom to ban religious symbols but not allowing them freedom to display religious symbols. This is an extraordinary leap from the original principles of Article 9, which is supposed to defend freedom of religion but is now being used to impose freedom from religion.

From the press release it is impossible to tell whether the ECHR judgment applies only to schools. As several press articles on the case have pointed out, the ECHR did not expressly order the school to remove its crucifix, but this is because it does not have the power to make such orders: what the ECHR does do is find a violation of the Convention and then the Italian government has to report back to the Council of Europe exactly what it proposes to do in order to implement the ruling. The Italian government plans to appeal, but if the appeal is not successful Italy will have to remove crucifixes from all schools and possibly from all other public buildings and so a distinctive part of Italian culture will have been brought to an end in order to satisfy the personal views of a foreigner and a foreign court.

The ECHR completely failed to even try to understand the points made about the importance of Christianity and Christian symbols in Italian history and culture, which proves how right Pope Benedict has been when he has talked about the failure of European institutions to recognise the importance of Christianity in the history and culture of Europe.

In Britain, because of Section 2 of the Human Rights Act, the ruling has immediate effect as a binding precedent in UK law and judgments such as this tend to have a large degree of “mission creep” as they are implemented by public authorities. Catholic and Anglican schools will probably be unaffected since the judgment refers to secular state schools but I suspect we will hear about Christmas decorations in schools being removed and nativity plays being banned by local authorities who will say they are acting in accordance with this ECHR ruling.

Whatever individuals may feel about the display of crucifixes, or indeed any other religious symbol, surely the decision to remove them or keep them should be made by democratic discussion and debate rather than by legal dictat. The ECHR decision in the Lautsi case is a complete perversion of the concept of human rights and subjects an entire country to the tyranny of the minority.

We will have to see whether the ECHR may overrule itself on an appeal but in the meantime as a (Muslim) colleague said to me regarding this case: “Human rights seem to be increasingly used to end human rights.”

Neil Addison is a barrister and director of the Thomas More Legal Centre

CBN News

JERUSALEM, Israel — Old testament prophets told of a day when Jews would return to Israel from the four corners of the earth. Some Jews are now returning from the world’s two most populous nations: China and India.

Recently, friends greeted seven Chinese Jewish men at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport. They flew from Beijing. Their journey marked the end of a nearly four-year bureaucratic struggle to get to Israel, but also marked the fulfillment of a biblical promise several thousand years old.

“We are witnessing the ingathering of the exiles from the four corners of the world. It’s taking place before our very eyes,” Michael Freund said.

Michael Freund of Shavei Israel — a group committed to bringing Jews back to Israel — says their arrival was prophetic.

“The prophet Zechariah in chapter 8 tells us that God promises that He will save His people from the East, from the countries of the East and from the countries of the West,” Freund said.

Home video of the Jewish community shows these men came from in Kaifeng, China. This community began more than 1,000 years ago when historians believe Jews from Persia or Iraq settled in China.

Freund says their ancestors once dreamed of going back to Israel. These men are fulfilling that dream, a dream shared by the several female Chinese Jews who immigrated four years ago.

“I still remember my grandma always read her Bible like Isaiah, I think 60 chapter says Hashem (God) will like the eagle bring His people come back. And always this Word and scripture came into my mind and I think it’s true,” Chinese immigrant Zhang Lan said.

The men themselves were joyful.

“Today, we most happy. We very, very so happy,” Chinese immigrant Xue Zei said.

But the Chinese Jews represent just one group returning to Israel.

A group of Jews coming from India three years ago represent members of the lost tribe of Manasseh. They joined other family members who had already immigrated to Israel for an emotional reunion. They were the largest group of Bnei Menashe in history to come to the Promised Land.

“Today is one of the most happiest day for the Bnei Menashe history because we never had a large group like this that made aliyah,” Bnei Menashe tribe member Allenby Selah said.

The Jewish agency believes the tribe of Manasseh is located in northeastern India in the states of Mizoram and Manipur.

For many of these Bnei Menashe, coming to Israel is a life-long dream.

Several thousand Bnei Menashe remain in India and hope to come to Israel.

Shavei Israel has identified groups like the “Hidden Jews” in Poland, the Subbotnik Jews of Russia, the Benei Anousim Jews in Spain, Portugal and South America, as well as the Bnei Menashe and the Jews from Kaifeng, China.

After their arrival, the Chinese came to the Western Wall. They came to pray and begin their new life here in Israel. Organizers say they represent the first group of Chinese men to move to Israel in history.

Experts estimate 2,000 Jews live now in China and organizers of this immigration hope more of them will come to Israel.

Freund calls it and the return of other Jews worldwide a sign of the times.

“God is gathering His people in. And this is an event not only of theological significance but of tremendous historical significance as well,” he said.

Here at eChurchWebsites, we often highlight the plight and persecution of our Christian Copt brothers and sisters in Egypt. On a previous recent post, I said the following:-

The relationship between the Christian Copts and the Muslim majority in Egypt is simply spiralling downwards. As I understand it, Christian Copts make up around 10% of Egyptians and are mainly an impoverished group.

Yesterday on Joels Trumpet, Joel featured a recent harrowing report from Christian Solidarity International, which cited incidents of Egyptian Christian Copt persecution. Whilst we were discussing this issue, a commentator, called ‘Dan The Copt’ from Egypt, made the following comments, which were so encouraging that I wanted to share them on this blog:-

I got a copy of the CSI report and the cases mentioned in the report are just a few examples out of thousands. Yes we are suffering in Egypt but our spirit is high and our Lord is supporting us, we have faith in our Lord Jesus Christ we know with all these pains He engraved our names in HIS MIGHTY HANDS.

Time will come and it is soon when people in Egypt will be baptized in public squares and in every street corners. The blood and the suffering of the Coptic people will plant the seeds for mass conversion and Egypt as whole will return to Christ. Satan is doing everything possible to prevent this from happening, but this is our LORD promise, and against the thousands of people martyred or persecuted in Egypt for HIS NAME, they are thousands of Muslims converted and accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior.

Maran Atha

And:-

Islam mission since day one is to get rid from the Jews and the Christian (The chosen people). For over 1400 hundred years Satan tried to finish his job in Egypt as he did in all areas around Egypt, but our MIGHTY LORD was there and still there with all His Mighty Angels and Saints. In spite of all these wars against the Coptic Church, it is the most stronger church on earth. In God we trust, and prayers is our is our weapons. We all know JESUS will have the final say in this war.

Glory to our LORD JESUS CHRIST.

No big surprise to see the National Secular Society attacking faith schools again. Their attack is based on alleged selective recruitment and promotion policies, but underlying this is their desire to eradicate what they would term as ‘religious indictrination’ of children.

Yesterday news broke that Lithuania had incurred EU wrath, for a law the Lithuanian government passed, which stands against the propagation of homosexuality to children in schools. Upon discussing this issue on another blog, one commentator observed:-

It is a sign of the times that we can apparently leave matters of religion so that “let them decide for themselves at 18″ is ok , but the same does not apply to sex.

This is the heart of the contradiction of humanist and secular attacks on faith schools. Indoctrination is OK, as long as it the right sort of humanist, secular, morally relativistic indoctrination.

BBC

The government is facing criticism over claims that it allows faith schools to refuse jobs or promotion to staff with different, or no, spiritual beliefs.

The National Secular Society will argue at a conference later that current legislation discriminates against well qualified, non-religious teachers,

The Department for Children, Schools and Families has said it has not received any complaints.

It said beliefs are only taken into account in a small number of cases.

Currently, the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 allows faith schools in England and Wales to take into account an applicant’s religious beliefs, or lack of them, when considering them for a teaching post.

This is intended to ensure that staff fully support the school’s particular religious ethos, such as Christianity or Judaism.

The Act was later amended to include school support staff.

In Scotland, Catholic faith schools are allowed to request that applicants provide a suitable referee who can testify to their personal religious beliefs and character.

Catholic teachers are asked to provide a testament from their parish priest.

The NSS has told the BBC that such requirements are discriminatory, and have no bearing on whether a person can teach a particular subject well.

Read Entire Article

A wonderful article from John Stott (Whom I greatly admire), which is an exclusive to the brilliant Virtue Online, who have kindly granted me permission to reproduce (thanks David) on this blog.

The Difference between Evangelicals and Fundamentalists

By Roger Steer
A VOL Exclusive
www.virtueonline.org
November 13, 2009

This exclusive article comes from Roger Steer author of the newly published “Inside Story”, a biographical look at the life of preacher/teacher John Stott. It did not make the cut in Mr. Steer’s book and so it is being offered exclusively to VOL’s readers.

If you would like to purchase Roger Steer’s book on Dr. Stott you can do so by clicking here http://tinyurl.com/yju5yxk

Over a period of a few months during 1998, John wrote his Evangelical Truth: a personal plea for unity. ‘As I approach the end of my life on earth,’ he wrote, ‘and as this year I complete sixty years of privileged Christian discipleship, I would like to leave behind me, as a kind of spiritual legacy, this little statement of evangelical faith, this personal appeal to the rising generation.’

Twenty years on from answering the questions ‘What is an evangelical?’ at Nottingham in 1977, he chose a Trinitarian approach to evangelical truth. But first, he set out ten respects in which the authentic evangelical differed from the fundamentalist. In doing so he tried to be as fair as he could to fundamentalists trying desperately to avoid caricature.

In relation to human thought, fundamentalists gave the impression that they distrusted scholarship, including the scientific disciplines. Some tended towards a thoroughgoing anti-intellectualism, even obscurantism. Authentic evangelicals, however, acknowledged that all truth was God’s truth, that our minds were God-given, being a vital aspect of the divine image we bear, that we insulted God if we refused to think, and that we honoured him when, whether through science or Scripture, we (as Kepler put it) ‘think God’s thoughts after him’.

As to the nature of the Bible, fundamentalists were said to believe that ‘every word of the Bible was literally true’. To be fair to fundamentalists, John thought this was a slander, since the adverb ‘literally’ was being used too sweepingly. Yet he couldn’t deny that some fundamentalists were characterised by an excessive literalism. Evangelicals, however, while believing that whatever the Bible affirmed was true, added that some of what it affirmed was figuratively or poetically (rather than literally) true, and was meant to be interpreted thus. Not even the most extreme fundamentalist believed that God had feathers (Ps. 91:4).

In relation to biblical inspiration, fundamentalists had tended to regard it as having been a somewhat mechanical process, in which the human authors were passive and played no active role. Thus the fundamentalist view of the Bible, as having been dictated by God, resembled the Muslim view of the Koran as having been dictated by Allah in Arabic through the angel Gabriel, while Mohammed’s only contribution was to take down the dictation. Evangelicals emphasised, however, the double authorship of Scripture, namely that the divine author spoke through the human authors, while they were in full possession of their faculties.

As for biblical interpretation, fundamentalists seemed to suppose that they could apply the text directly to themselves as if it had been written primarily for them. In doing to they ignored the cultural chasm which yawned between the biblical world and the contemporary world. At least in the ideal, however, evangelicals struggled with the task of cultural transposition, in which they sought to identify the essential message of the text, detach it from its original cultural context, and then re-contextualize it before applying it to our situation today.

Fundamentalists tended to go beyond suspicion (for which indeed there was ample justification) of the ecumenical movement to a blanket, uncritical, even vociferous rejection. Many evangelicals, however, although critical of the liberal agenda and frequently unprincipled methodology of the World Council of Churches, had tried to be discerning, affirming in ecumenism what seemed to them to have biblical support, while claiming the freedom to reject what had not.

On the church, fundamentalists tended to hold a separatist ecclesiology, and to withdraw from any community which didn’t agree in every particular with their own doctrinal position. This was to forget that Luther and Calvin were very reluctant schismatics, and dreamed of a reformed catholicism. Most evangelicals, however, while believing it right to seek the doctrinal and ethical purity of the church, also believed that perfect purity couldn’t be attained in this world. He conceded, however, that the balance between discipline and tolerance wasn’t easy to find.

In relation to the world, fundamentalists had tended sometimes to assimilate its values and standards uncritically (for example in the ‘prosperity gospel’) and at other times to stand aloof from it, fearing contamination. John readily admitted that by no means all evangelicals escaped the charge of worldliness. Nevertheless, at least in theory, they sought to obey the biblical injunction not to conform to this world, and were also anxious to respond to the call of Jesus to penetrate it like salt and light, in order to hinder its decay and illuminate its darkness.

Fundamentalists had shown a tendency – especially in the United States and in South Africa – to cling to the myth of white supremacy and to defend racial segregation, even in the church. Racism without doubt lingered among some evangelicals too. Yet there was a widespread desire to repent of it. Most evangelicals, he claimed, proclaimed and practised racial equality, originally by creation and supremely in Christ, who broke down the walls of racial, social and sexual separation in order to create a single, united humanity.

In relation to the Christian mission, fundamentalists had tended to insist that ‘mission’ and ‘evangelism’ were synonyms, and that the vocation of the church was without qualification to ‘proclaim the gospel’. Evangelicals, however, at least those of his persuasion, while continuing to affirm the priority of evangelism, felt unable to sunder it from social responsibility. As in the ministry of Jesus, so today, words and deeds, proclamation and demonstration, good news and good works supplemented and reinforced one another.

Finally, in relation to the Christian hope, fundamentalists tended to dogmatise about the future, although to be sure they held no monopoly on dogmatism. But they often went into considerable detail about the fulfilment of prophecy, divided history into rigid dispensations, and espoused a Christian Zionism which ignored the grave injustices done to the Palestinians. Evangelicals, however, while affirming with eager expectation the personal, visible, glorious and triumphant return of our Lord Jesus Christ, preferred to remain agnostic about the details on which even firmly biblical Christians had differing viewpoints.

John pleaded for evangelical integrity, stability, truth, unity and endurance. He claimed that the supreme quality which the evangelical faith should engender was humility, readily admitting that this claim might well be met with a wry smile. He knew full well that evangelical people were often regarded as proud, vain, arrogant and cocksure.

Evangelical Christianity was Trinitarian Christianity and, if this was correctly understood, it inevitably tended towards humility. Evangelicals held the three ‘Rs’ – revelation, redemption and regeneration, associating revelation with the Father, redemption with the Son and regeneration with the Holy Spirit. Yet the more the three persons of the Trinity were glorified, the more completely human pride was excluded. To magnify the self-revelation of God was to confess our complete ignorance without it. To magnify the cross of Christ was to confess our utter lostness without it. To magnify the regenerating, indwelling and sanctifying role of the Holy Spirit was to confess our abiding self-centredness without it.

AFP

MOSUL, Iraq — Gunmen killed a Christian teenager in a drive-by shooting outside his family home on Friday in the restive northern Iraqi city of Mosul, police said.

“Unidentified gunmen opened fire from a speeding black car on the adolescent before fleeing the scene in Tahrir,” a police officer said, referring to a Christian neighbourhood in eastern Mosul.

A neighbour said 16-year-old Rami Katchik, a member of the minority Armenian community, had been hosing down the entrance to his family home when the shooting occurred.

“His father had just gone into the house to get a shovel and ran out when he heard the gunshots and saw three men in the car,” said the neighbour Girgis Paulos.

It was unclear if he had been targeted because of his faith.

But a local priest, Hazem Girgis, described the killing as part of “crimes aimed at uprooting Christians and forcing them to flee.”

Thousands of Christians fled Mosul last year because of violence that claimed the lives of 40 people from the community.

A report on Tuesday by Human Rights Watch said Iraqi minorities, including Christians, in northern Iraq are the collateral victims of a conflict between Arabs and Kurds over who controls the country’s disputed provinces.

Iraq’s disputed provinces include Nineveh, of which Mosul is the capital, the oil-rich province and city of Kirkuk, and Diyala.

Since the US-led invasion of 2003, hundreds of Iraqi Christians have been killed and a string of churches attacked.

Around 800,000 Christians lived in Iraq at the time of the invasion, but their number has since shrunk by around a third or more as members of the minority community have fled the country, according to Christian leaders.

Latest Related Post

In the Iraq war, Christians pushed to the brink

How true is this? I absolutley and totally agree with the Pope on this one. How many Christian charitable organisations forget that the primary aim is the glorification of the name of Jesus Christ? Too many.

Catholic Cutlure

Church charitable work must serve evangelization, Pope reminds Cor Unum

Pope Benedict XVI met on November 13 with the members of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, who are meeting in Rome this week under the direction of the council’s president, Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes. In his remarks to the group, the Holy Father said that any charitable work done under the auspices of the Church should be guided by the aim of “bringing people to know and experience the merciful face of the heavenly Father.” The Pope stressed that the work of Cor Unum, the official papal charity, should combine a commitment to helping the needy with a dedication to spreading the Gospel message.

“It is certainly not the Church’s task to intervene directly in the political life of states,” the Pontiff said; “but the Christian community cannot and must not remain at the margins when it comes to defending human rights and promoting justice.”

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

Cor Unum: Announcing the Gospel and Serving Mankind (VIS)

Contact: Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, 540-538-4741, 202-547-1735

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 /Christian Newswire/ — Group wonders why their Director, Rev. Patrick Mahoney, was visited and questioned by FBI agents for leading a peaceful prayer vigil in front of the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Yet Major Hasan, who contacted Islamic terrorists multiple times, made threatening comments to the American military and considered himself a “Soldier of Allah” was never visited or questioned by the FBI.

Is it possible that Rev. Mahoney was targeted because he has been an outspoken critic of President Obama’s record on human rights and social justice?

Federal agents came to the home of Rev. Mahoney to question him about laying roses and praying in front of the Chinese Embassy on June 4th of this year.

The purpose of the prayer vigil was to honor and remember the heroic students who were brutalized in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago and to call upon the Chinese government to protect human rights and honor religious freedom.

Previous related Post

FBI Agents Visit the Home and Question Nationally Known Christian Activist and Outspoken Critic of President Obama’s Human Rights and Social Justice Record – Agents came to the home of the Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, Director of the Christian Defense Coalition to question him and “gather intelligence” about his laying roses at the Chinese Embassy on June 4th

Freaky!

Christian Institute