Syrian Islamists video ritual murder of Christians

At Westview UMC we have been praying for Christians under persecution throughout the world, especially Syria. Here is why.

Think religious human sacrifice is not being practiced any more? You don't know Islam.

 

A new angle of the brutal execution-style murders of Christians by Muslims in Syria is being discovered. Walid Shoebat reports that they have now begun conducting “ritual human sacrifices” by firing a bullet to the head or slitting the throat of their intended victims. 

Shoebat is a former member of the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization who converted to Christianity. 

In the video the speaker uses the word Qurban just before firing one by one at a row of men lined up on the floor. That term, according to Shoebat, “can only signify a sacrifice, which indicates that the filmed slaughter is nothing but a ritual human sacrifice.” Shoebat says, “Christians are being killed in these very rituals every day, and the bloodshed will not stop. We must work together to rescue them.” 

He is working with a Syrian Orthodox nun, Sister Hatune Dogan, to help Christians in Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Turkey who are victims of religious persecutions.

Be aware before you watch the video (link at bottom): It is very graphic video of actual murders of a dozen or so men by shooting them in the back of the head. There is no cut away because these Satanic killers want the world to know what they are doing. They are proud of it. They say that God demands it.

Allah is not God! Allah in fact is an invented idol, no more real than the pagan gods represented by figurines and statues in the ancient world. Islam is idolatry.

The number one threat to freedom, liberty, human dignity and flourishing in the 21st century is not climate change. It is Islam. Islam itself is irretrievably corrupt and irredeemable. Islam is a religion of death and murder, and nothing but.

I looked up in Muslim sources what "Qurban" means, just to be sure. Here is a grab of its definition from rasoulallah.net.

The video is here: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ae0_1394505392 

Prayer of St Patrick

This prayer is said to have been written by Saint Patrick himself, who lived from 387 – 493. St. Patrick evangelized Ireland.

As the story goes, he suspected an ambush while he was on the way to meet King Laoghaire. He said the prayer, known today as St. Patrick’s Breastplate, or the Deer’s Cry. As the soldiers sent to kill him lay in wait, Patrick and his companions passed by but all the soldiers saw were deer. Whether or not St. Patrick actually wrote the prayer, it is an eloquent expression of Christian faith, especially in crisis.

The Prayer of St. Patrick.

We bind unto ourselves today
the strong Name of the Trinity.
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One and One in Three.

We bind this today to us forever,
by power of faith, Christ’s incarnation;
his baptism in Jordan river,
his death on Cross for our salvation;
his bursting from the spiced tomb,
his riding up the heavenly way,
his coming at the day of doom.
We bind unto ourselves today.

We bind unto ourselves the power
of the great love of cherubim;
the sweet “Well done” in judgment hour,
the service of the seraphim,
confessors’ faith, Apostles’ word,
the Patriarchs’ prayers, the prophets’ scrolls,
all good deeds done unto the Lord
and purity of God-saved souls.

We bind unto ourselves today
the virtues of the star lit heaven,
the glorious sun’s life giving ray,
the whiteness of the moon at evening,
the flashing of the lightning free,
the whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
the stable earth, the deep salt sea
around the old eternal rocks.

We bind unto ourselves the power
of God to hold and lead,
his eye to watch, His might to stay,
his ear to hearken to our need;
the wisdom of our God to teach,
his hand to guide, His shield to ward;
the word of God to give us speech,
his heavenly host to be our guard.

Against the demon snares of sin,
the vice that gives temptation force,
the natural lusts that war within,
the hostile men that mar our course;
or few or many, far or nigh –
in every place and in all hours,
against their fierce hostility
We bind to us these holy powers.

Against all Satan’s spells and wiles,
against false words of heresy,
against the knowledge that defiles,
against the heart’s idolatry,
against the wizard’s evil craft,
against the death wound and the burning,
the choking wave, the poisoned shaft –
protect us, Christ, till Thy returning.

Christ be with us, Christ within us,
Christ behind us, Christ before us,
Christ beside us, Christ to win us,
Christ to comfort and restore us.

Christ beneath us, Christ above us,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love us,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
Christ in every eye that sees us,
Christ in every ear that hears us.

We bind unto ourselves the Name,
the strong Name of the Trinity,
by invocation of the same,
the Three in One and One in Three.
by Whom all nature hath creation,
eternal Father, Spirit, Word:

Praise to the Lord of our salvation,
Salvation is of Christ the Lord.

Amen.

Lenten Season at Westview

Ah, atheism

If only Hitler had known . . .

... that terminology is everything: "After-Birth Abortion - The pro-choice case for infanticide." 

"'After-birth abortion'" is a term invented by two philosophers, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. In the Journal of Medical Ethics, they propose:"

[W]hen circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible. … [W]e propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide,’ to emphasize that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus … rather than to that of a child. Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk.

The writers declare that a newborn infant has no personhood and would not even know s/he was being killed when it happened, so no problem. Kill her and be done with it.

[I]n order for a harm to occur, it is necessary that someone is in the condition of experiencing that harm. If a potential person, like a fetus and a newborn, does not become an actual person, like you and us, then there is neither an actual nor a future person who can be harmed, which means that there is no harm at all. … In these cases, since non-persons have no moral rights to life, there are no reasons for banning after-birth abortions. … Indeed, however weak the interests of actual people can be, they will always trump the alleged interest of potential people to become actual ones, because this latter interest amounts to zero.

But as long as we don't call "-cide" it's okay.

God, sex and us

Evidence for the Resurrection of Christ

Evidence for the Resurrection of Christ by Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli:

There are five possible theories: Christianity, hallucination, myth, conspiracy and swoon.

1	Jesus died	Jesus rose	Christianity
2	Jesus died	Jesus didn't rise—apostles deceived	Hallucination
3	Jesus died	Jesus didn't rise—apostles myth-makers	Myth
4	Jesus died	Jesus didn't rise—apostles deceivers	Conspiracy
5	Jesus didn't die		Swoon

There are no other possibilities. 

"Myth" in this context means the resurrection stories are not historically true but are intended as narratives of morality and religious meaning; not lies, per se, since pedagogy was the intent, not overt deception.

This, too: "What did the Disciples See? A Closer Look at the Resurrection Appearances"

The F-E-A-T that Demonstrates the FACT of Resurrection | Christian Research Institute

The F-E-A-T that Demonstrates the FACT of Resurrection

Because of its centrality to Christianity, those who take the sacred name of Christ upon their lips must be prepared to defend the reliability of the Resurrection. To make the process memorable, I’ve developed the acronym F-E-A-T. Each letter in this acronym serves to underscore an undeniable fact of the Resurrection: 

Fatal torment
Empty tomb
Appearances
Transformation

Reasons to believe God exists

Answers to the most serious questions in life don't fit on bumper stickers. So these links will require an investment in time and thought. These and more here.

Some reasons why people think that God exists.

• The kalam cosmological argument and the Big Bang theory

• The fine-tuning argument from cosmological constants and quantities

• The origin of life, part 1 of 2: the building blocks of life

• The origin of life, part 2 of 2: biological information

• The sudden origin of phyla in the Cambrian explosion

• Galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones

• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines

• The creative limits of natural selection and random mutation

• Angus Menuge’s ontological argument from reason

• Alvin Plantinga’s epistemological argument from reason

• William Lane Craig’s moral argument

• The unexpected applicability of mathematics to nature

• Arguments and scientific evidence for non-physical minds 

In addition to these arguments for theism, Christians should be able to make a minimal facts case for the resurrection, one that leverages the early creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7. And some sort of case for the belief that Jesus was divine using only the earliest sources. 

In addition to those positive evidences, there would be informed defenses to other questions like the problem of evil, the problem of suffering,religious pluralism, the hiddenness of God, materialist conceptions of mind, consciousness and neuroscience, the justice of eternal damnation,sovereignty and free will, the doctrine of the Incarnation, the doctrine of the Trinity, and so on.

See also, "So you think you understand the cosmological argument?"

 

First contact by 2040? Nope.

Is anyone out there? Well, the odds are against it
unless divine agency is postulated.

The Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence (SETI) project has been going on for 54 years now. No intelligent life  - or life at all - has been found off earth, but the universe is vast and the project is young. 

Now SETI's Seth Shostak says,

"I think we'll find E.T. within two dozen years using these sorts of experiments," Shostak said here Thursday (Feb. 6) during a talk at the 2014 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) symposium at Stanford University. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Alien Life] 

"Instead of looking at a few thousand star systems, which is the tally so far, we will have looked at maybe a million star systems" 24 years from now, Shostak said. "A million might be the right number to find something." 

Shostak's optimism is based partly on observations by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which has shown that the Milky Way galaxy likely teems with worlds capable of supporting life as we know it. 

"The bottom line is, like one in five stars has at least one planet where life might spring up," Shostak said. "That's a fantastically large percentage. That means in our galaxy, there's on the order of tens of billions of Earth-like worlds."

I am sure, though, that this bold prediction is wholly unrelated to the fact that the article later says that, "getting enough funding to keep scanning the skies is a constant problem."

So let's just say we are right on the edge of success and with millions more dollars we'll succeed! But of course, that's just coincidental. 

The faith that life necessarily exists off earth is called the "theory of mediocrity" because it holds that conditions on earth are simply average and that life-producing conditions are therefore abundant in the universe. But even SETI advocates admit that there is an indescribably-huge leap from the formation of life to the rise of life that is at least human-level intelligent. 

The first evidence of microbial life on Earth, for instance, dates from 3.8 billion years ago — just 700 million years after our planet formed. But it took another 1.7 billion years for multicellular life to evolve. Humans didn't emerge until 200,000 years ago, and we've become a truly technological species in just the last century or so.

Science writer Mark Thompson explains that even a 14-billion-year-old universe may not be old enough to result in planets teeming with life, especially intelligent life.

It seems that the evolution of stars precluded the formation of rocky planets much before the appearance of Population I stars. If that is the case, and adding a generous margin for error, it looks like the first planets like Earth would have formed no earlier than 8 billion years ago. 

If that is true, then it may well be that we are not necessarily the first life, but perhaps amongst the first intelligent life (as we know it) to evolve.

Furthermore, there is no teleology, or inevitability, in evolution theory. No outcome is inevitable, there are no such things as "higher" life forms. There is only survival, or not. Hence, technological, inventive beings are not bound to form at all.. There is no "progress" in the development of life in the first place and no evolutionary outcome is inevitable in any way.

That's why Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr pointed out that since life first appeared on Earth, there have been an estimated 50 billion species. And yet only one, us, has developed high intelligence. Mayr says that such intelligence does not obviously offer a species survival advantage (consider the cockroach) and hence may be so rare that homo sapiens-level intelligence may be a "one off" in the universe.

The ponderous word overlaying all this is "if." If life exists at all in earth or elsewhere simply because of the chance compounding of chemicals in bio-capable worlds, then it is very difficult to confidently conclude that human beings are remotely likely to encounter any kind of life off earth. 

Why? Because the odds are so supremely unlikely that life formed here on earth by chance that for life to also have formed elsewhere would be like winning a million-dollar lottery a million times in a row, according to Astronomy magazine editor Robert Naeye. 

I posted a summary of just some of the odds in, "The Massive Improbability of Life." That is one reason that Robert Griffiths, who won the Heinemann prize in mathematical physics, stated, 

"If we need an atheist for a debate, I go to the philosophy department. The physics department isn't much use."

But suppose there are between 200-500 billion intelligent species in the universe. Does that sound like a lot? It's only one per galaxy. 

In 2011 I put together a slide show on this topic. It is below and just below it is a video from the SciAm site that is a good overall summary of the current scientific state of thinking.

 

Ancient Jews and dancing bears

There is an old saying that the remarkable thing about a dancing bear is not how well it dances, but that it dances at all.

So why, exactly, would the ancient Hebrews be the sole people of their day who understood things that scientists have only recently confirmed? The remarkable thing is not that they got so much right, but that they got anything right at all, because no one else of their day did.

Click here.

This, too.

Tips for Being an Effective Apologist

A Clay Jar: Tips for Being an Effective Apologist

"Atheism And Its Problem Of Evil"

Atheism And Its Problem Of Evil | William M. Briggs



As usual, William Briggs dissects the problem with precision and clarity. Read the whole thing.

Bottoms up!

Famous Methodist Terrorists

Saw this on FB and decided to confirm it on my own. Yep!

But this is not news, eh?

 

Mission focus

Here is the focus of the Conference for the coming year. Good areas, and I especially appreciate that it all fist on a single sheet of paper.

Deliberate witnessing planning

Below is a scanned PDF of the handout used at the evangelism training at Brentwood UMC on Jan. 18, 2014, sponsored by Bishop Bill McAllily. The presenter, as indicated, was Dr. Derrick Lewis-Noble. 

When I receive the Word format document of this handout, I will post it, too, or post a link to download it. You should be able to save the PDF below by using the "download" link in the bottom bar or by following the link below to the Scribd page. 

Long Handout Evangelism Training Jan 18 2014

Women speaking in church and Holy Communion

I have had occasion recently to engage in theological reflection on three questions:

On what basis do we Methodists ordain women or even allow women to read Scripture or lead prayers in worship?

Is Holy Communion required to be offered weekly?

Is unleavened bread required for Communion?
 

1. Women speaking in church.

Paul's wrote in 1 Timothy 2:11, "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man... ."  

 

The key to understanding the passage is the word "to have authority over" (in Greek, authentein). 

 

This is the only verse in the whole New Testament where authentein is used. The word appears nowhere else in the whole Bible. Everywhere else in the New Testament refers to the authority of church leaders, a different word is used, exousia, which means "authority" in our usual sense of the word. See here.

 

So why did Paul use authentein in 1 Timothy when everywhere else he uses exousia? Since Paul was extremely well educated, we must conclude that he used this different word on purpose, knowing full well the difference of meaning and intending to communicate that different meaning.

 

And the meaning of authentein is, bluntly, sex. In the use of the day, authentein was a distinctive word used to describe the activities of temple prostitutes. 

 

In Corinth, on the hill of Acropolis, the Greeks had erected the great Temple of Aphrodite, the goddess of love.  There were, at any one time, up to one thousand prostitutes serving the temple.  Among the Greeks, it was considered a supreme act of worship to the goddess Aphrodite for a man to engage in sexual relations with these priestess-prostitutes. Evidently such practices were finding their way into the early church.  Clement of Alexandria even complained about certain groups among them who had turned the agape feast into a drunken sex orgy.  Interestingly enough, he refers to those engaging in those activities as authentai.

 

This should provide considerable illumination to the passage.  Rather than advocating a position of subservient inferiority for women in the church, the passage would more accurately be related, "I do not allow a woman to evangelize through prostitution and sexual seduction, as the pagans do; these women must be silent."

 

Much more detail here, although it is not a casual read:
http://godswordtowomen.org/kroeger_ancient_heresies.htm

This is a key excerpt, pointing out that if Paul was so resistant to women's active role in the church, then it is an odd position for him to take since elsewhere in his ministry, he,

... brought Priscilla as well as her husband Aquila to Ephesus to serve in a teaching capacity (Acts 18) and made significant use of women in his ministry.  He hails several [women] as fellow-laborers in the gospel (Rom. 16:1-15; Phil. 4:2f.) and asks the church to give submission to such as these (I Cor. 16:16).  He stated furthermore that in Christ there is neither male nor female and that before the Lord there is neither man without the woman nor woman without the man (Gal. 3:28; 1 Cor. 11:11f.).  How can this attitude be reconciled with the text in I Timothy? 

It is reconciled by understanding that Paul was forbidding recently-converted, pagan women from bringing pagan, sexual worship into the Church, but not from reading the Scriptures aloud as part of Christian worship. 

 

2. The Lord’s Supper - is weekly required?

The obvious question is, "Required by whom?" It can only be required by either the Lord or mortals. If required by the Lord, then yes, it is required. But is required simply by other church people, then it is not required except by tradition; certainly there is no divine commandment in that case. 

There is no command by Christ to take Communion every week. Jesus said, “Do this, as often as you drink it [the Communion cup], in remembrance of me,” but did not specify how often that had to be. It is reasonable to conclude that he left the frequency up to his followers. Nor is there anywhere in the rest of the New Testament where the apostles mandated a particular frequency for taking Communion. 
 

Of course, there is no biblical argument to be made against weekly Communion. Yet neither is there sound biblical certification mandating weekly Communion. Some advocates point to Acts 20:7-12 as proof that the early church took communion weekly, but the passage does not say that; it is an eisegetical reading (deciding what you want the passage to say before you read it). That the early church took the Lord’s Supper every Sunday is a reasonable but by no means certain reading of the text. 
 

In short, Jesus himself seems to have left the frequency of Communion up to his followers, and that should be good enough for us.

 

(Some Methodists do argue in favor of weekly Communion, though not on the basis of divine mandate. See here: http://um-insight.net/blogs/teddy-ray/why-weekly-eucharist%3F/)

 

3. Use of unleavened bread in Communion

In New Testament Greek there was a specific word for unleavened bread, azumos. But Matthew 26.26 states that, “As they were eating, Jesus took artos,” which is the word used for common household leavened bread. 

 

Jesus did not use unleavened bread at the Lord’s Supper. We know this for two reasons:

1. The Bible says he did not, which I just explained, 
    
2. The Lord’s Supper is not an imitation of Passover, in which the Jews eat unleavened bread. The Lord’s Supper is not the same as a seder, or Passover ritual meal. Even though Jesus and the disciples had celebrated the seder that night, it is clear from the narrative that Jesus, in the Last Supper, was not part of the seder meal nor intended to be. Jesus moved beyond the Covenant of Sinai, commemorated by the seder, in inaugurating the New Covenant foretold by Jeremiah; in fact, Jesus specifically said so in explaining the wine, the “cup of the New Covenant.”

The Baptist Bulletin addressed the question this way:

The Last Supper took place during the Jewish Feast of Unleavened Bread, so Jesus and the disciples may have eaten that easily accessible, plentiful unleavened bread that night. But whether or not this use would indicate a requirement for Communion in our day is in question. Nowhere in the New Testament are we specifically commanded to use unleavened bread. Also, the Feast of Unleavened Bread was a Jewish observance. Should we be bound to something in the Dispensation of the Church that might compare with other Jewish ceremonial customs and laws we do not observe? There seems to be no account of the early New Testament church where unleavened bread mattered.

Using unleavened bread for Communion is neither required nor forbidden. See also:

http://biblebased.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/must-we-use-unleavened-bread-in-the-lords-supper/

Oh, we Methodists do use real wine in Communion. Welch’s grape juice is, in fact, non-alcoholic wine.

2014 Liturgical Calendar

Also:

UMC 2014 Music and Worship Planning Calendar

2014 Lectionary, Sundays and Special Days Only

I don't believe in a State Patrol like that!

A parable:

The highway patrol I believe in would never do anything like this!

I wish there were no speed limits on the interstate highways. The highest speed limit there is in Tennessee in 70 mph. Someone once told me that if the limit was raised to 80, people would drive 90.

"That's okay," I replied, "as long as they move over when I want to pass." I lived and drove for three years in Germany, where there are no speed limits on almost all the autobahn. I am quite comfortable driving 130 mph or more and am undisturbed at the idea of other drivers doing so, too. It's not a race, it's just transportation.

However, I have not been driving in excess of the speed limit because I know that the Tennessee Highway Patrol is lurking out there. I have been quite sure that eventually I would get radar tagged and arrested, maybe even as unpleasantly as the young man in the photo above. So I have been as law-abiding a driver as you can find.

But recently it has come to me that I have been a sap. I think now that I can drive as fast as I want on the interstate. Because, after all, I am a good driver. I am not hurting anyone. I am not making anyone else drive fast. So now if I want to drive 130, I will.

Wait, you protest. The THP is still out there and they are still going to slap cuff on you when they catch you!

I am unworried about that because, you see, I have decided that I just do not believe in a highway patrol like that. The highway patrol I believe in is kind, loving, merciful, gracious and just wants me to be happy. And if it makes me happy to drive 130, then the THP is quite okay with that and will bless it. The THP likes me the way I am. And if the way I am is at 130 mph, the THP, being compassionate and caring, likes me still.

I think we need to move beyond all that talk about the law and punishment. We need to focus on how we can find self fulfillment in doing what comes naturally to us. I feel that is best. And I know the THP does not object because (as I said) I am a good driver and I feel that is right.

Don't you think so, too?