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Religion Tag

So far it's been difficult to get information on the question of whether the parishioners in the Texas church where yesterday's mass murder took place were prohibited from carrying guns. Here are the pertinent rules in Texas:

When Pope Francis became head of the Catholic church, many were hopeful that the dynamic and humble priest would blossom into a great leader. It appears now that the Pope's social justice agenda is not appealing to a good portion of the Catholic faithful. Several dozen Catholic clergy members and lay scholars have presented Pope Francis with a document known as a "formal filial correction", accusing him of propagating heresies concerning marriage, the moral life, and reception of the sacraments.

One of the many things that has long puzzled me about the leftist agenda is its long-standing, mulit-pronged attack on Judeo-Christianity.  On the one hand, I understand that the left has a reason for wishing to undermine religion.  After all, as assorted totalitarians, fascists, and communists well know, a populace permitted to believe in and publicly worship a power higher than government is anathema to totalitarian central control. Challenging and wiping out all religious references makes perfect sense if your goal is the total subjugation of a people under the all-powerful arm of a government that claims it will provide for all of its citizens' earthly needs.  What has puzzled me is that much of the left's base is Christian and/or Catholic.  I've been waiting at least ten years for the left to grasp this simple fact.

Hate has consumed the news cycle since Charlottesville happened. But you know what's more affective? Stories of love. Yes, it sounds cliché, but it's true. Love and positive change. How about a story about a man who went from a member to the KKK to a Catholic priest? That's what happened to Father William Aitcheson of the Catholic Dioceses of Arlington in Virginia. The events in Charlottesville affected him on a personal level and he decided to use his past as teaching tool.

English actor, writer, and comedian Stephen Fry, who is perhaps as well-known for his leftist politics and atheism as he is for Blackadder or A Bit of Fry and Laurie, has run afoul of Ireland's 2009 blasphemy law. Gardaí, the Irish Republic's police, are investigating Fry for allegedly mocking Christianity on Irish television.  The investigation is a response to a viewer complaint.

Jesus: social justice warrior? Apparently so, if you believe Jacqui Lewis, senior minister of the very liberal Middle Collegiate Church in NYC. During her appearance on Al Sharpton's MSNBC show this morning, Lewis described Jesus as a "brown-skinned Palestinian man who understood he needed to resist." The notion that Jesus was Palestinian has been thoroughly debunked. He was Jewish, after all. But that hasn't stopped anti-Semites like Barack Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, from also making the claim.

As Holy Week begins for Christians around the world, some intriguing information on the faith has been released by the Pew Research Center.
Christians remained the largest religious group in the world in 2015, making up nearly a third (31%) of Earth’s 7.3 billion people, according to a new Pew Research Center demographic analysis. But the report also shows that the number of Christians in what many consider the religion’s heartland, the continent of Europe, is in decline. Christians had the most births and deaths of any religious group in recent years, according to our demographic models. Between 2010 and 2015, an estimated 223 million babies were born to Christian mothers and roughly 107 million Christians died – a natural increase of 116 million.

Back in 2015, the American Humanist Association (AHA) sued the Birdville School District, located near Fort Worth, TX, because school board members started their meetings with a prayer. The AHA said this violated the First Amendment "through its practicing of promoting Christian prayers." Former student Isaiah Smith brought the case to AHA and claimed "the prayers made him feel unwelcome at the public meetings and that the school board endorsed Christianity." On Monday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the "school board may open its meetings with student-led prayers without violating the U.S. Constitution." From Reuters:
Writing for the appeals court, Circuit Judge Jerry Smith said the matter involved legislative prayer, because a school board was "more like a legislature" than a classroom.