On November 3, we noted that the “War on Christmas” had begun. One piece of evidence that was offered was the decision to have a “Holiday Tree,” instead of a “Christmas Tree,” in…

The amendment…

“Prove me, O LORD, and try me;
test my heart and my mind.”

Harry Houdini, among his many other amazing feats, included in his act the opportunity for a strong man from the audience to punch him in the stomach as…

At around 17 seconds he says there were three shooters. ABN

Police said the suspects are aged between 26 and 30, and look quite like women when they make an effort, the China Daily reported.

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Protesters stoned and throw petrol bombs at the church. The Pastor of the church said to media that protestor had threat to kill him if he is not shutting down the church.

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Wherever we turn to in this wide world, we incessantly see and hear of fraud, conflict, thuggery, blatant brutality and beastly murder taking place in increasing numbers and spreading all over in turbulent waves. However, in our country, we see and hear everywhere at meetings, gatherings and numerous assemblies, religious preachers or eminent persons exhorting people to traverse the path of good conduct.

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The Dharma Chakra Committee (DCC) of Darjeeling brought the casket containing the ashes of Buddha to the Druk-Sa-Ngag Choeling monastery near Dali on Friday. The ashes of his first disciples -- Sariputra and Maha Mogallana -- have also been brought.

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The Religious Experience Research Centre's evidence of everyday divinity is a joy, says Roger Tagholm

About three times a month a letter or email arrives at the library of the University of Wales at Lampeter. So far, so unremarkable, you might think – until you know their contents

The library is home to the Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC), which today celebrates its 40th anniversary with an Open Day at Harris Manchester College in Oxford, its former home. The letters and emails are from members of the public who believe they have had a "spiritual or religious experience or felt a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday life".

"Vauxhall station on a murky November Saturday evening is not the setting one would choose for a revelation of God," runs one account. "The whole compartment was filled with light. I felt caught up into some tremendous sense of being within a loving, triumphant and shining purpose. All men were shining and glorious beings who in the end would enter incredible joy. In a few moments the glory had departed, all but one curious, lingering feeling. I loved everybody in that compartment. I seemed to sense the golden worth in them all."

The centre has some 6,000 such accounts, which, it could be argued, form an "evidence" of sorts for some unspecified "other". The RERC was established in 1969 by the marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy, who was both a Darwinian and a member of the Unitarian church. He believed that man did indeed have a spiritual nature and that there was an extrasensory reality beyond the individual self. Appeals for people's religious or spiritual experiences were placed in the religious media, and then, later, in the wider press, beginning with an interview in this newspaper written by Geoffrey Moorhouse who would go on to recount his own spiritual journey in his Indian travel book Om.

Today, the centre's director is Professor Paul Badham, who taught theology and religious studies at Lampeter until retiring last year. MA students and postgraduate students working in the field of religious experience, as well as researchers and writers from around the world, use the centre's archive and library.

In 1990, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, suggested it extend its work to other cultures. A grant from the Templeton Foundation enabled it to explore religious experience in China, and the University of Istanbul has carried out similar research in Turkey. Professor Cafer Yaran of the faculty of theology at the latter is due to give his findings at today's celebrations.

It is easy to mock those who claim to have had a mystical experience. Richard Dawkins dismisses all such experience as simply a function of "the mind's simulation software". But Badham notes that all human experiences are mediated through brain activity – it doesn't mean the experience is simply a product of the brain. "When I see something with my eyes it brings about events in my brain, which is how I interpret what I see. This does not mean that what we see isn't really there. So with religious experiences. Of course they are associated with something going on in our brain, and increasingly neuro-specialists can locate where in the brain. But this does not mean that such experiences are unreal, any more than what we see is unreal."

The centre's work is heir to William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. It quietly points towards something that the mystics have long known: that religious or spiritual experience is common to humanity, part of "our evolutionary heritage", as Badham puts it. Sir Alister, who died in 1985, would surely be gratified at the centre's continuing survival and its international reach – and would echo Badham's words: "Dogmas divide, experience unites."

]]> http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/insideisrael/2009/November/Israel-Rejects-UN-Vote-on-Goldstone-Report/ http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/insideisrael/2009/November/Israel-Rejects-UN-Vote-on-Goldstone-Report/ http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/news_reports/execution_and_resurrection_in_1.html http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/news_reports/execution_and_resurrection_in_1.html http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/politics/2009/November/Kill-the-Bill-Protestors-Target-Health-Care/ http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/politics/2009/November/Kill-the-Bill-Protestors-Target-Health-Care/ http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/finance/2009/November/Govt-Risked-Trillions-of-Taxpayer-Dollars/ http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/finance/2009/November/Govt-Risked-Trillions-of-Taxpayer-Dollars/ http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2009/November/Fort-Hood-Victims-Examples-of-True-Soldiers/ http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2009/November/Fort-Hood-Victims-Examples-of-True-Soldiers/ The nation is grieving with families of the fallen after Thursday's military massacre at Fort Hood-- and many have two questions: "Why? and "How?"

It was November 6Th, 1996. Around 2.00 pm. I leaned over the railing outside my Masters house watching the golden leaves fall from the Lindon Tree in the garden at Shasta Abbey. I was commenting to the monk beside me that I felt no sadness. There was a sort of joy, almost elation in the air. How could this be? My Master had just died. Breathed her last. He commented something to the effect that it was like another leaf falling from a tree. Then I went indoors and got on....

And that's what I've been doing ever since. There is that which endures, joyfully.

Pentagon insists need for religious tolerance and diversity far outweighs concerns about Islamists joining the ranks

The US military has a long tradition of religious tolerance but military officials bristled today at suggestions that this has aided infiltrators.

"What our policies are and what we try to practise very earnestly is inclusion and diversity," said Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Les' Melnyk. "We need troops that reflect the diversity of America and we show the diversity of America to the world when we deploy."

Only 3,526 of America's 1.4 million active duty military personnel reported being Muslim, but Melnyk said the 283,000 who reported no religious preference could include some members of the faith.

Major Nidal Malik Hasan's family members said he had complained of religious harassment.

Illustrating the tensions between the military and American Muslims, some Muslim soldiers say civilian co-religionists have questioned why they would join a force fighting in two Islamic countries. Just after the first Gulf war the military allowed Saudi clerics to lecture troops about Islam. Up to 3,000 soldiers are believed to have converted within months, the biggest surge ever of Muslims into the armed forces, and military officials later became concerned that foreign clerics had gained influence over US troops.

In March 2003, Sergeant Hasan Akbar, a Muslim convert, killed two of his commanding officers by throwing a grenade into their tent in Kuwait. His family said he had sensed his faith was causing tension in the ranks. He had recently been disciplined for insubordination, and prosecutors said he was angry about US troops killing his fellow Muslims in the Iraq war. He was sentenced to death by a military court in 2005.

That same year, two Muslim servicemen, including an army chaplain, were accused of espionage at Guantánamo Bay. Captain James Yee, the chaplain, was later cleared of the charges. Senior Airman Ahmad Halabi, an Arabic translator at the prison, pleaded guilty to lesser charges. In 2000, Ali Mohamed, an al-Qaida operative who became a sergeant in the army special forces, pleaded guilty to conspiracy in connection with the 1998 bombings at the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

Saleem Abdul-Mateen, a Navy veteran and head of the Washington-based Muslim American Veterans Association, said that when people learn that Muslims are responsible for violence, like the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Fort Hood incident, "fingers are pointed at Muslims in the military and outside".
"If there is no Muslim presence [in the military], then who is going to speak on behalf of Muslims?" he asked. "We have demonstrated our allegiance to the country".

]]> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/06/france-evangelical-church-growth-religion http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/06/france-evangelical-church-growth-religion

Church insists it is not like the US right, but many fear growth of a political force

As the piano strikes up, the congregation sways, palms to the ceiling, fists in the air, murmurs of hallelujah punctuating the music. Pastor Franck Lefillatre, besuited and bathed in the spotlight on his podium, intones into a microphone.

"Let out the words that are in your heart," he urges. His whispers crescendo to booming rhetoric. Behind him, emblazoned in gold lettering, are the words: "Jesus Christ: the same yesterday, today, eternally."

As evangelical services go, this gathering on a rainy Sunday afternoon is nothing unusual. In countless churches around the United States and many other countries it would be a staple means of Christian worship.

But this is not the American Bible belt. It is the Church of Paris-Bastille, and this congregation is just one of a growing number of evangelical communities spreading through France and prospering in spite of its staunchly secular – and Catholic – traditions.

From a postwar population of around 50,000, French evangelicals are now estimated to number between 450,000 and 500,000. According to the Evangelical Federation of France (FEF), the number of churches has risen from 800 in 1970 to over 2,200 today.

This week the boom made headlines when thousands of evangelicals – who are estimated to make up two-thirds of the country's practising Protestants – descended on Strasbourg to turn the 500th anniversary of Calvin's birth into a mass, media-covered event. It was not something even the most hopeful of believers could have prayed for.

For Lefillatre, whose church is part of the World Assemblies of God Fellowship, the largest global Pentecostal denomination, the growth is reflected within the bare, shabby walls of the Paris-Bastille. In the three years he has been pastor there, he said, the congregation has gone from around 250 to 350 or 400. Do they come every so often or without fail every Sunday? "Every Sunday," he said firmly.

On paper France would seem one of the least likely places for this branch of Christianity to gain a foothold. For centuries, Protestantism was the embattled minority in a country Catholics liked to call the "eldest daughter of the church" because of its strong ties to Rome. The minority that exists now still makes up just 3% of the population.

More importantly, though, ever since France harnessed popular discontent with the influence of Catholicism and wrote a separation of church and state into the constitution, the French republic has worshipped at the altar of laïcité – the concept of a secular state.

The gradual emergence of evangelicals as a force has, therefore, raised eyebrows, with some critics questioning whether their beliefs are compatible with the values of a secular republic. Not only are they known in France for speaking in tongues, "born again" conversions and a zeal denounced by some as manipulative proselytism, they are associated in many minds with the politically powerful movement of the US religious right.

Jean-François Colosimo, a writer and religious historian, provoked a furious backlash from evangelicals when, after it emerged that France's intelligence services had launched a "census" of the domestic population, he said: "Everything in France would seem to ban a politico-religious mixture. But laïcité is fragile and temptations are present" – a direct reference to the evangelicals.

These arguments are rejected as irrelevant by French believers. Just because they have the same faith as the Americans and a similar style of worship, they say, it does not mean they share the same politics. Daniel Liechti, vice president of the FEF, emphasised the need to recognise the European roots of the present-day movement.

"French Protestants and evangelicals fought for religion to be separate from the state in the belief that laïcité is a good thing. We do not mix the two. It is impossible to say whether French evangelicals are more left- or rightwing."

Sébastien Fath, a specialist in the spread of evangelicalism, agrees that there remains a "clear distinction" among French evangelicals between politics and religion.

But according to Henri Tincq, a religious commentator, issues such as abortion and homosexuality are creeping up the agenda. "These themes have been traditionally foreign to the evangelical culture in France. You find them now in evangelical networks, which do remain, nonetheless, minorities," he said. The fear is that, with its combination of doctrinal dogma and staunch moral beliefs, the movement could yet become a potent, if minority, political force.

Sitting in the Paris-Bastille after Lefillatre's Sunday service, Sylvain Vautier, 25, an engineer, dismissed any idea that his church was a copy of the US model. It was, he said, "much more balanced".

Yet, in some ways, Vautier embodies the zeal and dogma that leads many French people to regard his faith with suspicion. He bases his faith – and world view – on a "correct" interpretation of the Bible and admits that interacting with non-believers can be difficult. "When you're talking to someone, even on a professional basis, there's a difference," he said. "You think: I'm saved and you're not. It creates a bit of a gulf."

]]> http://www.goconnect.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2070:thank-you http://www.goconnect.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2070:thank-you http://www.crossfeednews.com/weblink/life_issues/aborted_fetus_cells_used_in_beauty_creams http://www.crossfeednews.com/weblink/life_issues/aborted_fetus_cells_used_in_beauty_creams http://www.crossfeednews.com/weblink/doctrine_and_teachings/christian_universities_take_diffe http://www.crossfeednews.com/weblink/doctrine_and_teachings/christian_universities_take_diffe  read more »]]> http://www.crossfeednews.com/weblink/marriage_and_family/marriage_for_gays_on_agenda_in_new_y http://www.crossfeednews.com/weblink/marriage_and_family/marriage_for_gays_on_agenda_in_new_y  read more »]]> http://www.crossfeednews.com/weblink/church_and_state/hindus_teachers_oppose_us_state_tax_on_ http://www.crossfeednews.com/weblink/church_and_state/hindus_teachers_oppose_us_state_tax_on_ http://www.altmuslim.com/a/a/a/fort_hood_has_enough_victims_already/ http://www.altmuslim.com/a/a/a/fort_hood_has_enough_victims_already/ http://www.christiantoday.com/article/3/campus.faith.hub.mobilises.students.to.social.action/24558.htm http://www.christiantoday.com/article/3/campus.faith.hub.mobilises.students.to.social.action/24558.htm http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/mysticsaintinspirations/%7E3/8ODF2GpQedc/fakhruddin-iraqi-divine-flashes-lamaat.html http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/mysticsaintinspirations/%7E3/8ODF2GpQedc/fakhruddin-iraqi-divine-flashes-lamaat.html http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/jta/breaking-news/%7E3/_SEu9uPmaj4/us-sees-abbas-in-continuing-role http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/jta/breaking-news/%7E3/_SEu9uPmaj4/us-sees-abbas-in-continuing-role ]]> http://www.jewishtreats.org/2009/11/divided-by-seven.html http://www.jewishtreats.org/2009/11/divided-by-seven.html ]]> http://www.jewishtreats.org/2009/11/torah-service.html http://www.jewishtreats.org/2009/11/torah-service.html
It begins with the opening of the aron ha’kodesh (holy ark - the cabinet housing the Torah scrolls). The Torah scroll is brought to the bimah (central table where the Torah is read) in a procession, while prayers are recited by the chazzan (prayer leader) and by the congregation.

On a typical Shabbat, the Torah portion is divided into seven parts. Seven people are called, one at a time, to the bimah for an aliyah (literally: going up). They recite the blessings before and after the reading of each section. An eighth person is called up to make the blessings over the maftir (extra) portion, which is either a repetition of the last few lines or a separate section of the Torah. Traditionally, the first aliyah is given to a Kohain, the second to a Levi, and the remaining aliyot to those descended from the other tribes.

Another important part of the Torah service is the ritual of hagbaha, the raising of the Torah scroll, open, for all to see. Sephardim do hagbaha before reading the Torah. Ashkenazim do hagbaha afterward.

While the scroll is open, the congregation says: V’zot ha’Torah ah’sher sahm Moshe lif’nai b’nai Yisrael--al pee Ah’doh’nai b’yad Moshe / This is the Torah that Moses placed before the Children of Israel--at God's commandment by the hand of Moses” (Deuteronomy 4:44/Numbers 9:23 - note that the section from Numbers is not recited in Sephardi congregations).

The honor of rolling the Torah closed after its reading is known as g’lila. The return of the Torah to the ark occurs in the reverse order of the original processional (from the bimah to the ark) after the reading of the Haftarah (reading from the prophets).