Techcordance

Mosque

NEW YORK, N.Y. — The construction of a mosque has been approved near Ground Zero that has many people, especially family members of 9/11 victims, upset.Critics say it’s not so much the mosque itself they find objectionable, but the location.
Eight and a half years after September 11, 2001, people still come to pay their respects and remember the nearly 3,000 lives that were lost when radical Muslims flew two hijacked American airliners into the World Trade Center towers. It was the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil. Today the Cordoba Institute’s Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is pushing forward with a new mosque and community center near Ground Zero which he says will help bridge the gap and bring healing between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Prayer

(CNSNews.com) – Two top evangelical leaders sounded a defiant tone on the eve of National Day of Prayer — warning that the American right to freedom of religion “is being eroded every day” and may be lost in an onslaught of secularism unless Americans “have the guts to stand up.”
The Rev. Franklin Graham, who last month was officially “dis-invited” by the Army to speak at a National Day of Prayer ceremony at the Pentagon for statements he made about Islam, said he will not back down in preaching the Gospel as he sees it.
“We’re living in a time where we cannot compromise, we cannot back up, we cannot retreat,” Graham said Wednesday during a live Webcast from the Washington, D.C. offices of the Family Research Council.
“The Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is to be preached to the ends of the Earth – that’s what He’s called us to do,” he said.
Graham, the honorary chairman of this year’s National Day of Prayer, made his comments in a sermon to an audience of leaders making final preparations for Thursday’s National Day of Prayer.

Lawsuit

A Florida school district is being sued for “persistent and widespread” restrictions on religious expression. Liberty Counsel, a legal group often representing Christians in religious freedom and family cases, filed a lawsuit Tuesday on behalf of two dozen individuals against the Santa Rosa County School District and its Superintendent, Timothy Wyrosdick, for violations of First Amendment rights.
The plaintiffs – which include teachers, students, former students, parents, volunteers and local members of the community – complain that they have been censored, intimidated or harassed by the school district and its partner, the American Civil Liberties Union. Last year, the school district agreed to a Consent Decree drafted by the ACLU that restricts the practice or promotion of religious expression and activities by students. The decree was adopted after the ACLU sued Santa Rosa schools over the same issue – the right to pray and express religious beliefs in school.

NARAL

By R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

Nancy Keenan is worried. The current president of NARAL, Keenan detects a loss of fervor in support of abortion rights among younger women, and she talked openly to Newsweek about her concern. Are we witnessing a major shift of momentum on the issue of abortion? Keenan’s group is officially known as NARAL Pro-Choice America. It was founded in 1969 as the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws and NARAL is the oldest abortion-rights advocacy group in the United States. The group may have changed its name after Roe v. Wade, but it hasn’t changed its agenda – NARAL is committed to an all-out defense of abortion rights. All this comes to light in a report by Sarah Kliff of Newsweek. In the magazine’s April 26, 2010 edition Kliff outlines the challenges facing the abortion rights movement. In the aftermath of the health care reform signed into law by President Obama, abortion rights groups are licking their political wounds. As Kliff explains, the movement woke up to the fact that a significant number of Democrats in both the House and the Senate are pro-life. Even as the executive order signed by President Obama offered some limited and tenuous protections for the unborn, the pro-abortion movement was far more alarmed by the fact that the House of Representatives had earlier passed the so-called “Stupak amendment” that would have represented the most significant modification of abortion law since Roe v. Wade.

Franklin Graham

Last Sunday the president of the United States came to visit my 91-year-old father, Billy Graham, and me at my father’s home in North Carolina. If either of us wanted to visit the president at his home or even just to speak with him on the phone, we would have to navigate one or more telephone operators, receptionists or executive assistants–and still might not be successful in reaching him.
This morning, and numerous times throughout the day, I spoke directly to the God of this universe–no switchboard, secretaries, call screeners or voice mail. What an amazing thing! Even more amazing, God was waiting on my call and anxious to hear from me and talk to me, no matter how many times I called. Prayer–talking to God–is a vibrant and vital personal practice; but it is also a very real part of our national history.
In 1775 George Washington and the Continental Congress requested the colonies to pray for wisdom in a war for independence. Nearly 100 years later, President Abraham Lincoln offered a proclamation of a day of “humiliation, fasting and prayer.” Almost a century later, in 1952, President Harry Truman signed a joint resolution of Congress declaring an annual, national day of prayer. President Ronald Reagan, in 1988 amended the law, permanently establishing the first Thursday of May as the National Day of Prayer, a tradition every president, Republican and Democrat alike, has honored by signing a proclamation encouraging all Americans to pray on this day…

Anti-Religious
Sixty-four percent of Americans believe that rulings by judges in recent years have been more anti-religious than the Founding Fathers intended, a new poll shows. Only 21 percent of adults think the judges’ rulings regarding religion in public life have correctly interpreted the U.S. Constitution, according to Rasmussen Reports.
Among evangelical Christians, 87 percent say the rulings have been too anti-religious. Those who practice other religions are evenly divided on the question.
Meanwhile, 51 percent of those who rarely or never attend a religious service believe the courts have correctly interpreted the Constitution.
“Legal scholars, religious leaders and politicians have argued for decades over whether the ’separation of church and state’ is actually enshrined in the Constitution,” the report, released Friday, states. “One side argues that the Constitution merely prohibits the establishment of a government-mandated official religion, but the other reads in the document the complete banishment of religion from anything touched by the government. The courts in recent years have leaned in the direction of the latter position.”

Earth Day


Churches around the world are celebrating the 40th anniversary of Earth Day on Thursday. And while some are taking the call to go green to a whole new level, others are more hesitant. “I think our churches should be the first to push the envelope in terms of reducing our carbon footprint,” Molly Harper Haines, 27, told the United Methodist News Service. “If every church ‘got off the grid’ by installing solar panels or using wind energy (for example), had community gardens to grow food and flowers for decorations … the world would be a different place.”…
Earth Day was created in 1970 by Sen. Gaylord Nelson. Forty years later, environmental groups believe the world is in “greater peril than ever” and that climate change is “the greatest challenge of our time.”
Those words don’t sit well with Reformed Pastor Kevin DeYoung of East Lansing, Mich.
Though not opposed to Christians celebrating Earth Day and thinking through ways to steward the earth, DeYoung believes the Earth Day movement rests on “several debatable premises” like the world being in greater peril than ever. Moreover, the annual observance is also steeped in politics, advocacy and assumed solutions, he argues.

Demotion

A NASA employee in Pasadena, California, has filed suit over action taken against him for discussing intelligent design with other employees.David Coppedge, an information technology specialist and system administrator on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s mission to Saturn, claims he was harassed and demoted from a high-level job because he distributed DVDs that explain intelligent design.
Casey Luskin, an attorney with the Discovery Institute, tells OneNewsNow that NASA officials claimed intelligent design is religious material when it is really scientific.
“The evolution lobby has long claimed that intelligent design is religion and cannot be advocated in public schools,” Luskin reports. “But now they are claiming that intelligent design is religion and cannot even be talked about at scientific research organizations, whose primary goal is to study the origin of life.” The only employees who received the DVDs were willing recipients, and the Discovery Institute attorney explains that Coppedge “would offer these pro-intelligent design DVDs to his coworkers, and if they said that they were not interested, he would drop the matter. He was not pushy in trying to share these DVDs with his coworkers,” Luskin assures.Nonetheless, the NASA employee was accused of promoting ideas in a fashion that was unwelcome and disruptive, and he was charged with creating a hostile work environment. Action was taken without Coppedge being allowed to even see evidence against him, so now he is suing for religious discrimination, harassment and retaliation, violation of his free-speech rights, and wrongful demotion.

Appeal


Almost two dozen members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, came together Wednesday to issue a resolution calling on the Obama Administration to strongly appeal the recent ruling by a Wisconsin federal judge declaring the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional.
The members of Congress say they are willing to take the legal fight all the way up to the Supreme Court.
It was Congress in 1952 that designated the National Day of Prayer as a time to “turn to God in prayer and meditation.”
Now, it is current members of Congress who are trying to save the tradition.
“This decision is not representative of a vast majority of Americans regardless of their faith or even their non-faith,” Virginia Congressman Randy Forbes said.
Forbes, Chairman of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, and Democrat Ambassador Tony Hall are rallying bi-partisan support for the National Day of Prayer in the wake of the Wisconsin ruling against it.

Promotion Denied

Dr. Mike Adams was on the academic fast track while serving the University of North Carolina-Wilmington as an atheist, but after the professor converted to Christianity in 2000, he alleges, the college put the clamps on his career.In a lawsuit against the university, Adams claims he was subject to unmerited complaints and “invasive” investigations following his conversion. Furthermore, he believes his application for promotion from associate professor to a tenured full professor was denied because his nationally syndicated columns were deemed too politically conservative by his leftist peers.”Christian professors should not be discriminated against because of their beliefs,” said David French, senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing Adams in the case. “Disagreeing with an accomplished professor’s religious and political views is no grounds for refusing him promotion.”U.S. District Judge Malcolm J. Howard, however, ruled against Adams last month, quoting a fellow professor’s claims that Adams hadn’t met minimum research and writing requirements and that his Christian, conservative writings were not “scholarly work by the measures of our discipline.”But Adams contends his scholarly output surpassed that of almost all of his colleagues and that the senior faculty’s real beef with him lies in the content of his convictions.