Easter!

Christ the Lord is Risen Today! Hallelujah!

Tomb, thou shalt not hold Him longer;
Death is strong, but Life is stronger;
Stronger than the dark, the light;
Stronger than the wrong, the right...
~ Phillips Brooks, "An Easter Carol"

Amen and Amen!

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Holy Saturday

The Day Between is significant because it exists...

"Not its number in the series, but its place, bears its significance as that day between the days which speaks solely neither of the cross nor of the resurrection, but simultaneously remembers the one and awaits the other, and guarantees that neither will be heard, or thought about, or lived, without the other." ~ Alan E. Lewis

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Good Friday

But God commendeth His love toward us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. ~ Romans 5:8

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!
~ It Is Well With My Soul by Horatio G. Spafford

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In Peace or In Sorrow

"It Is Well with My Soul" is a very influential hymn penned by hymnist Horatio Spafford and composed by Philip Bliss.

This hymn was written after several traumatic events in Spafford's life. The first was the death of his only son in 1871, shortly followed by the great Chicago Fire which ruined him financially (he had been a successful lawyer). Then in 1873, he had planned to travel to Europe with his family on the S.S. Ville du Havre, but sent the family ahead while he was delayed on business concerning zoning problems following the Great Chicago Fire. While crossing the Atlantic, the ship sank rapidly after a collision with a sailing ship, the Loch Earn, and all four of Spafford's daughters died. His wife Anna survived and sent him the now famous telegram, "Saved alone." Shortly afterwards, as Spafford traveled to meet his grieving wife, he was inspired to write these words as his ship passed near where his daughters had died.

Bliss called his tune Ville du Havre, from the name of the stricken vessel.

The Spaffords later had three more children, one of whom (a son) died in infancy. In 1881 the Spaffords, including baby Bertha and newborn Grace, set sail for Israel. The Spaffords moved to Jerusalem and helped found a group called the American Colony; its mission was to serve the poor. The colony later became the subject of the Nobel prize winning Jerusalem, by Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf.

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Damn Those Christians...

Like an Episcopalian could ever be motivated enough by his faith to take action. ;-)

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Jimmy "The Dhimmi" Carter: Worst. President. Ever.

Jimmy Carter: Abuse of Women Including Genital Mutilation is the Fault of Catholics & Southern Baptists

In an address to a gathering sponsored by the World Parliament of Religions (PWR) last Friday, former US President Jimmy Carter has once again blamed traditional religion, particularly Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics, for “creating an environment where violations against women are justified.”

Says Gateway Pundit: Last I checked it was the Muslims who performed female genital mutilation. But, Jimmy Carter would never have the guts to single out Muslims like that.

Jimmah, you... are a doddering old fool.

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Holy Saturday, Easter Vigil

"If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it that it is worth paying."

~ C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

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Good Friday

"Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask."

~ C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

"Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it."

~ C.S. Lewis (The World's Last Night)

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Merry Christmas!

Great little One! whose all-embracing birth

Lifts Earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to Earth.

~ Richard Crashaw

Joy To The World - Bebo Norman

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"Honest" Being The Key Word...

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

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Brave Gays Target Elderly Woman

Restaurant Manager To Leave El Coyote Over Prop. 8 Controversy

Frontiers magazine learned Saturday Marjorie Christoffersen is stepping down as a manager at the Los Angeles restaurant El Coyote. Bill Schoeppner, a fellow manager at El Coyote who has been with the restaurant for 26 years, told Frontiers Christoffersen was also resigning as a member of El Coyote's board of directors.

“She no longer works here,” Schoeppner said on Saturday. “She just told me tonight.”

Christoffersen created a firestorm of controversy for the 77-year-old L.A. institution after local blogs broke the news she had donated $100 to the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign. Long a popular destination for the LGBT community for its cheap Mexican food and generous Margaritas, El Coyote found itself the target of boycotts and demonstrations after Christoffersen's donation went public. In a press conference hosted by the restaurant days after the news of the donation broke, Christoffersen tried to explain her donation did not have to do with animus for gay and lesbian people, but was instead tied to her Mormon faith.

I'm so proud of my brave fellow gays for bringing down Marjorie Christoffersen - that elderly pillar of homophobia. Way to go boys and girls! Putting a senior citizen out of work who donated $100 to support Prop 8 because of her religious beliefs should get us the right to marry quicker than a drag queen's snap.

Note to liberals... everything above was sarcasm.

As someone who would like to see the same legal benefits and duties of marriage extended to gays and lesbians I would like to kindly ask you to sit down and shut up if the only way you know to protest is by harassment and bullying.

Boycotting a business or event is an acceptable way to make your feelings known. Targeting individuals in the same hateful manner in which you claim to have been targeted is not.

Via NRO: Marjorie Christofferson's Courage

Marjorie is just one of 89 people who work for El Coyote. No matter. El Coyote welcomes gay employees and customers, and did so long before that was cool. No matter. El Coyote has just sent $10,000 to gay organizations to atone for Marjorie’s sins. No matter. Marjorie has many gay friends whom she has helped over the years. "When one of the guys died from AIDS, Marjorie paid for his mother to fly out for his funeral," noted one restaurant patron. That doesn’t matter either. [...]

You can see for yourself what kind of person Marjorie Christofferson is at a meeting with GLBT leaders on YouTube here. [...]

In the end, shaking and tearful, she expressed regret for the pain she had caused, but Marjorie also said, " I cannot change a lifetime of faith in which I believe in very deeply. I cannot and will not, no matter what, change my love and respect for you and your views."

Not good enough. [...]

I'm sure many ordinary gay-marriage supporters deplore what happened to Marjorie. But this is now the face of their movement: agree with us, or we will hurt you.

I am appalled at the way Marjorie has been treated. Again, I find myself compelled to apologize for the childish, brutish, and irresponsible actions of far too many of my fellow gay and lesbian citizens. And the thing that really hacks me off about this, is that 99.9% of the spoiled, self-centered American gays who are treating Prop. 8 like their own personal pogrom have never known one day of true discrimination or hardship in their lives.

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Wow...

Korean Widower Doesn't Blame Pilot for F-18 Crash

A Korean immigrant whose family was killed when an F-18 crashed into his house returned home to survey the rubble and said he doesn't blame the military pilot who survived the accident.

Dong Yun Yoon, 37, lost his wife, two baby daughters and mother-in-law after a Marine Corps fighter plane clipped a tree and plummeted into houses about two miles from base. The pilot safely ejected and was rescued hanging by his parachute from a tree.

"I pray for him not to suffer for this action," Yoon said at a news conference, according to The Los Angeles Times. "I know he's one of our treasures for our country."

Just, wow. What a powerful statement. God bless Mr. Yoon.

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It's All About Choices...

UK School Cancels Christmas Nativity In Favour Of Muslim Eid Celebrations

Greenwood Junior School sent out a letter to parents saying the three-day festival of Eid al-Adha, which takes place between December 8 and 11, meant that Muslim children would be off school.

That meant planning for the traditional nativity play were shelved because the school felt it would be too difficult to run both celebrations side by side.

The move has left parents furious. [...]

Following outrage from parents, the school was forced to send out a second letter saying that the Christmas play would be done in January.

Sent by the head teacher, Amber Latif, and Yvonne Wright, chair of governors, it apologised for "any misunderstanding" but said it had to respect "the cultures and religions of all the children".

It added: "The Christmas performance has not been cancelled outright but has been postponed until the New Year."

Now, I can understand the school's choice to move the Christmas celebration. After all, the Christians aren't very likely to go wacky and riot or take hostages over a slight offense. Still, here's how it should work; if no other accommodation can be made the Muslim children and their parents have a choice to make: do they want to be in the Christmas Pageant or do they want to celebrate Eid? The school could also move the Eid observance to January. The Muslims could also send their children to a Muslim school, but given the already great failure to matriculate into British culture I'm not sure I'd encourage that.

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Another Thought On Minister Oprah

I wanted to add to my thoughts from this post on Oprah's views of faith and spirituality, by saying I believe the error that Oprah - and others - makes when talking about other faiths or rather their preferred word "paths" is to mistake any kernel of truth as the whole corn cob.

I rather agree with C.S. Lewis who said:

What had been holding me back [from a conversion to Christianity] has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can't believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense has the life and death of Christ 'saved' or 'opened salvation to' the world...

Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me ... was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn't mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in the Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even though I could not say in cold prose "what it meant". Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God's myth where the other are men's myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call "real things". Therefore, it is true, not in the sense of being a description of God (that no finite mind would take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to appear to our faculties. The "doctrines" we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.

And in The Pilgrim's Regress:

“Child, if you will, it is mythology. It is but truth, not fact: an image, not the very real. But then it is My mythology. The words of Wisdom are also myth and metaphor: but since they do not know themselves for what they are, in them the hidden myth is master, where it should be servant: and it is but of man’s inventing. But this is My invention, this is the veil under which I have chosen to appear even from the first until now. For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see My face and live. What would you have? Have you not heard among the Pagans the story of Semele? Or was there any age in any land when men did not know that corn and wine were the blood and body of a dying and yet living God?”

We can find the truth in all of human history and in all of mankind's stories - God has been speaking to us that long - but we don't find the whole truth until God himself came to us in the person of Christ. Of course such philosophizing is much more complicated than can be said in short quotes, but that I think is what Oprah is missing.

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Spiritual Oprah: Buying Into The Lie

What about Jesus?

Neither is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved. Acts 4:12

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God Help England

English Christians apologize for praying for Muslims:

A row has broken out after a Christian group organised a day of prayer in Oxford about Muslims during Ramadan.

The Muslim Education Centre of Oxford (Meco) accused Witney-based Open Doors UK of preaching “evangelical propaganda”, after the Christian group held a Call to Prayer day in Oxford yesterday.

But Open Doors UK, which held the event at St Aldate’s Church, insisted it had been taken out of context, although it “regretted” any offence that had been caused.

Good grief! They apologized faster than Takeru Kobayashi stuffs his mouth at a hot dog eating contest! Convert already you stupid dhimmis. I don't know about you but the Muslim world can kiss my entire ass; I will never apologize for praying.

via Gates of Vienna

And then there's this little bit of creeping sharia...

Compulsory Fasting For All During Ramadan

Later this month it's Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It's one of the holiest days of the Jewish calendar, so I'd be obliged, please, if you'd all stay at home, turn off the TV and refrain from your usual activities. Ten days after that it's Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when Jews fast and spend the day in synagogue. So I've also asked my Times colleagues not to work then. And I will be mightily offended if I learn afterwards that any of them have been eating.

You might not think I am being serious. But if I was Head of Democratic Services at Tower Hamlets Council in East London, I would be. Last week John Williams e-mailed each of the borough's 51 councillors with a similar instruction.

For the duration of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, they are, he told them - every one of them, Muslim, Catholic, Jew or atheist - to behave during council meetings as strict Muslims. They are not to eat or drink; they are to break for Muslim prayers; they are to do as they are ordered by the Muslim religion.

Oh yes, it is happening. Just imagine the outrage though, if someone tried to make the Muslim councilors fast during Yom Kippur or Lent? Hoo-boy! There'd be rioting and car burning in the streets! Burquas torn in anguish! Islamic Outrage Boy in an apoplectic fit! In short - the typical Muslim reaction to anything they don't like.

via Road Sassy

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The Religion Of Peace Kills Again

Saudi Man Kills Daughter For Converting To Christianity

A Saudi man working with the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice recently killed his daughter for converting to Christianity.

According to sources close to the victim, the religious police member had cut the tongue of the girl and burned her to death following a heated debate on religion.

I am the resurrection and the Life. He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. John 11:25

Tributes at Tasty Infidelicacies and Jihad Watch

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The "Jesus" Thing...

In case you haven't heard... Christians (or "Followers of the Way" or some other non-confrontational, meaningless generic label) should "move beyond" the whole "Jesus thing."

Via Mark Steyn, HT: Right View From The Left Coast

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Good Easter Morning To You All! Christ Has Died. Christ Has Risen. Christ Shall Come Again!

After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

The angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: 'He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.' Now I have told you."

So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them. "Greetings," he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me." ~ Matthew 28: 1-10

So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being.” The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, and afterward the spiritual. The first man was of the earth, made of dust; the second Man is the Lord from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are made of dust; and as is the heavenly Man, so also are those who are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man.

Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does corruption inherit incorruption. Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed— in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible has put on incorruption, and this mortal has put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” “ O Death, where is your sting? O Grave, where is your victory?” The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. ~ 1 Corinthians 15:42-57

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Amen!

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Hindu Vs. Christian

Hindu Extremists Attack Indian Churches

Gangs of Hindus and Christians defied a curfew imposed following two days of attacks by Hindu hard-liners. Local police have been unsuccessful in halting the attacks and the federal government announced it was sending in a paramilitary force.

A mob of Hindus torched the house of Radhakant Nayak, a member of the Indian parliament's upper house and a Christian leader in the area, Nayak told the CNN-IBN news channel.

It isn't just Muslims that go off the deep end. Every religion has it's nut jobs. But it's important to remember that Hindu or Christian or Buddhist violence makes news because it's rare. Muslim violence makes news because it's common.

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