Billy Graham Death Rumors Debunked

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Billy Graham Death Rumors Debunked

Billy Graham today may be quoting Mark Twain, who once famously said, “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

Somehow, a social-media report of the iconic evangelist’s demise at the age of 96 gained enormous traction late last week—despite denials from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Nevertheless, an “R.I.P.” Facebook page quickly gained 1 million “Likes.”

Who would perpetrate such a malicious social-media hoax and why?

We may never know.

“News of religious figure Billy Graham’s death spread quickly earlier [last] week causing concern among fans across the world,” mediamass.net reported. “However, the November 2014 report has now been confirmed as a complete hoax and just the latest in a string of fake celebrity death reports. Thankfully, the 96-year-old religious figure is alive and well.”

Rumors of the religious figure’s alleged demise gained traction on Saturday after an “R.I.P. Billy Graham” Facebook page attracted nearly one million “likes.” Those who read the “About” page were given a believable account of the American Christian leader’s passing:

“At about 11 a.m. ET on Saturday (Nov. 22, 2014), our beloved religious figure Billy Graham passed away. Billy Graham was born on Nov. 7, 1918 in Charlotte. He will be missed but not forgotten. Please show your sympathy and condolences by commenting on and liking this page…Read More

Source and Original Content by BCNN1

Lawyer Denied Access to Clients Imprisoned in Iran

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Lawyer Denied Access to Clients Imprisoned in Iran

The lawyer representing two Christian pastors and a deacon facing six years in prison in Iran for their faith has reportedly been denied access to his clients ahead of an appeal hearing.

“It is unacceptable that these men have been denied access to their legal counsel ahead of the court hearing. We remain concerned about the lack of due process in their case and the exceptional nature of their punishment. They have committed no crime and are effectively being punished for their faith,” said Christian Solidarity Worldwide’s Chief Executive Mervyn Thomas on Monday.

“We are deeply concerned for their wellbeing and, in particular, for pastor Irani’s health, which has deteriorated significantly during his unjust detention. We urge the Iranian authorities to release these men and the many others who are being held in contravention of the international covenants guaranteeing freedom of religion or belief to which Iran is party,” Thomas added.

The lawyer, Vahid Moshkani Farahani, has been seeking to meet with pastor Behnam Irani, pastor Matthias Haghnejad and deacon Silas Rabbani ahead of the trial, but has been denied by Iranian authorities several times.

The Christians all received six-year sentences in October, and are facing an appeal at the Sixth Branch of Karaj Revolutionary Court.

Farahani has also expressed concerns for the welfare of Irani, who has complained of several medical issues while in prison, but has not received the needed medical care.

In an earlier report, the persecution watchdog group noted that the Christians are set to serve out their sentences in isolated prisons, which would force their families to travel great distances to visit them…Read More

Source and Original Content by Christian Post

Christian and Yazidi Refugees are Thrown into Fear as Winter Approaches

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Christian and Yazidi Refugees are Thrown into Fear as Winter Approaches

Christian, Yazidi and other refugees in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq who fled Islamic State terrorists now face a freezing winter with temperatures of 35 to 55 degrees and few resources to sustain them.

“Winter is upon them, and it is already cold at nights, but they don’t have anywhere to go,” Juliana Taimoorazy, president of the Iraqi Christian Relief Council told the National Catholic Register. “This is a human tragedy unfolding in front of our eyes, and not enough is happening.

The refugee camps are already affected by fever and disease, she said. Thousands of refugees have left Iraq altogether and crossed the border into Turkey.

According to the UN there are about 850,000 Iraqi refugees in Kurdistan, including 150,000 Christians.

Caroline Brennan, of Catholic Relief Services, told NCR: “Just weeks or months ago, they were middle-class; they had homes; they had careers: They were corporate professionals or barbers or teachers or college students. Now, they are just living under extremely perilous conditions.”

Source and Original Content by Christian Today

Historic Church in Mosul Destroyed by Islamic State

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Historic Church in Mosul Destroyed by Islamic State

Islamic State militants have blown up one of the oldest churches in the city of Mosul, according to Kurdish media sources.

St George’s church was built in the late 17th century, though rebuilt in 1931.

According to the Rudaw news service, cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is Great) rose from many mosques in the city as Islamist militants blew up the church.

Since its takeover of Mosul in June, Islamic State has destroyed a number of churches, Shiite mosques and other ancient sites, including the shrine of Prophet Jonah.

Mosul was once the heartland of Iraqi Christianity, with a Christian presence going back many generations. Islamic State militants gave Christians the option of leaving the the city, converting or dying when they took over the city in July. Many were murdered or driven out in circumstances of extreme brutality.

Saad Mamuzin, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party’s (KDP) 14th branch in Mosul told Rudaw that the latest bombings are Islamic State’s revenge for their defeat on the battleground.

“The organisation has once again turned to bombing churches and mosques after it lost popularity and many of its members to the airstrikes that have targeted strongholds in different areas of the city,” he said.

The extremist group has also blown up Yazidi and Kakei shrines outside the city as thousands of Yazidi and Christians have fled their homes to the Kurdistan region.

Pressure is mounting on Islamic State in the area, with the reported death of at least 33 militants yesterday in Mosul and the surrounding region, including a leader implicated in the sale of abducted Yazidi women. Iraqi security forces have retaken two town after battles with militants.

US Vice President Joe Biden met Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan during a visit to Istanbul at the weekend aimed at boosting co-operaton between the two countries in their policy towards Islamic State. Turkey has been a reluctant partner in the US-led coalition. It has demanded the removal of President Bashar al-Assad from power in Syria and the establishment of a no-fly zone in Syria, which the US has resisted. However, Turkey has offered to train Syrian rebels and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.

Source and Original Content by Christian Today

Sony to Cut Smartphone and TV Lineup

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Sony to Cut Smartphone and TV Lineup

Japan’s loss-making Sony Corp plans to slash its TV and mobile phone product line-ups to cut costs, counting on multi-billion dollar revenue surges for its buoyant PlayStation 4 and image sensor businesses over the next three years.

Having lost ground to nimbler rivals like Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd in consumer electronics, Sony said on Tuesday its goal for TV and smartphones is to turn a profit, even if sales slide as much as 30 percent.

“We’re not aiming for size or market share but better profits,” Hiroki Totoki, Sony’s newly appointed chief of its mobile division told an investors’ conference. A poor showing by its Xperia smartphones has weighed heavily on recent earnings and Sony said more detail on plans for the unit will be unveiled before end-March.

With cost cuts on the way in some divisions, Sony is also not planning to renew its FIFA soccer sponsorship contract next year, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Under its new three-year electronics business plan, Sony said it was aiming to boost sales for its videogame division by a quarter to as much as 1.6 trillion JPY ($13.6 billion, roughly Rs. 84,300 crores). It said that will be helped by personalised TV, video and music distribution services that should lift revenue per paying user.

At its devices division, which houses its image sensor business, Sony said sales could increase 70 percent to as much as 1.5 trillion yen. Sony’s sensor sales are already robust, with Apple using them in its iPhones while Chinese handset manufacturers are increasingly adopting them.

In a similar event last week for its entertainment units, the conglomerate said it was aiming to lift its movie and TV programming revenues by a third over the next three years.

Shares in Sony finished 6 percent higher on hopes that the new measures show a greater sense of restructuring urgency, while the Nikkei 225 index rose 0.3 percent.

“There’s a lot of expectation for Sony now, but nothing is sure until there are results,” said Ichiyoshi Asset Management chief fund manager Akino Mitsushige. “Getting out of the mobile market is an option, but they can’t do that now, so they will need to make some fundamental changes.”

Source and Original Content by NDTV

James Fortune Granted Supervised Visitation Rights To Kids

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James Fortune Granted Supervised Visitation Rights To Kids

Whatever award-winning gospel singer James Fortune did to his wife Cheryl Fortune, he did it in the presence of the couple’s children.

Yet, she advocated on his behalf in court to get his supervised visitation rights reinstated. The court consented.

According to Houston’s KTRK, Mr. Fortune went back to Fort Bend County court last Wednesday, Nov. 19, to request permission to see his four children.

Last month, he was charged with Aggravated Assault Family Violence and was not allowed any contact with his children since the alleged incident happened.

Fortune’s wife Cheryl, the alleged victim, testified on his behalf.

KTRK says, “She told the judge that the kids were present when the alleged incident occurred, but were not harmed. She also said she believes it’s in the best interest of the children for them to have visitation with their father.”

Now that Judge Hawkins obliged, what does this mean…Read More

Source and Original Content by BCNN1

Rick Warren, Russell Moore, N. T. Wright State their Stands on Marriage

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Rick Warren, Russell Moore, N. T. Wright State their Stands on Marriage

“There is always a danger in being the 28th speaker in a conference,” said Rick Warren during his speech today at Pope Francis’s marriage conference. “What’s left to say?”

Apparently plenty, as Warren’s speech—which he said he wrote from scratch the night before after yesterday’s speakers covered his previously prepared main points—was “probably the first time ever the synod hall resembled a revivalist meeting,” tweeted David Quinn, an Irish Catholic columnist. The Saddleback Church senior pastor reportedly received a standing ovation following his remarks defending marriage between a man and a woman.

“As Christians we seem to be known more for what we’re against than what we’re for. I want to change that,” said Warren. According to his prepared remarks obtained by CT, he explored why Hebrews 13:4 commands that “marriage is to be honored by everyone” and laid out an “action plan” for conference attendees. In true evangelical form, his eight steps are in mostly alphabetical order:

Affirm the authority of God’s word
Believe what Jesus taught about marriage
Celebrate healthy marriages
Develop small group courses to support marriage
Engage every media to promote marriage
Face attackers with joy and winsomeness
Give people confidence
Teach the purposes of marriage

“It is a myth that we must give up biblical truth on sexuality and marriage in order to evangelize,” said Warren in his conclusion, which noted how Saddleback recently baptized its 40,000th adult convert. “In the end we must be merciful to the fallen, show grace to struggling, and be patient with the doubting. But when God’s Word is clear we must not—and we cannot—back up, back off, back down, back out, or backslide from the truth.”

Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission, also addressed the conference, acknowledging that the gathered audience came from different—and potentially warring—countries and represented a variety of faiths.

“But all of us in this room share at least one thing in common,” said Moore. “We recognize that marriage and family is a matter of public importance, not just of our various theological and ecclesial distinctive communities, since marriage is embedded in the creation order and is the means of human flourishing, not just the arena of individual human desires and appetites…Read More

Source and Original Content by Christian Today

Homosexuality Debate: Tragedy, Tradition, and Opportunity

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Homosexuality Debate: Tragedy, Tradition, and Opportunity

As 2014 comes to a close, many believe the question of the legal, public status of gay marriage has been effectively settled—even before the Supreme Court finally pronounces on the matter. Fierce battles over religious freedom will continue, but already about 60 percent of all Americans now live in states where gay marriage is legal. In those states, and perhaps soon in the entire country, the public policy issue is largely settled at least for a generation or two.

But the change in public policy need not—and should not—settle the issue for the church. Instead all of us are being compelled to examine our beliefs and practices. This is a good thing. We deeply need a new approach to our neighbors and our churches’ own members, especially those who live with a same-sex attraction or orientation. To find this will require acknowledging the tragedy of our recent history, the continuity of Christian teaching, and the opportunity for a new kind of ministry.

The Tragedy

We must start with the tragedy that evangelical Christians who long to be biblical are widely perceived as hostile to gays. And it is largely our own fault. Many of us have actually been homophobic. Most of us tolerated gay bashers. Many of us were largely silent when bigots in the society battered or even killed gay people. Very often, we did not deal sensitively and lovingly with young people in our churches struggling with their sexual orientation. Instead of taking the lead in ministering to people with AIDS, some of our leaders even opposed government funding for research to discover medicine to help them.

At times, we even had the gall to blame gay people for the tragic collapse of marriage in our society, ignoring the obvious fact that the main problem by far is that many of the 95 percent of the people who are heterosexual do not keep their marriage vows. In fact, self-described evangelicals get divorced at higher rates than Catholics and Mainline Protestants! We have frequently failed to distinguish gay orientation from gay sexual activity—even though if any of us were judged by the persistent inclinations of our hearts, on sexual matters or otherwise, none of us could stand.

If the devil had designed a strategy to discredit the historic Christian position on sexuality, he could not have done much better than what the evangelical community has actually done in the last several decades.

Some believe that the track record of evangelicals is so bad that we should just remain silent on this issue. But that would mean abandoning our submission to what finally I believe is clear biblical teaching. It would mean forgetting the nearly unanimous teaching of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians over two millennia. And it would mean failing to listen to the vast majority of contemporary Christians (who now live in the global South).

Biblical Consistency

The primary biblical case against homosexual practice is not the few texts that explicitly mention it. Rather, it is the fact that again and again the Bible affirms the goodness and beauty of sexual intercourse—and everywhere, without exception, the norm is sexual intercourse between a man and a woman committed to each other for life. Although this is familiar ground, and less and less contested even by those who advocate for a revision of Christian ethics, it is important to state just how strongly and consistently the Bible speaks to the goodness of marriage between a man and a woman, and equally consistently to the immorality of sexual acts (heterosexual and homosexual) that do not honor that bond…Read More

Source and Original Content by Christianity Today

French Atheist Becomes a Theologian

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French Atheist Becomes a Theologian

If French atheists rarely become evangelical Christians, how much rarer it is for one to become an evangelical Christian theologian. So what happened? One might argue that with 66 million French people, I’m just a fluke, an anomaly. I am inclined to see it as the work of a God who says, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy” (Rom. 9:15). Hearing the facts may help you decide for yourself.

I grew up in a wonderfully loving family in France, near Paris. We were Catholic, a religious expression that seemed to arise more out of tradition and perhaps superstition than conviction. As soon as I was old enough to tell my parents I didn’t believe any of it, I stopped going to Mass. I pursued my own happiness on all fronts, benefiting from my parents’ loving dedication. It allowed me to do well at school, learn to play the piano, and get involved in many sports. I studied math, physics, and engineering in college, graduated from a respected engineering school, and landed a job as a computer scientist in finance. On the sports front, after I grew to be 6 feet 4 inches and discovered I could jump 3 feet high, I ended up playing volleyball in a national league, traveling the country every weekend for the games.

An important part of young male French atheist ideals consisted of female conquests. Here, I was starting to have enough success to satisfy the raunchy standards of the volleyball locker room. All in all, I was pretty happy with my life. And in a thoroughly secular culture, the chances of ever hearing the gospel—let alone believing it—were incredibly slim.
New Life Goal

When I was in my mid-20s, my brother and I vacationed in the Caribbean. One day, returning from the beach, we decided to hitchhike home. A car pulled over. Two young women visiting from America were lost and needed directions to their hotel. Incidentally, it was right next to our house, so they gave us a ride.

They were attractive enough that my radar went off immediately, and we started flirting. The one I was interested in happened to mention she believed in God—by my standards an intellectual suicide. She also said she believed that sex belongs in marriage—an even more problematic belief than theism, if that were possible. Nevertheless, once the vacation ended, I returned to Paris, she to New York, and we started dating.

My new goal in life was to disabuse my girlfriend of her beliefs so that we could be together without antiquated notions of God—or sex—standing in the way. I started thinking: What good reason was there to think God exists, and what good reason was there to think atheism was true? This step was important, because my own unbelief rested comfortably on the fact that the smart people around me didn’t believe in God either. It was more a reasonable life assumption than the conclusion of a solid argument. But of course, if I was going to refute Christianity, I first needed to know what it claimed. So I picked up a Bible.

At the same time, I figured there was at least one experiment I could carry out. I thought, If any of this is true, then the God who exists presumably cares greatly about this project of mine. So I started to pray into the air: “If there is a God, then here I am. I’m looking into this. Why don’t you go ahead and reveal yourself to me? I’m open.” I wasn’t, but I figured that if God existed, that wouldn’t stop him…Read More

Source and Original Content by Christianity Today

After Facebook Appeal, French Man with Down’s Syndrome Receives 3,000 Birthday Cards

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After Facebook Appeal, French Man with Down’s Syndrome Receives 3,000 Birthday Cards

A French man with Down’s syndrome has received 30,000 birthday cards from around the world after a Facebook appeal from his mother.The postal service reportedly had to use a lorry to deliver the mountain of envelopes and parcels sent to Manuel Parisseaux in Calais, which the family have had to store in a neighbour’s garage.

His mother, Jacqueline, decided to do something special to mark his 30th birthday and on 3 November, posted a Facebook status on her husband’s page.According to local paper La Voix du Nord, it read: “I have a request to make to all my Facebook friends – my son Manuel is going to turn 30 years old on November 22 and he loves to receive postcards.

“He has Down’s syndrome. I’m writing to ask you to take a couple minutes to send him a little card and to pass this information on to your friends so the chain doesn’t get broken.”I thank you all in advance for your gesture, which will make my Manu so happy.”

The post went viral, sparking automated efforts by Facebook to shut down Lucien Parisseaux’s account believing it was an advertising scam.Mrs Parisseaux had to create a new page under her maiden name for the appeal to continue and a trickle of cards soon turned into a flood.

On Saturday alone, her son’s birthday, 3,000 cards arrived along with chocolate, cakes and small presents from countries including Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, the US and Australia.“We would never have imagined the impact that a simple internet message could have in a few days, “ Mrs Parisseaux told La Voix du Nord.

“We are surprised by this outpouring of generosity and messages of support and kindness. The world is not indifferent after all.”

La-poste

Source and Original Content by The Independent

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