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Former Rugby Player Files Religious Discrimination Suit after Being Fired over Expressing His Christian Views
After being fired for sharing a post on Instagram opposing homosexuality, Australian Christian Rugby player Israel Folau has filed suit against Rugby Australia.
On Thursday, the 30-year-old announced that he had filed an application with the Australian Fair Work Commission for religious discrimination, which he believes was the backbone of his termination. “No Australian of any faith should be fired for practicing their religion,” Folau argued, according to the Christian Post.
As Christian Headlines previously reported, Folau’s contract was terminated in April after he shared a post on Instagram warning “drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists, [and] idolaters” to turn away from sin.
The former Wallabies player wrote in the April 10 post, “Those that are living in Sin will end up in Hell unless you repent. Jesus Christ loves you and is giving you time to turn away from your sin and come to him.”
He then quoted Galatians 5:19-21 which says, “Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these , adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they…
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Pope’s change to Lord’s Prayer divides Catholics
Pope Francis officially re-wrote the line ‘lead us not into temptation’ after claiming that the English translation misrepresented God.
The line will now read ‘do not let us fall into temptation’, to clarify that it is not God who tempts us.
Speaking to Italian broadcaster TV2000 last year, he said: “It is not a good translation because it speaks of a God who induces temptation.
“I am the one who falls. It’s not him pushing me into temptation to then see how I have fallen.
“A father doesn’t do that, a father helps you to get up immediately. It’s Satan who leads us into temptation, that’s his department.”
The pontiff has left it to each country’s church leaders to update the phrase but English and Welsh Catholics have said they do not intend to revise the original wording.
Speaking to Premier, a media spokesman for the Catholic Church in England and Wales said: “Translations are the responsibility of International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL). The Bishops then give approval and then send for agreement by the Congregation in Rome.
“ICEL is not currently considering the Lord’s Prayer.”
The revised prayer will appear in the third edition of the Messale Ramano – which includes all the text of celebration of Mass in the Catholic Church.
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Click Read More to read the rest of the story from our content source/partners – Premier Christianity News.
Forced Conversions, Marriages Spike in Pakistan
LAHORE, Pakistan (RNS) — Sixteen-year-old Suneeta and her 12-year-old sister were walking home in March when they were kidnapped.
The men who took them forced the girls to convert to Islam.
“We were walking back to our house after working on the farm when men in a car came out of nowhere and dragged us in with them,” said Suneeta, who is Hindu and lives in Badin, a small city in the south of Pakistan. “The next thing we knew, we were in a shrine being forced to say the kalma (acceptance of Islam) by a cleric.”
The men who kidnapped the girls told their mother to pay the equivalent of $365 — an enormous amount for the poor farming family — or the men would marry off the girls.
Their mother begged and borrowed from within the Hindu community and paid the ransom. She got her girls back.
The family considers itself lucky.
Every year, thousands of Hindu and Christian girls and young women are kidnapped in Pakistan and forcibly married, disappearing from their families. And while these forced conversions have been going on for decades, a recent surge in reported cases has brought the issue back into the limelight.
Around 1,000 cases of Hindu and Christian girls being forced to convert were estimated in the province of southern Sindh alone in 2018, according to the annual report of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.
There are no concrete numbers for the rest of…
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Biden Caves, Says He Now Supports Taxpayer-Funded Abortion
Former Vice President Joe Biden told a crowd Thursday night he had changed his mind and now supports taxpayer-funded abortion, putting him in line on the issue with other major Democrats for the party’s presidential nomination.
“If I believe health care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s ZIP code,” he said, according to CNN.
Biden was the only major Democrat who backed the Hyde Amendment, a provision dating back to 1977 that prevents federal funds from being used to fund abortion, as Christian Headlines previously reported. Congress regularly reauthorizes it as part of spending bills.
The 2016 Democratic Platform pledged to overturn the amendment, but Biden had voted for it during his time in the Senate.
Biden maintained he was a strong supporter of Roe v. Wade yet said he opposed federal funds being used for abortions. Biden is Catholic.
“Those of us who are opposed to abortions should not be compelled to pay for them,” he wrote to constituents in 1994, according to NBC News.
He told a Catholic publication in the 1980s that “abortion is wrong from the moment of conception.” He said as late as 2007 there was a “sliding scale relating to viability of a fetus” in law.
Such comments had concerned pro-choice Democrats.
On Thursday, Biden said his position had evolved on…
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Six Unique Additions Some Churches Have Made to Their Worship Services
Podcast Episode #543
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Corporate worship is stale in many churches. These six additions can help re-engage your members during corporate worship and spur them to further ministry.
Some highlights from today’s episode include:
- For a church to be a praying church, you have to be very intentional about how you lead the church to pray during corporate worship.
- Use your offertory time to give an example of how the funds given through the church are ministering to those in the community and around the world.
- I wish more churches prayed for other churches in their community more often.
- When you celebrate the ministry of members, it should encourage others to join them in missions and ministry.
The six additions we discuss are:
- Worship prep: A preview of the history and meaning of music chosen for the service.
- Prayer guide: Helping the congregation know how to pray corporately.
- Reasons for stewardship: An example of how God is using the funds given through the church.
- Pray for other churches: A different church in the community each week.
- Gifts to give your neighbors: One church gives each member a small loaf of bread to take to their neighbors.
- Featured missional member: Each month or week a church member is featured for his or her ministry.
Resources mentioned in today’s podcast
Rainer on Leadership is a member of the LifeWay Leadership Podcast Network
Episode Sponsors
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A teenager’s suicide and the bravery of D-Day: Finding a cause worth our lives
The story is not always the story.
National and international news outlets are focusing this morning on the way a Dutch teenager’s death was erroneously reported this week. Noa Pothoven’s death was described as the result of legal euthanasia in the Netherlands. Her family then had to clarify that her death was actually caused by starvation.
However, the emphasis should be less on the reporting of her death than on the fact that she chose to die.
Noa Pothoven was sexually assaulted at the age of eleven, then raped by two men three years later. She developed post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and eating disorders.
As her health continued to deteriorate, she posted on Instagram: “After years of battling and fighting, I am drained. I have quit eating and drinking for a while now, and after many discussions and evaluations, it was decided to let me go because my suffering is unbearable.”
She was being fed through a tube before, as the BBC reports, “her family accepted her wish to die, so they stopped forcing her to stay alive and instead used palliative care to make her final days as peaceful and bearable as possible.”
A “coffin-size” euthanasia pod
“Sarco” is a suicide chamber described by Fast Company as “a coffin-size pod you get into in order to painlessly and peacefully kill yourself on purpose.” The chamber rapidly replaces the oxygen in the pod with nitrogen gas, causing what the article describes as a “quick, painless” death.
Physician-assisted suicide is legally available to one in five Americans this morning. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide was the tenth leading cause of death in America in 2017, claiming more than forty-seven thousand lives. It was the second leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of ten and thirty-four.
There were more than twice as many suicides in the US as there were homicides.
In a…
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