Morality, Religion & Philosophy: August 2008 Archives
China confiscated over 300 Bibles from four American Christians yesterday.
The Bibles were taken from the group's checked luggage after they landed at the airport in the city of Kunming, said Pat Klein, head of Vision Beyond Borders. The group, based in Sheridan, Wyoming, distributes Bibles and Christian teaching materials around the world to "strengthen the persecuted church," according to its Web site.The group arrived in China on Sunday and had intended to distribute the Bibles to people in the city, Klein told the AP in a telephone interview while still at the airport.
"I heard that there's freedom of religion in China, so why is there a problem for us to bring Bibles?" Klein said. "We had over 300 copies and customs took all of them from us."
Officially, you heard right; in reality, you heard wrong. China doesn't have much freedom of anything.
(HT: JW.)
I guess cheating offsets are about as reasonable as carbon offsets!
What is Cheat Offsetting?When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere.
Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralises the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.
Can I offset all my cheating?
First you should look at ways of reducing your cheating. Once you've done this you can use Cheatneutral to offset the remaining, unavoidable cheating.
As a non-cheater, I can get paid to "offset" cheating done by others. It's win-win-win!
Regardless of how plausible you find the theory of Darwinian evolution to be, there's still no secular explanation for how life got started in the first place. (For starters, read about the problems posed by earth's oxidizing atmosphere.) So some secular scientists have decided to punt and consider the possibility that life came to earth on a meteor.
This once-controversial notion holds that the universe is filled with the ingredients of microbial life, and that earthly life first came from the skies as comet dust or meteorites salted with hardy bacteria."Studies have shown that microbes can survive the shock levels of being launched into space," said Charles Cockell, a microbiologist at the Open University. "And as more and more organisms are discovered under extreme conditions, it's become more plausible that things could survive in space for the time it takes to go from one planet to another."
Not long ago, Cockell's claims would have been greeted with scientific derision. But as scientists learn more about Earth and space, the theory, which goes by the grandiose name of "galactic panspermia," seems less far-fetched.
Less far-fetched than the idea that God created earth and the life that's on it? Maybe... if your starting point for every hypothesis is that there is no God.
In April, Columbia University chemist Ronald Breslow traced the molecular signatures of earthly amino acids to those of neutron stars."Everything that is going on on Earth occurred because the meteorites happened to land here. But they are obviously landing in other places," he said at the time. "If there is another planet that has the water and all of the things that are needed for life, you should be able to get the same process rolling."
Completely unfalsifiable, so it could be true! If you want to put your faith in interplanetary microbes, I guess that's up to you.
The Voice of the Martyrs website was attacked by hackers a couple of weeks ago.
On July 24, VOM’s Web site was deliberately attacked forcing us to take the site offline temporarily. Our network engineers say the attack originated outside the United States. We have to believe the intent was to silence the online voice of the persecuted church. ...We apologize for any inconvenience this interruption has caused, but at the same time we are thrilled our work is so effective that enemies of the Gospel took notice. Please pray for persecuted Christians around the world, especially during this Olympic season as the attention of the world turns to China.
I'd bet anything that the attack was the work of Chinese state-sponsored hackers trying to silence VoM in the run-up to the Olympics. VoM's mission is to publicize the persecution of Christians around the world, and China is one of the worst offenders.
Be in prayer for the Christians who are under constant persecution in China and other hostile lands around the world. Pray that their suffering will help bring the light of the Gospel to the other victims of these repressive regimes.
Corporations give millions of dollars to all sorts of non-profits, but sometimes the targets of their donations are inimical to human life and need to be stopped.
With shareholder activism, Strobhar has had a hand in changing the corporate giving policies of more than 150 companies, essentially depriving Planned Parenthood [the nation's largest performer of abortions] of donations that would have totaled multimillions of dollars.The tool of choice for Strobhar, who describes himself as "just a stockbroker from Dayton, Ohio," is the shareholder resolution. In order to introduce a shareholder resolution, a shareholder must own stock in the company valued at $2,000 or more for at least one year prior to the introduction of the resolution. Since 1991, Strobhar has introduced more than 60 such resolutions. ...
AT&T was giving $50,000 a year to Planned Parenthood when Strobhar began his activism at the company. The company had received thousands of letters from customers [protesting those contributions], but to no avail. It was only when Strobhar threatened the introduction of a shareholder resolution, suggesting that the company was in "breach of fiduciary responsibility," that AT&T paid attention. Within months, AT&T announced it would no longer contribute to Planned Parenthood. ...
General Mills and American Express also stopped giving to Planned Parenthood following shareholder resolutions introduced by Strobhar.
Bravo. Strobhar should serve as an example to opponents of both corporations and free speech: the solution to speech you don't like, or corporations you don't like, isn't to suppress or boycott, it's to get engaged with some speech of your own.
(HT: Sound Mind Investing Blog.)
