I was raised in a very strict religious household. I always had my doubts, I always had questions that could not really be voiced or in turn could not really be answered. I finally left that religion, about 10 years ago. About, maybe 5 years ago, I declared I didn’t believe that Satan existed. I am now at a crossroads. I have come to the fork on the road and I don’t know which way to turn.

I have always stated, I am a spiritual person, but do not believe in organized religion. I am now coming to terms that I might not really believe in the existance of God. This teriffies me. I wonder, when I am at my death bed, am I going to regret this?

I like to rationalize and I like to find evidence and facts. I don’t find any when it comes to HIM, yet, at the same time, I can’t find evidence for the opposite.

I don’t like where the world is heading, when it comes to HIM. I sometimes wonder if it is the religious zealots that are pushing me in the opposite direction. That is when I pause and wonder, should I allow them that much power?

I had posted about a christian student that was suing his college. Well, the saga continues:

Los Angeles City College had half a dozen middle-aged people milling around the campus quad. ”God Hates Gays,” their signs read. Nice way to represent Jesus, right? I mean when Jesus was here on earth, he preached “HATRED” and walked around with signs to preach the word. 

The suit, filed Feb. 12, has inspired a wave of blog and media commentary. Lopez’s lawyer from the Alliance Defense Fund, co-founded by James Dobson of Focus on the Family, has appeared on the popular Fox News show “The O’Reilly Factor.” 

A dozen nasty e-mails winged their way to a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York biographer, who had the singular misfortune of sharing a name and occupation with Lopez’s instructor.

“Some of them threatened my life,” said the New York-based John Matteson, an associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. 

Leave it to the Christians to react in that way. They profess to follow Jesus, but their actions are from Christ like. Threatening and preaching hate…

Ah, a faithful mormon preaching what his God teaches him to preach. 

And what was the response of this mormon?

Buttars declined to comment to The Associated Press, but said Friday he would not be issuing an apology.

In a statement released on the Senate Republicans’ blog, Buttars wrote that he will continue to defend traditional marriage.

“I was disappointed to learn of the Utah State Senates censure on February 20, 2009. However, this action will not discourage me from defending marriage from an increasingly vocal and radical segment of the homosexual community.

In recent years, registering opposition to the homosexual agenda has become almost impossible. Political correctness has replaced open and energetic debate. Those who dare to disagree with the homosexual agenda are labeled “haters” and “bigots,” and are censured by their peers.

The media contributes to the problem. Increasingly, individuals with conservative beliefs are targeted by a left leaning media that uses their position of public trust as a bully pulpit. This pattern of intimidation suppresses free speech.

For the record, I do not agree with the censure. I see it as an attempt to shy away from controversy. In particular, I disagree with my removal as Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, since my work there is entirely unrelated to my opposition to the homosexual agenda.

Still, I’m a grown man and I can take my knocks. When it comes right down to it, I would rather be censured for doing what I think is right, than be honored by my colleagues for bowing to the pressure of a special interest group that has been allowed to act with impunity.

Thanks to the many citizens who have written and called to express their support. Please know that I’ll live through this to fight another day. In years to come, we’ll all look back at this point in history and see it as a crossroads. I have no intention of resigning.”

What an appropriate way to demonstrate what your God teaches you, right? I mean, Jesus was about what he said in regards to racisim and homosexuality. 

What is interesting is the response by the LDS:

“From the outset, the Church’s position has always been to engage in civil and respectful dialogue on this issue. Senator Buttars does not speak for the Church.”

JUST OUT OF CURIOSITY, WHERE DID HE LEARN THIS?

A 40-day fast. 

I want to know who are the tens of thousands of people that follow this man? Seriously, look at his body language, something is mentally wrong with this man. Lou Engle.

Fasting means starvation which equals HALLUCINATIONS…not God talking to you.

76 year old church volunteer was explaining the church’s suicide hotline with six people, including a tourist group from Canada. “We were talking actually about the suicide prevention hotline that we have here at our church and telling them it’s open 24 hours, seven days a week, and then just then, I heard this pop”.

Meanwhile, an 84 year old church volunteer welcomes this man that hands her a note and his driver’s license. The note stated his pick-up was in the parking lot. He walked up to a gold cross and knelt as if to pray and shot himself. What did the pastor have to say?

“He did not give any sign that he was going to do that. He just came, like any other tourist, to pray,” said pastor Juan Carlos Ortiz. “I think God will have mercy on him, because he must have been very desperate to do what he did.” 

The Orange County coroner’s office identified the man as Steve Smick, 48.  

“I think God will have mercy on him”? Seriously? To make a statement like that for his family to read is just callous, but what else do you expect from some “Christians”. I just can’t help but wonder, going to the house of God, wouldn’t something happen from God Himself to let others know that His house was going to be used for that?

The Crystal Cathedral had been a witness to another tragedy:

Are these the sign of the times?

The pastor of Willow Creek Chicago — the city campus of the evangelical mega-church Willow Creek Community Church — has resigned and admitted to “sexual impurity,” a church spokesman said. The pastor, Rev. Steve Wu, could not be reached, and the church would not specify what took place just a statement Tuesday by church officials admitting to “sexual impurity”

Wu, 43, began pastoring Willow Chicago in 2006. It was the fifth campus of Willow Creek Community Church – the fourth largest mega-church in the country with 22,500 attendees, according to Outreach magazine’s 2008 list. The mega-church, founded by the Rev Bill Hybels, currently has six locations throughout Illinois.

The church also stated that he may go through a “restoration process”. I wonder if this will be like the one Ted Haggard went through, which we all know, has made him realize that his sexuality is a “complicated” one. 

I wrote about this before, there is nothing good about a church that is said to be a “mega-church”. What those types of church come down to is BUSINESS and MONEY. In due time, the true colors come out and they fall hard.

How ironic. The wife was decapitated, allegedly by her estranged husband, in the offices of the television network the couple founded with the hope of countering Muslim stereotypes. This type of “honor killing” is native in their land of Pakistan. What animals.

He did the honerable thing and turned himself in.

How disgusting.

According to Christian Today, Jade Goody has revealed she wants to christen her sons Bobby, five, and Freddy, four, so that they know their mummy is looking down on them from Heaven and wants this done before she dies after receiving the devastating news last week that her cancer is terminal. 

They also report her saying the following:

I want to ask God why he couldn’t have given me more time with my boys. Just a bit—just enough to hear them laugh a few more times, to see that they’re happy, to write them long letters so I can tell them who I was and how much I loved them and remind them about all the things we did together. Because they might forget me. And I can’t bear the thought of that.

Sometimes that is a question many face when they are soon near the end: Why God?  

Very sad situation.

There is a lawsuit alleging a teacher discriminated against a students beliefs when he censored a classroom speech on God and marriage. The allegation also inludes a statement that he didn’t get a grade but a statement by the teacher, “ask God what your grade is”. The student also alleges the teacher called him a “fascist bastard” mid-way through his speech last November and refused to let him finish.

The student, Jonathan Lopez, said that midway through his speech, when he quoted a dictionary definition of marriage and recited a pair of Bible verses, professor John Matteson cut him off and would not allow him to finish. Lopez is seeking $5,000 in damages.

Ok, it sounds more like a sermon than a speech. The Dean of the school stated that students were offended by Lopez’s “speech”.

At what point does a Christian realize that if someone is interested in the “word of God” then a church is sought for that message?

From AP:

 

DALLAS – The stepson of megachurch pastor T.D. Jakes has been arrested on an indecent exposure charge.

Dallas police say Jermaine Jakes is accused of exposing himself to two undercover vice detectives last month. He turned himself in Thursday and was released on a $1,000 personal recognizance bond.

His lawyer, Faith Johnson, didn’t return a call to the AP on Thursday. She told Dallas-Fort Worth television station KTVT: “We are aware of potential allegations involving Jermaine Jakes and are undertaking our own investigation of these allegations at this time.”

According to an arrest affidavit, the younger Jakes allegedly walked up to an undercover detective in a park and began masturbating while maintaining eye contact with the detective.

Jakes’ stepfather is a Dallas megachurch pastor who gave a sermon at the prayer service for Barack Obama on the morning he was sworn in as president.

OH OH, NOW HE DONE IT!

Update: Pastor T.D. Jakes told his congregation Sunday that he would provide “help, support and restorative grace” to his stepson, who was accused of exposing himself to two undercover detectives last month. Hopefully this one is more successful than the one that Ted Haggard went through. We all know that after his restorative therapy his sexuallity is still “complicated”.

The pastor read a statement to his congregation, saying parents of children who don’t live up to ideals do not “diminish our love for them as recompense for our disapproval.”

This guy is 29 years old, obviously is living in the ‘Down Low’, because of his step dad. Let the brother live, and maybe he wouldn’t have to be going to the park and getting BUSTED!

Apprently the “gay agenda” is to silence the christians. Why am I always the last to find out what the agenda is? Someone needs to stay ontop of letting all the homosexuals know what the movement is, seriously. The one-hour  ’special report’ starts as a look at how a group of Christian demonstrators were arrested for, as they tell it, trying to “share the Gospel,” but almost immediately focuses on gay and lesbian Americans’ struggle for equality under the law.

“Special classes of people get special protections”

Here we go, trying to scare the heteros against the homos. Very Christ like, right?  This ’special report’ is based on the same book that Sally Kern declared helped her find out what the “gay agenda” is. It’s a 1989 book called “After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s,” by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen. The video was produced by the American Family Association, and includes testimony from individuals who claim that they were once homosexual but were “cured” through prayer.

Who pushes this “gay agenda” more, the Christians or the ‘homosexuals’? The way the Christians go around bringing light to this agenda makes them the ones that push the issue. The “gay agenda” is nothing more than a scary term started by the religious zealots to scare their flock into hating a minor class of citizens.  

Homosexuals are not asking for “special” treatment, they are asking for equality. Special treatment would be: no paying of taxes, not going to work and collecting disability, etc. 

I think I am going to have to read that book, and maybe let my other “homosexual” friends know what the book is about, see? Thanks to the religious people, I myself am going to find out what this “gay agenda” is…

The conservative Christian group Focus on the Family claim that,

It is an agenda that they basically set in the late 1980s, in a book called ‘After the Ball,’ where they laid out a six-point plan for how they could transform the beliefs of ordinary Americans with regard to homosexual behavior — in a decade-long time frame…. They admit it privately, but they will not say that publicly. In their private publications, homosexual activists make it very clear that there is an agenda. The six-point agenda that they laid out in 1989 was explicit: Talk about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible… Portray gays as victims, not as aggressive challengers… Give homosexual protectors a just cause… Make gays look good… Make the victimizers look bad… Get funds from corporate America..CitizenLink.