If you become the parents of a baby who is not perfect, what would YOU do?
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
WHO OWNS THE COMPANY FROM WHICH YOU BUY?
Source: frugaldad.com
Frugal Dad knows ..., and Renegade Radio shares this important information with you as a public service.Thursday, March 1, 2012
CAN'T GET NO SATISFACTION
On any given weekend many individuals will enter a video store and take home not a classic movie, but five or six videos of mediocre to vulgar quality. On any typical school day a large percentage of children will receive their daily dosage of Ritalin. On any weekday night many families will pass long hours in front of the TV or on the Internet, and on the weekend spectator sports events will occupy most of Saturday and Sunday -- and even Monday nights.
Estimates by the Couple to Couple League indicate that over 80 percent of married couples of childbearing age will purchase their supplies of contraceptives and pills as a staple of modern life. These indisputable facts reflect an emotional, spiritual, and intellectual starvation which finds relief, not in real nourishment, but in the junk food of modern civilization -- the ersatz instead of the real.
Hollywood movies imagine themselves as great art, so-called information highways are touted as the equivalent of education, the news media and television assume an aura of reality, and professional sports pose as noble heroism. Actually the mainstream media is not telling the truth to us. Despite these attempts at pleasure, peace, entertainment, excitement, and garnering tidbits of information, man has an inner life that these substitutes for the real thing do not satisfy.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
CHRISTIANS WORLDWIDE ARE BEING MURDERED
We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring’s fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway—an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.
The portrayal of Muslims as victims or heroes is at best partially accurate. In recent years the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania. In some countries it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries.
The media’s reticence on the subject no doubt has several sources. One may be fear of provoking additional violence. Another is most likely the influence of lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation—a kind of United Nations of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia—and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading leading public figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a systematic and sinister derangement called “Islamophobia”—a term that is meant to elicit the same moral disapproval as xenophobia or homophobia.
But a fair-minded assessment of recent events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other. The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression of religious intolerance has to stop. Nothing less than the fate of Christianity—and ultimately of all religious minorities—in the Islamic world is at stake.
Egypt Coptic Christians
At least 24 Coptic Christians were killed in Cairo during clashes with the Egyptian Army on Oct. 9., Thomas Hartwell / Redux
From blasphemy laws to brutal murders to bombings to mutilations and the burning of holy sites, Christians in so many nations live in fear. In Nigeria many have suffered all of these forms of persecution. The nation has the largest Christian minority (40 percent) in proportion to its population (160 million) of any majority-Muslim country. For years, Muslims and Christians in Nigeria have lived on the edge of civil war. Islamist radicals provoke much if not most of the tension. The newest such organization is an outfit that calls itself Boko Haram, which means “Western education is sacrilege.” Its aim is to establish Sharia in Nigeria. To this end it has stated that it will kill all Christians in the country.
In the month of January 2012 alone, Boko Haram was responsible for 54 deaths. In 2011 its members killed at least 510 people and burned down or destroyed more than 350 churches in 10 northern states. They use guns, gasoline bombs, and even machetes, shouting “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) while launching attacks on unsuspecting citizens. They have attacked churches, a Christmas Day gathering (killing 42 Catholics), beer parlors, a town hall, beauty salons, and banks. They have so far focused on killing Christian clerics, politicians, students, policemen, and soldiers, as well as Muslim clerics who condemn their mayhem. While they started out by using crude methods like hit-and-run assassinations from the back of motorbikes in 2009, the latest AP reports indicate that the group’s recent attacks show a new level of potency and sophistication.
The Christophobia that has plagued Sudan for years takes a very different form. The authoritarian government of the Sunni Muslim north of the country has for decades tormented Christian and animist minorities in the south. What has often been described as a civil war is in practice the Sudanese government’s sustained persecution of religious minorities. This persecution culminated in the infamous genocide in Darfur that began in 2003. Even though Sudan’s Muslim president, Omar al-Bashir, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which charged him with three counts of genocide, and despite the euphoria that greeted the semi-independence he grant-ed to South Sudan in July of last year, the violence has not ended. In South Kordofan, Christians are still subject-ed to aerial bombardment, targeted killings, the kidnap-ping of children, and other atrocities. Reports from the United Nations indicate that between 53,000 and 75,000 innocent civilians have been displaced from their resi-dences and that houses and buildings have been looted and destroyed.
The portrayal of Muslims as victims or heroes is at best partially accurate. In recent years the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania. In some countries it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries.
The media’s reticence on the subject no doubt has several sources. One may be fear of provoking additional violence. Another is most likely the influence of lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation—a kind of United Nations of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia—and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading leading public figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a systematic and sinister derangement called “Islamophobia”—a term that is meant to elicit the same moral disapproval as xenophobia or homophobia.
But a fair-minded assessment of recent events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other. The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression of religious intolerance has to stop. Nothing less than the fate of Christianity—and ultimately of all religious minorities—in the Islamic world is at stake.
Egypt Coptic Christians
At least 24 Coptic Christians were killed in Cairo during clashes with the Egyptian Army on Oct. 9., Thomas Hartwell / Redux
From blasphemy laws to brutal murders to bombings to mutilations and the burning of holy sites, Christians in so many nations live in fear. In Nigeria many have suffered all of these forms of persecution. The nation has the largest Christian minority (40 percent) in proportion to its population (160 million) of any majority-Muslim country. For years, Muslims and Christians in Nigeria have lived on the edge of civil war. Islamist radicals provoke much if not most of the tension. The newest such organization is an outfit that calls itself Boko Haram, which means “Western education is sacrilege.” Its aim is to establish Sharia in Nigeria. To this end it has stated that it will kill all Christians in the country.
In the month of January 2012 alone, Boko Haram was responsible for 54 deaths. In 2011 its members killed at least 510 people and burned down or destroyed more than 350 churches in 10 northern states. They use guns, gasoline bombs, and even machetes, shouting “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) while launching attacks on unsuspecting citizens. They have attacked churches, a Christmas Day gathering (killing 42 Catholics), beer parlors, a town hall, beauty salons, and banks. They have so far focused on killing Christian clerics, politicians, students, policemen, and soldiers, as well as Muslim clerics who condemn their mayhem. While they started out by using crude methods like hit-and-run assassinations from the back of motorbikes in 2009, the latest AP reports indicate that the group’s recent attacks show a new level of potency and sophistication.
The Christophobia that has plagued Sudan for years takes a very different form. The authoritarian government of the Sunni Muslim north of the country has for decades tormented Christian and animist minorities in the south. What has often been described as a civil war is in practice the Sudanese government’s sustained persecution of religious minorities. This persecution culminated in the infamous genocide in Darfur that began in 2003. Even though Sudan’s Muslim president, Omar al-Bashir, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which charged him with three counts of genocide, and despite the euphoria that greeted the semi-independence he grant-ed to South Sudan in July of last year, the violence has not ended. In South Kordofan, Christians are still subject-ed to aerial bombardment, targeted killings, the kidnap-ping of children, and other atrocities. Reports from the United Nations indicate that between 53,000 and 75,000 innocent civilians have been displaced from their resi-dences and that houses and buildings have been looted and destroyed.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Narcissus
The myth of Narcissus is very suggestive for our day. There are many variations to the story, but they all end the same way. Narcissus is cursed to forever experience the pain of unrequited love. That happens to be our own curse, too. But first, here’s how it happened to Narcissus.
Narcissus was a handsome and vain boy who constantly spurned the love of the nymphs. After getting sick of hearing the laments and prayers of the jilted nymphs, the Goddess finally decided to punish Narcissus. So one day, as Narcissus leaned over a pool of still water to take a drink, he saw the image of himself reflected in the water. Because of the curse, he was made to fall in love with his reflection.
Whenever Narcissus tried to reach out and embrace the vision in the water, it would ripple and disappear as his arms disturbed the pool. Narcissus pleaded with the image in the water to at least stay and let him look on what he loved. And so Narcissus, mesmerized by his own reflection, languished at the pool until he died.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
YOUTH AND EUTHANASIA
An online survey by the UK’s Premier Christian Media has surprisingly revealed that euthanasia and abortion are issues of greater importance to young Christians than to older believers, whereas older Christians are more concerned with youth related issues than their younger counterparts.
The poll asked Christians aged eighteen to 65+ from all denominations and representing all parts of the country to rate issues in terms of how important they are to them.
“Surprisingly,” a press release from ComRes outlining the poll results states, “pro-life and end of life issues were of greater concern to young people aged between 18-34 years compared with those over the age of 65.”
Analysis showed that 69% of young people surveyed believe abortion to be very important compared to just 31% of over 65’s.
Similarly, two thirds (66%) of young people think euthanasia is a very important issue.
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