» Continued from Part

=== Mormonism
12. Petitioners Ask LDS Church to Alter Gay Stance

=== Paganism / Witchcraft
13. Mexican Witches Cast Year-End Spells

=== Hate Groups
14. Judge Orders Public Defender To Represent Supremacist
15. Neo-Nazi Youths Arrested in Germany

=== Other News
16. Accused cannibal credits God with release
17. Last child-sex ring defendant released from prison after court action
18. Poacher Guilty; Abandons Religion Defense
19. Indian Guru Blames Staff Disloyalty for Dotcom Bust
20. China clamps down on religious groups
21. Chinese Christians flock to official and underground churches
22. Got meat? Jesus wouldn't have eaten it, billboard says

» Part 3

=== Noted
23. Students' Religious Beliefs Changing
24. Death Knell Tolls for Cults
25. Scholars debate Jesus's birthplace
26. Japanese Town Claims Tomb of Christ

=== Books
27. 'Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?'

=== The Happy People Around The Corner
28. Science Tracks the Good Life

=== Mungiki

11. Kenya: President Moi appeals for end to female genital mutilation
BBC Monitoring/East African Standard, Dec. 27, 2000
http://beta.yellowbrix.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
President Moi yesterday called for an end to Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in the country. He said the rite was outdated and had no role in modern society. He said women were exposed to a lot of pain during delivery and should not continue suffering unnecessarily because of the ritual.
(...)

President Moi accused Mungiki sect of promoting female circumcision and advised peace-loving Kenyans not to support their activities.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


=== Mormonism

12. Petitioners Ask LDS Church to Alter Gay Stance
Salt Lake Tribune, Dec. 24, 2000
http://www.sltrib.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
A loosely organized group of more than 300 gay and lesbian Mormons and their family members are petitioning The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to reconsider its stance on homosexuality.

A copy of the petition, signed ''Mormon Advocates for Further Light and Knowledge,'' appeared as an ad in the Saturday edition of The Salt Lake Tribune.
(...)

The petition's author is Mac Madsen, a former Weber State University healthy-lifestyles professor and men's golf coach.
(...)

Indeed, many in the Mormon hierarchy have already seen the petition. More than a year ago, said Madsen, it was mailed to the church's top 125 officials.

''I received absolutely no response,'' he said.
(...)

Madsen also investigated getting the petition printed in at least two other newspapers -- The Deseret News and Provo Daily Herald -- but thus far it has only appeared in The Tribune.

The Deseret News rejected it, said Madsen, who, in the end could only come up with enough money for one ad placement.

Though no names appear in the ad, more than 300 individuals from 12 different countries and most of America's 50 states backed it, said Madsen.
(...)

The LDS Church has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaigns fighting same sex marriage in Hawaii and other states.

The petition also requests that false and inflammatory remarks made in public or found in church-sanctioned reading materials be repudiated and removed, citing church pamphlets, such as To Young Men Only, which implies homosexuals are predisposed to bestiality.
(...)

The policy, as the petition points out, ''is rather obscure as far as its origin. It wasn't a revelation and it's not canonized or anything,'' he said.

There were no policies targeting homosexuals for the first 125 years of the church's history, he said.

''It wasn't up until the 1950s and on into the 60s when President [Spencer] Kimball started counseling young males against same-sex desire,'' and the church began printing handbooks and policy statements to that end, said Madsen.

This effectively means the policy is amendable, said Madsen, who ended the petition asking for just that.

''President Kimball and other church leaders in the 1970s did not originate the policy which restricted blacks from holding the priesthood. They inherited it -- and eventually changed it . . . We encourage you to reconsider and then change the current church position relative to our homosexual brothers and sisters and thus welcome yet another disenfranchised segment of our church community into full membership.''
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]

* The Mormon Church, theologically a cult of Christianity, has a history of making changes to its scriptures, prophecies and teachings: See The Changing World of Mormonism

=== Paganism / Witchcraft

13. Mexican Witches Cast Year-End Spells
Washington Post, Dec. 28, 2000
http://washingtonpost.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
(...) At this most hopeful time of year, many Mexicans are seeking a change in their luck, not through New Year's resolutions, but through this nation's remarkably large number of witches. Looking for love? Want to be rich? Just hoping next year will be better than this one? Mexico's witches offer their help, for a price.
(...)

Fortune-tellers, swamis, shamans and soothsayers of every stripe can be found everywhere from New England state fairs to the bazaars of India, but fewer places can boast a culture of witchcraft as thriving and lucrative as Mexico's. Witches from all over Latin American hold annual conventions in Mexico, and bookstores are full of stories from the coven and recipes for black magic. Some witches wind up in the official limelight, hired by police departments to help find victims of kidnappings or retained by politicians to help plot strategy.

Early last year, many top-ranking witches gathered at the National Press Club of Mexico City to announce they had cast a spell on the presidential election to make it, for the first time in recent memory, clean and fair. The gathered crowd of foreign journalists nearly choked on their skepticism, but the witches turned out to be dead on.

And witchcraft is clearly big business. There are no reliable estimates of how much money witchcraft pumps into the Mexican economy, but a visit to the Sonora Market, where Doctor Aura works, suggests that it is immensely popular and profitable.
(...)

Witchcraft is so much a part of Mexican culture that academics have studied it and thousands of people have made it their life's work. There is a National Association of Sorcerers in the capital, and a town in the state of Veracruz has crafted a busy tourist industry by touting itself as a national center of witchcraft.

To skeptics, the brand of witchcraft practiced at the Sonora Market, with its promises of immediate fixes for heartache and physical pain, is a goofball theme park of snake oil salesmen. But for believers, it is a place of potential magic, where the power of other worlds is available to those seeking answers to everyday problems.
(...)

Aura says the witchcraft practiced in the market is a blend of religious beliefs and ancient rites passed down through the centuries. The cramped quarters where she works is a mishmash of religions and cultures. Jesus Christ hangs on a crucifix next to a two-foot statue of the Grim Reaper, not far from a plastic rooster and some books explaining the Santeria religion. There is also a Buddha and a Sitting Bull-style Indian headdress. Mexican witches say their power is drawn from the blend, which covers everything from fresh herbs picked yesterday to recipes for potions that are said to date from Aztec traditions of pre-Columbian times.

While it is impossible for an outsider to judge Aura's talents, it is clear she is a focused listener and a keen observer of her customers' facial expressions and body language. She seems gifted in the art of sizing up the person before her; she has a politician's empathy and power of persuasion.

Under different circumstances, she could earn big money as a ''Yes! You Can!'' motivational speaker touring American corporations.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


=== Hate Groups

14. Judge Orders Public Defender To Represent Supremacist
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 25, 2000
http://beta.yellowbrix.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
A judge has ordered the public defender's office to represent supremacist pastor Gordon Winrod and two of his children against kidnapping charges.

Winrod, 73, is charged along with his daughter, Carol Winrod, 27, and son, Stephen Winrod, 33, with kidnapping six of the pastor's grandchildren from their homes in North Dakota in the mid-1990s and keeping them at his farm near Gainesville in southwest Missouri.

The defendants, being held on $500,000 bond, have repeatedly declined legal counsel for the case, insisting on representing themselves.

But in a judgment filed Dec. 12, Circuit Judge William Mauer said previous court hearings ''indicate a complete failure of the defendants to understand the legal process.''

''The possibility of proceeding orderly in this matter without counsel to at least advise the defendants would be next to impossible,'' Mauer wrote.
(...)

Meanwhile, Ozark County Prosecutor Tom Cline has filed a motion seeking to have Gordon Winrod held in contempt for violating a gag order preventing him from publicly discussing the case.

Winrod has continued to disseminate his Winrod Letter, which espouses his supremacist views preaching hatred of Jews and government, to Ozark County residents.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


15. Neo-Nazi Youths Arrested in Germany
AP, Dec. 27, 2000
http://news.excite.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
BERLIN (AP) - The town of Guben on the Polish border was again at the center of Germany's inner-struggle against neo-Nazism Wednesday after four youths, including one convicted in the 1999 death of an Algerian asylum-seeker, were arrested in the stabbing of a man of Asian heritage.

Police said the right-wing extremists shouted anti-foreigner slogans at the victim, whose mother is Asian, then attacked him with a knife early Tuesday. He suffered an inch-long stab wound in the back. A witness called police and all three attackers were arrested immediately; a fourth was arrested later based on statements by the others, police said.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


=== Other News

16. Accused cannibal credits God with release
Boston Herald, Dec. 24, 2000
http://www.bostonherald.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
As angry Montana residents wonder why Massachusetts officials released convicted child molester and sexual sadist Nathaniel Bar-Jonah from custody, the accused cannibal killer thinks he knows the answer.

Divine intervention.

In a notarized last will and testament he sent to the Great Falls Tribune, Bar-Jonah credits the Lord with shepherding his release from the Massachusetts Treatment Center for the sexually dangerous in Bridgewater in 1991.

``I've seen God take a hopeless situation like when all avenues were closed it seemed and I'd never, ever be released,'' Bar-Jonah wrote in the rambling document. ``Yet God told me I would and I believed Him even though the evidence of my release was not there.

``Then totally out of left field I got 2 - Yes, 2 - Christian psychiatrists who believed in me. That was a miracle in it self (sic) to find 2 Christians in that profession in Massachusetts. The state had a lot of evidence on their side, yet the judge sided with me.''

The 43-year-old Bar-Jonah, who grew up in Webster as David P. Brown, has been charged with killing 10-year-old Zachary Ramsay, who disappeared in 1996 while on his way to school in Great Falls.

Montana authorities have never recovered Ramsay's body and now believe Bar-Jonah ate the remains and also fed them to unwitting friends.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


17. Last child-sex ring defendant released from prison after court action
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Dec. 27, 2000
http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
WENATCHEE -- When he got out of prison, Michael Rose hugged his mother and just felt relieved that the ordeal of child-sex ring prosecution was over.

''I got rid of my anger and bitterness years ago. Had to, or else it would have ruined me,'' Rose told The Wenatchee World.

The 32-year-old handyman left Twin Rivers Correctional Facility on Dec. 7, two days after a judge vacated his March 1995 convictions on rape and molestation charges involving two boys. Prosecutors gave up any additional moves against him.

Rose was the last defendant imprisoned from a wide-ranging investigation of alleged child sex rings -- and the 18th person to be released after courts overturned their convictions or because they pleaded to lesser charges after appeals.

''I did not do any of it,'' Rose said in a telephone interview from his mother and stepfather's home in Tonasket. Although authorities accused him of participating in a child-sex ring, he maintained his innocence during more than six years of imprisonment and appeals.
(...)

Prison had some positive influences on him, he said. He became a Christian and started living the way he believes God wants him to live. That lifestyle includes frequently reading the Bible -- he took five copies with him when he left prison -- avoiding violent and sexually explicit television shows and not swearing.

''I grew up (in prison). I was living a pretty wild lifestyle before,'' he said. ''I live healthy now. I eat healthy. I follow God's laws.''

Rose said he relied on his strong faith to sustain him in prison. He turned to God, he said, when he made decisions about whether to plead guilty to a lesser charge and get out of prison earlier. Prosecutors offered him deals before his trial and in 1999, he said.

Rose said God told him to stay behind bars and wait.

''I look back, and I still wouldn't have took it, but it was awful tempting,'' he said.

Rose said his faith also led him to forgive Cherie Town, who testified against him at his trial.

He holds former Wenatchee Police Detective Bob Perez partially responsible for his convictions, but stopped being angry with Perez after several years in prison.

''If he asked forgiveness, I would forgive him,'' Rose said.

However, he said he is planning a civil lawsuit.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]

* More about the Wenatchee case:

The Power To Harm
" In February 1998, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published this series of
stories regarding the so-called ''Wenatchee Sex Ring.'' ''The series documents
overzealous -- even abusive -- actions by Perez and social service
caseworkers, civil rights violations by judges and prosecutors as well as
sloppy work by public defenders. Since then, many of the convicted have been
freed by higher courts, largely through the work of The Innocence Project, a
group of volunteer lawyers.''"

18. Poacher Guilty; Abandons Religion Defense
Salt Lake Tribune, Dec. 23, 2000
http://www.sltrib.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
A former Provo psychologist abandoned his religious-based defense of his out-of-season deer hunting and pleaded guilty Tuesday to poaching protected wildlife.

Fourth District Judge Steven Hansen ordered David Hamblin, 46, to pay $600 in fines and restitution and put him on probation for 24 months for his second wildlife conviction in recent years, both stemming from Hamblin's desire to practice the spiritual ways of Mexico's Huichol Indians.
(...)

Hamblin, whose own heritage is Anglo and Mormon, has contended his activities are protected under constitutional guarantees of religious freedom, but he decided against making the legal investment to advance such a defense in court. Under Huichol customs, hunting deer, venerating their entrails and ingesting peyote are sacred rituals, according to anthropologists who have studied the tribe.

Hamblin still faces a single count of drug possession with intent to distribute, stemming from the seizure of a single button of peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus, from his Provo home-office.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


19. Indian Guru Blames Staff Disloyalty for Dotcom Bust
Reuters, Dec. 27, 2000
http://news.excite.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Many dotcoms are going bust because they got into business to make a quick buck and did not focus on old economy values like employee loyalty, says New Age guru Deepak Chopra.

''In the old paradigm, the basis of business was only to make profits. That's not working any more as seen in the dotcom revolution which is having a dismal downfall,'' Chopra told a group of businesswomen on Wednesday. ''If you translate the purpose of business into spiritual terms, the purpose is not to make money but the service of society,'' said the guru, who runs the Chopra Center for Well Being in La Jolla, California.

Chopra -- seen by some as a quack, by others as a messenger of hope -- has written over a dozen books and sold over 10 million copies with esoteric titles like Creating Affluence, Quantum Healing, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind and The Way of the Wizard.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


20. China clamps down on religious groups
News24/SA (South Africa), Dec. 27, 2000
http://www.news24.co.za/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
Beijing - Authorities have closed or destroyed more than 3 000 unauthorised temples and churches in a quickening campaign to curb religion in an eastern China enclave known for its religious tolerance, a rights group reported on Wednesday.

Under orders from Beijing, authorities in the coastal city of Wenzhou found in a two-month inspection that only 3 200 of the area's 8 000 religious sites were properly registered, the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy reported.

So far, of the nearly 4 800 illegal sites, 3 011 have been closed or torn down, the group said, citing sources it did not identify.

Among the illegal sites, more than 400 were Protestant and Catholic churches, while the rest were Buddhist, Taoist and local religious temples and shrines, the group said. It added that the legal places of worship included 1 200 Protestant and 120 Catholic churches.
(...)

But earlier this month, when the clampdown was first reported, local officials confirmed 450 buildings were destroyed to suppress what they called rampant superstition.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


21. Chinese Christians flock to official and underground churches
AFP, Dec. 25, 2000
http://sg.dailynews.yahoo.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
BEIJING, Dec 25 (AFP) -
Chinese Christians, both third-generation believers and the newly converted, flocked to China's official and underground churches to celebrate Christmas Sunday and Monday.
(...)

Christianity is spreading in China, despite a crackdown on unregistered Protestant and Catholic churches in the past year. The government is becoming increasingly wary of religious groups growing into defiant organizations such as the banned Falungong movement.
(...)

Despite the Chinese government's claims it allows religious freedom, many Christians still prefer to worship in underground churches, which do not register with the government and therefore operate outside the government's control.

''In official churches, they also speak about the Bible and praise the Lord, but whenever there are conflicts between the religion and the government, they never stand on the side of religion,'' a member of an underground parish said.

Christians arrested for evangelizing are accused of breaking the law even though the Bible encourages people to spread the gospel.
(...)

China officially estimates it has five million Catholics and 10 million Protestants, but the real figures are believed to be much higher.

A Hong Kong-based human rights group claims the total number of Chinese Catholics is 10 million and Protestants 30 million.

The government admits the number of people believing in Christianity is growing, with an estimated 70,000 more Catholics each year nationwide.

But underground parishioners said many more unofficial worshippers remain uncounted.

In Beijing alone, the number of underground Protestant churches has grown to at least 1,000 compared to just 200 five years ago, but the number of official churches has stayed around eight, Christians said.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


22. Got meat? Jesus wouldn't have eaten it, billboard says
South Bend Tribune, Dec. 23, 2000
Publication date: 2000-12-23
http://beta.yellowbrix.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
SOUTH BEND -- Just in time for Christmas, a national animal- rights group has made Jesus Christ its South Bend ''spokesman'' in a campaign to persuade people to give up eating meat.

''Jesus was a vegetarian. Follow him,'' proclaims a large billboard on South Bend Avenue, northeast of the Five Points intersection.
(...)

The billboard was leased by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the Norfolk, Va.-based animal-rights group.
(...)

PETA provides the details of its Jesus claim on a Web site, www.jesusveg.com. Essentially, the group claims that Jesus was a member of the Essenes, a Jewish sect whose members were believed to have been vegetarians.

Friedrich downplayed the scriptural debate.

''The real point of the campaign is if you are eating meat, you are promoting cruelty to animals so severe that if it were done to dogs and cats, it would be illegal,'' he said.

''We are trying to make the point that Christians have something to say about this. It makes a mockery of God to treat animals so cruelly,'' Friedrich said.

Some local residents well-versed in theology suggest the billboard is more hype than truth.

''There is absolutely nothing in the Bible that can be construed as suggesting that Jesus was a vegetarian,'' said Rev. Basil Foley, the minister at Olivet AME Church on Notre Dame Avenue. The church is a short distance from the billboard.

Scriptural evidence also suggests that Jesus participated in traditional Jewish feasts, which included the serving of sacrificial lamb, Foley said.
(...)

PETA is known for its controversial advertising.

Early this year, the group unveiled a ''Got Beer?'' campaign on college campuses. The campaign suggested that drinking beer is healthier than milk, and that the dairy industry is cruel to animals. The ad campaign was shelved amid criticism that it encouraged underage drinking.

In August, the group sponsored billboard advertisements that linked prostate cancer to drinking milk by featuring New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was being treated for prostate cancer, with a milk mustache to parody the ''Got Milk?'' ads. The company that put up the billboards took them down after public criticism.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]

* Resources on Bible interpretation - a skill that appears to be greatly neglected among folks connected with PETA - can be found here

» Continued in Part 3