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=== 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

=== Noted

23. Students' Religious Beliefs Changing
AP, Dec. 27, 2000
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
[...more trends in religion...]
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - For Frank Primus, going home for the holidays can be stressful, with family religious traditions often conflicting with his beliefs.

Primus, who grew up Baptist but converted to Islam just before leaving for college, was forced to balance the family tradition of Christmas morning services with his observance of the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan a day later.
(...)

Primus is part of what experts say is a growing phenomenon of religious life on the nation's campuses, as students come home with different beliefs and sometimes feel alienated from their families.

Some students are turning toward a more lasting commitment to religion, while others are looking for a different type of spirituality than their parents, religious experts say.

``Students are accessing some kind of deep personal dimension of meaning in their life,'' said Scotty McLennan, university chaplain at Tufts University. ``We've just about doubled our traditional religious movement over the last 15 years at Tufts. The Catholic Mass packs the chapel on Sunday nights.''
(...)

Janice McWilliams, a staff member at UC Davis InterVarsity, a nationwide evangelical campus organization, said dealing with parents who are upset with their children's fervent interest in religion is a large part of her job.

Nationally, InterVarsity has 32,000 student members, according to figures for the 1999-2000 academic year. More than 1,500 were new converts to Christianity.
(...)

On the Net:

InterVarsity: http://www.gospelcom.net/iv/ [...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


24. Death Knell Tolls for Cults
Xinhua/WorldSources/AP, Dec. 26, 2000
[Note: Xinhua, the source of this item, is China's official press agency.]
http://beta.yellowbrix.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
BEIJING, December 26 (Xinhua)--The world stands intact as the millennium draws to its end in 2000 to great disappointment of leaders of some cults, who have repeatedly warned the world of a doomsday and committed a series of atrocious crimes against their followers.

The fact indicates that there is no room for those people who only sounded the knell for themselves--they are facing punishment for their atrocities as related governments have vowed to bring them to justice.

The past decade has seen at least three mass suicides masterminded by cult leaders, with over 80 members of the Branch Dravidian sect killed in a fiery blaze in Texas in 1993 and dozens of members of the Solar Temple sect found dead in Switzerland in 1994.

The latest occurred in March when more than 500 members, including 78 children, who were members of the Movement for the Restoration of Ten Commandments of God, set themselves ablaze in Uganda. Bloody lessons given by the cults should never be forgotten and be repeated. Facing the rampant activities of the cults, the international community has stepped up crackdown on these dangerous organizations.
(...)

Many countries, including developed ones, share the memories of agony for cults. In the United Sates, there are 2,000 to 5,000 cults that involve 10 million to 20 million people. France has 172 such groups with 160,000 followers. The Japanese Aum Supreme Truth has lured 14,000 in Japan and 35,000 in Russia.

Almost all cult groups fabricate evil theories, collect funds from the followers and exercised spiritual control over the members, threatening the function of the government and the stability of the society.

However, few governments have shown tolerance toward cult activities.
(...)

To combat cults, the French National Assembly unanimously passed a law in June that makes ``mental manipulation'' a crime.

Under the law, people could be sentenced to three years in prison for acts of ``serious and repeated pressure or the use of techniques to alter the mind of a person, leading him or her to commit a harmful act.''

Another clause authorizes the court to dissolve sects that have been convicted twice on charges, such as endangering lives, illegal use of medicine or duplicitous advertising.

But some cults staged counterattacks against the French government on the pretext of protecting human rights. These cult groups, especially the Church of Scientology, a cult seen as dangerous and undesirable by the French and German governments, condemned the anti-sect law as an assault on free speech and an infringement of the Declaration of Human Rights. The Church of Scientology is listed by a French anti-sect committee, set up two years ago and headed by French deputy Alain Vivien, as a dangerous organization that ``threatens public order'' and ``human dignity.'' Vivien has called for its dissolution.

On October 23, several thousand Scientologists from the United States, Canada and other European countries gathered in Paris to protest against the anti-sect law, which was the largest Scientology gathering in France for several years.

Facing the counterattack of the Scientologist, Vivien criticized the United States for supporting the cult and letting it bring shame to France.

France is not alone in its anti-sect actions as it has support from both Germany and Belgium, said Vivien.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


25. Scholars debate Jesus's birthplace
Religion News Service, Dec. 23, 2000
http://www2.startribune.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
The story, immortalized in pageants and song, is a familiar one. A messiah, sent to redeem humanity. Son of the peasant girl Mary, and Joseph, a widowed carpenter. Born in Bethlehem.

Or was he?

While evidence has been unearthed that verifies the existence of a historical figure named Jesus, material shedding light on the circumstances of his birth is relatively scarce outside the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Both, with varying discrepancies, pinpoint Bethlehem as Jesus' birthplace.

But as the quest for the historical Jesus continues, scholars are divided over whether the biblical account is accurate.

''Aside from Matthew and Luke, we have no information about Jesus' birth from any other source that we would regard for a moment as historical,'' said N. T. (Tom) Wright, canon theologian of Westminster Abbey in London and author of several books on Jesus and the New Testament. ''So as ancient historians we're inclined to say it looks as though we've got the truth with Bethlehem.''

Not all have been so inclined, however.

New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan believes the Bethlehem story is a symbolic one, never meant to be taken literally. He said the account hearkens back to a passage from the Old Testament book of Micah which declared that from Bethlehem would come ''one who will be ruler over Israel.''

''If I were to say to you 'Neither of those candidates was born in a log cabin,' you would understand that to mean that neither is as good as Lincoln,'' said Crossan, professor emeritus of religious studies at DePaul University in Chicago and co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, a group of biblical scholars. ''In the same way, in certain religious contexts in the first century, 'born in Bethlehem' was coded to mean the awaited Davidic messiah.''

Wright rejects that idea.

''Just because we have discovered a motive why the early Christians might have wanted to say that Jesus was born in Bethlehem doesn't necessarily mean that was the case,'' he said. ''It's much more likely that early Christian writers were highlighting something that was already established rather than inventing the Bethlehem story from scratch.''

For Episcopal priest and religion professor Bruce Chilton, the question isn't whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but rather which Bethlehem.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]

* The Jesus Seminar is a group of scholars adept at twisting the Scriptures and attacking the Bible's historical reliability.
http://www.apologeticsindex.org/j12.html
[Story no longer online? Read this]

26. Japanese Town Claims Tomb of Christ
AP, Dec. 23, 2000
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
SHINGO, Japan -- Nearly 2,000 years ago, a man fled for his life from the Middle East, crossing Siberia and Alaska before living out his days in this snowbound hamlet in northern Japan.

The tale is fanciful enough, but even more so when townspeople tell you the name of the visitor they say is buried here: Jesus Christ.

This strange historical theory is founded on a radical rewriting of the Christian belief that Jesus was crucified, resurrected three days later and then rose to heaven - all in Jerusalem. It has its roots in shaky archaeology and shadowy local customs some say came from the Holy Land.

Many officials here disavow the theory, but nevertheless, some 10,000 people visit the Shingo burial site each year. Perhaps it's because the legend fits in with the fascination in Japan - where fewer than 1 percent of the people are Christians - with such trappings of Christianity as Christmas and church weddings.

The Jesus-in-Japan theory first emerged in the 1930s when researchers claimed to have found a ''will of Christ'' - the original of which was lost during World War II - indicating that Jesus was buried in Shingo. Later, a burial mound believed to fit the theory was found in the village about 370 miles north of Tokyo.

According to the story, Jesus came to Japan in his early 20s, studied Japanese culture and religion and then returned to Judea when he was 33 to begin his ministry. He was never crucified - having switched places with his younger brother Isukiri - and managed to flee across Siberia to Alaska and on to Japan by boat.

In Shingo, Jesus is said to have married, had three daughters and lived until age 106.

No one has actually ever burrowed into the mound to study its contents, as far as town officials know.

Townspeople are reluctant to profess much belief in the story. But the town is not resisting its fame - or the money tourists bring with them.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]


=== Books

27. 'Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?'
Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 28, 2000
http://www.csmonitor.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
The Messiah Before Jesus
By Israel Knohl
University of California Press
145 pp., $22


The University of California Press has just issued a small but mind-bending book, ''The Messiah before Jesus,'' by Israeli scholar Israel Knohl.

Three years' research into Jewish messianism during the complex and treacherous Herodian era has enabled Knohl to make a stunning imaginative leap. Thanks to David Maisel's excellent English translation, we can consider Knohl's thesis that historical sources, including remnants of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, point to a self-declared Jewish messianic leader one generation before Jesus.

Not only that, Knohl proposes that Jesus knew of this earlier messiah, possibly through John the Baptist. If this is so, Jesus would have envisioned himself as this man's successor, with whom he shared a common destiny - that of the ''suffering servant'' who must be killed by his enemies and, after three days, rise from the dead.

''This slain Messiah,'' writes Knohl, ''is the missing link in our understanding of the way Christianity emerged from Judaism.... A reconstruction of the story of the [first] murdered Messiah allows us for the first time to provide historical background for the account of Jesus' messianic awareness in the New Testament.''

The impulse to reject Knohl's thesis is very strong. Removed by 2,000 years from the documents and events he describes, we have adopted other explanations. Some have the status of revealed truth.
(...)

Yet Knohl's consummate scholarship and intimate familiarity with other scholarly work gradually persuades. His argument depends heavily on surviving fragments of two hymns from the ''Thanksgivings Scroll,'' discovered in 1947 in a Qumran cave near the Dead Sea.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]

Note:

Jesus is the Messiah
" ''As one reads through the Bible, we find progressively detailed prophecies
about the identity of the Messiah. Obviously, as the prophecies become
increasingly detailed, the field of qualified ''candidates'' becomes
increasingly narrow.''"

=== The Happy People Around The Corner

28. Science Tracks the Good Life
San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 24, 2000
http://www.sfgate.com/
[Story no longer online? Read this]
The ''happiest place on Earth'' isn't Disneyland: It's Denmark.

An emerging social science -- happiness research -- is identifying the happiest and unhappiest regions in the United States and around the world. It's also shattering stereotypes and folk beliefs about happiness: who's got it, who doesn't, and how to get it for yourself.

The Chronicle recently asked a leading happiness researcher -- psychologist Michael Hagerty, a professor of management at the University of California at Davis -- to analyze several decades of social surveys conducted by scholars around the globe.

The surveys had one question in common: How happy are you? They covered hundreds of thousands of people in more than 20 nations. Hagerty's analysis has led him to some fascinating, and occasionally counter-intuitive, conclusions:

-- Despite their reputation as carefree surfer dudes and beach babes, Californians and other inhabitants of the West Coast are not, on the whole, happier than the average American.

-- Despite all those European films depicting inhabitants of northern Europe as brooding depressives, the world's happiest nations are Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Luxembourg.
(...)

The study of happiness isn't new: It's been a branch of social science research for at least a half-century.

However, perhaps fearing ridicule, early scholars in the field avoided calling their subject ''happiness.''
(...)

Now, though, the word ''happiness'' is coming out of the closet.

This summer, Kluwer Academic, a respected scholarly publishing house in Europe, unveiled a new research publication: The Journal of Happiness Studies, edited by sociology professor Ruut Veenhoven of Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
[...more...]   [Need the full story? Read this]

* The publisher of Religion News Report lives in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and tends to be happy :)