Colorado highlighted (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From the Denver Post:

The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that governors’ proclamations of a state Day of Prayer violate the Constitution’s provisions for religious liberty.

When the state sponsors the particular religious practice of prayer, the three-judge panel found, it sends a message that those who pray are favored members of Colorado’s political community.

"In doing so, they undermine the premise that the government serves believers and nonbelievers equally," Judge Steven Bernard wrote in a 73-page decision.

The content of six Colorado Day of Prayer proclamations, 2004 to 2009, is "predominantly religious," lacking a secular context or purpose, and the effect is "government endorsement of religion over nonreligion," Bernard wrote. Judges Alan Loeb and Nancy Lichtenstein concurred.

The lawsuit against the Colorado Day of Prayer was brought by the Wisconsin-based Freedom from Religion Foundation. The foundation also attempted to shut down the US National Day of Prayer but were turned back by the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in 2011.

<Read the entire story>

Response: Hopefully the governor will appeal the ruling. The Colorado Day of Prayer is entirely voluntary and not really a forcing of a particular religion upon people in the state. Unbelievers are really not forced to participate and really are not harmed or affected in anyway unless they choose to be. 

Our religious heritage in this country continues to be under assault. Secularists and atheists continue to use constitutional passages that were meant to protect religious liberty in order to erase religion entirely from the public square. 

The Colorado Day of Prayer and similar events across the country in reality are not attempts to establish any kind of state religion. Not only that, no one really believes that they are. Nevertheless, activist groups like the Wisconsin-based Freedom from Religion Foundation are using that legal language in order to destroy all vestiges of religion and displays of faith wherever they find them.

The effect is really not a question of establishment or favoring a particular religion but forcing the establishment of atheism as the new official state doctrine in Colorado and ultimately all across America.             *Top

Related Posts?:

1. -Federal Judge Rules ‘National Day of Prayer’ Unconstitutional
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(Photo by Brent Harris/WORLD on Campus)

An atheist student group set up a booth on a Texas university campus offering to exchange pornography for Bibles and other religious materials including Qurans.

According to Kyle Bush, the president of the student group- Atheist Agenda:

"The point is not to hand out porn, but rather the primary purpose is to get people to come talk to us so we can get our message out. We want to spread atheism and bring it more to the spotlight. We offer another alternative to people who might not fit in anywhere else."

The atheist group collected five Bibles, one Encyclopedia of Islam, and one Quran in exchange for porn during the 2 day event. Not exactly a raging success. They did create a little bit of attention for their cause but nothing like their first exchange in 2008 that gained international press.

Interestingly 30 yards away a Christian student group sang praise songs and bathed the event in Prayer.

Response: Events like this somewhat backfire on atheist groups. Rather than promoting their ideas in a forum of debate, events like this which ridicule the faith of others merely create attention but not necessarily good attention.

Do the atheists in this group really want to give the impression that they support porn as something that is good for society? Probably not. Do they really believe that porn is better than religion for our culture? Maybe, maybe not.

However, we do support their right to free speech and also the right of the Christian group nearby to sing and pray on campus. Hopefully the current rage on University campuses to regulate student leadership (called ‘anti-discrimination’) does not reach all the campuses across America and student groups remain free to express their views everywhere, including conservative non-PC Christian groups and even atheist groups which I obviously do not support.            *Top

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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church) has apologized for violating an agreement that they had with Jewish leaders not to posthumously ‘baptize’ victims of the holocaust. Here is the story:

CNN) – The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has apologized for "a serious breach of protocol" in which the parents of the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal were posthumously baptized as Mormons.

The church also acknowledged that three relatives of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel were entered into the genealogy database, though not referred for baptism.

Asher Wiesenthal and Rosa Rapp were baptised in proxy ceremonies in temples in Utah and Arizona, according to the database records discovered by researcher Helen Radkey in Salt Lake City.

The Wiesenthal baptisms violated a 1995 pact in which the church agreed to stop baptizing Jewish Holocaust victims.

Here’s a response on the issue from LDS spokesman Michael Purdy:

“We sincerely regret that the actions of an individual member of the church led to the inappropriate submission of these names.”

"These submissions were clearly against the policy of the church. We consider this a serious breach of our protocol and we have suspended indefinitely this person’s ability to access our genealogy records."

Meanwhile one cannot over estimate the grief this has caused among Jews with family and relatives who were killed in the Holocaust. Here’s a reaction from Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who had participated in the earlier negotiations with the Mormon Church over their practice of posthumously baptizing Jews:

"We are outraged that such insensitive actions continue in the Mormon Temples," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who participated in many of the high-level meetings between Jews and Mormon officials.

"Such actions make a mockery of the many meetings with the top leadership of the Mormon Church dating back to 1995 that focused on the unwanted and unwarranted posthumous baptisms of Jewish Victims of the Nazi Holocaust."

Here’s another wrinkle to this on-going story. On Tuesday, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney was called upon by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel to tell his church to stop doing proxy baptisms in the names of dead Jews, particularly Holocaust victims like Wiesel’s parents who were apparently found on a recent Mormon ‘ready to baptize’ list.

<<Read my response to this story on my Apologetica page>>

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It has become culturally fashionable to make the claim that “Jesus never said he was God.”

Lots of folks would like to claim Jesus as their own but his divinity gets in the way. The Muslims claim Jesus was a great prophet to the Jews but far less than even their prophet Muhammad. Some Jewish folks would like to acknowledge him as an ancient Jewish rabbi teacher if they could leave out the God thing and ignore the terrible treatment many Jews have received from some of his misguided followers over the centuries.

Even Hindu and eastern gurus like to make the claim that Jesus traveled to India and learned everything from them. Then there is the strange case of Richard Dawkins who wants to claim that Jesus Would Be An Atheist Today.

The real problem is that the Bible gets in the way and supports the divinity of Jesus. Not only that, but Jesus clearly indicated on a number of different occasions that he was the “I am” God of the Old testament. The response of those who heard him at the time confirms it.      <<Read the rest on my Apologetica page>>               *Top

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There are many differences that separate the two largest world religions- Islam and Christianity.

Some of the greatest disparity revolves around their very different understandings about the character of God (or Allah in the case of Islam) and how one can have a relationship with God the Father and receive eternal salvation.

<<Read the rest on my Apologetica page>>

*Top 

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Mormonism is center stage again with Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman running for President in 2012. I have seen one article after another talking about why evangelicals should not be voting for a Mormon.  A poll of evangelical Christians in June showed that at least 34% said that they would not vote for a Mormon running for President under any conditions.

Well the conditions are this- the current President, Barack Obama is not an evangelical nor does he share many of our values, but he is a declared Christian none–the-less.

We will have to wait and see whether either one of these former governors becomes the GOP presidential nominee for 2012. Personally I do not support either of them, at least not right now.  Mitt Romney is the obvious front runner and all of the others running are vying for the top spot as the ‘I’m-not-Romney’ candidate.

Here’s my perspective on the issue.

Mormons and evangelicals definitely have some major theological differences that will probably separate us forever. However, we also share many values.

<<Read the rest of my thoughts on the Apologetica page>>           *Top

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Did the 9/11/01 attacks end up changing some of our attitudes about religion?

In an article on my Apologetica page I make the point that it did in at least two significant ways:

1. Islam in America came out of the closet

2.Atheists also came out of the closet

<<Read my conclusions on my Apologetica page>>

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