If this woman is found to be guilty of these crimes, she should be taken to the edge of town and stoned to death.
Prosecutors will seek the death penalty against a former California Sunday school teacher accused of killing an 8-year-old girl earlier this year.
Sandra Cantu’s body was found in a suitcase in an irrigation pond near where she lived.
Melissa Huckaby, 28, was indicted last month in the death of Sandra Cantu, a playmate of Huckaby’s daughter. Huckaby lived in the same mobile home park as Cantu and her family in Tracy, California.
Sandra’s body was found April 6, stuffed into a suitcase and submerged in a pond at a dairy farm. She was last seen alive March 27 in the mobile home park.
Huckaby is charged with kidnapping and murdering Sandra, according to the indictment, along with lewd and lascivious acts on a child under 14 and rape by instrument. She pleaded not guilty in June, but entered another not guilty plea on Thursday at a hearing, minutes of which were provided to CNN by a court spokeswoman.
Prosecutors said at the hearing Thursday they plan to seek the death penalty.
Huckaby is the granddaughter of Clifford Lane Lawless, pastor of Clover Road Baptist Church near the mobile home park, and she taught Sunday school at the church, police said.
Source/Full Story @: CNN.com
"Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap."
Galatians 6:7
President Obama has been without a pastor or a home church ever since he cut his ties to the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. in the heat of the presidential campaign. But he has quietly cultivated a handful of evangelical pastors for private prayer sessions on the telephone and for discussions on the role of religion in politics.
All are men, two of them white and three black — including the Rev. Otis Moss Jr., a graying lion of the civil rights movement. Two, the entrepreneurial dynamos Bishop T. D. Jakes and the Rev. Kirbyjon H. Caldwell, also served as occasional spiritual advisers to President George W. Bush. Another, the Rev. Jim Wallis, leans left on some issues, like military intervention and poverty programs, but opposes abortion.
None of these pastors are affiliated with the religious right, though several are quite conservative theologically. One of them, the Rev. Joel C. Hunter, the pastor of a conservative megachurch in Florida, was branded a turncoat by some leaders of the Christian right when he began to speak out on the need to stop global warming.
But as a group they can hardly be characterized as part of the religious left either. Most, like Mr. Wallis, do not take traditionally liberal positions on abortion or homosexuality. What most say they share with the president is the conviction that faith is the foundation in the fight against economic inequality and social injustice.
“These are all centrist, social justice guys,” said the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers, a politically active pastor of Azusa Community Church in Boston, who knows all of them but is not part of the president’s prayer caucus. “Obama genuinely comes out of the social justice wing of the church. That’s real. The community organizing stuff is real.”
The pastors say Mr. Obama appears to rely on his faith for intellectual and spiritual succor.
Source: NYTimes.com
Looks like the Roman Catholic Church is desperate for money again… So now you can buy salvation again, isn’t that neat.
Via: International Herald Tribune
The announcement in church bulletins and on Web sites has been greeted with enthusiasm by some and wariness by others. But mainly, it has gone over the heads of a vast generation of Roman Catholics who have no idea what it means: “Bishop Announces Plenary Indulgences.”
In recent months, dioceses around the world have been offering Catholics a spiritual benefit that fell out of favor decades ago — the indulgence, a sort of amnesty from punishment in the afterlife — and reminding them of the church’s clout in mitigating the wages of sin.
The fact that many Catholics under 50 have never sought one, and never heard of indulgences except in high school European history (Martin Luther denounced the selling of them in 1517 while igniting the Protestant Reformation), simply makes their reintroduction more urgent among church leaders bent on restoring fading traditions of penance in what they see as a self-satisfied world.
“Why are we bringing it back?” asked Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of New York, who has embraced the move. “Because there is sin in the world.”
Full Story
Posted by: joshuah Tags: newa
How blasphemous… Read this article, make up your own mind about this teacher, but please do not move on without asking yourself a few questions, like: How could someone who emulates Jesus vote for the child butcher, i.e. pro-abortionist, Obama ? Jesus lived by God’s Word, He is the Word, so how could He have voted at all in the first place, being King of kings and Lord of lords. But if you actually do vote, and thereby acknowledge the rulers of this world in their office, how could you vote for someone who advocates the slaying of the innocent.
Anyway, this is just one example of how this pastor missed the point, and the outcome of his little experiment is that now he is looking forward to breaking God’s Law again – oh really…. Does that not imply that he lacks Fear of God completely ? But Fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom, Rev. Ed Dobson…
Via: USATODAY.com
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — The Rev. Ed Dobson has spent most of his life following Jesus. But only now does he realize how hard it is to live like him.
The retired megachurch pastor and one-time architect of the religious right has spent the last year trying to eat, pray, talk and even vote as Jesus would. His revelation: Being Jesus is tough.
“I’ve concluded that I am a follower, but I’m not a very good one,” Dobson said. “If you get serious about the Bible, it will really mess you up.”
Full Story
Oh really…
Source: The Observer
In one of the most holy weeks in the Christian calendar, a report says that in just over a generation the number of people attending Church of England Sunday services will fall to less than a tenth of what they are now.
Christian Research, the statistical arm of the Bible Society, claimed that by 2050 Sunday attendance will fall below 88,000, compared with just under a million now.
The controversial forecast, based on a “snapshot” census of church attendances, has been seized upon by secular groups as proof that the established church is in decline. But the Church of England has rejected the figures, saying they were incomplete and ignored new ways of worshipping outside the church network.
According to Dr Peter Brierley, former executive director of Christian Research, by 2030 just under 419,000 people will attend an Anglican Sunday service. By 2040 the number will be down to 217,200, falling to 153,800 five years later. By 2050, if the trend prediction is correct, only 87,800 will be attending.
The figures stand in contrast to the picture of faith described by the prime minister earlier this month. In a preface to a new report, Faith in the Nation, Gordon Brown said: “Faith in Britain today is very much alive and well. At the last census, more than three-quarters of the population said they belonged to a faith … people’s religious identities go right to the heart of their sense of themselves and their place in society and the world.”
Full Story
Technorati Tags: Churchianity
Source: washingtonpost.com
Conservatives from the Episcopal Church voted yesterday to form their own branch of Anglicanism in the United States and said they would seek new recognition in the worldwide church because of their growing disenchantment over the ordination of an openly gay bishop and other liberal developments.
In the past five years, a small but growing number of Episcopal parishes and dioceses have voted to leave the church, but yesterday’s vote, at a meeting in Wheaton, Ill., represents the biggest split for Anglicans and presents a new challenge to U.S. church leaders and the denomination’s world spiritual leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.
The conservatives remain upset about the 2003 ordination of Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the role of female clergy, the church’s definition of salvation and changes to the main book of prayer.
It was unclear how other branches of Anglicanism, a loose affiliation of 77 million people that is the third-largest Christian church in the world, will react.
Full Story
I don’t know exactly who it is that this Episcopal Church represents, but it is NOT the God of the Bible. The Scriptures are clear about homosexuality being an abomination, and equally clear about women teaching or having authority over men…when they do, this is the result: Apostasy, and the love and tolerance of abominations.
They have to declare those with a more scriptural perspective to be “dissidents”, otherwise Ms.Katharine Jefferts Schori might not be allowed to be a “bishop.”
Source: Reuters
Leaders of the U.S. Episcopal Church voted on Thursday to defrock a bishop who has been a leader among dissidents opposed to the ascendancy of gays in the church and a critic of other issues involving liberal scriptural interpretation.The House of Bishops of the 2.4-million-member U.S. branch of the global Anglican Communion said its members meeting in Utah has voted 88-35 to remove Bishop Robert Duncan, head of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from the ordained ministry.
Over the years Duncan has been a leading orthodox dissident and an organizer of those who have been at odds with the U.S. church since 2003 when the Episcopal Church consecrated Gene Robinson of New Hampshire as the first bishop in more than four centuries of church history known to be in an openly gay relationship.
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, head of the U.S. branch of the 77-million-member worldwide Anglican church, said the bishops had concluded that Duncan’s actions constituted an “abandonment of the communion of this church” and that “he should be deposed.”
Full Story…
The correct course of action is for all of these churches to discard their tax exempt status. But I doubt that will happen, so the way it works now is that the beast system graciously provides it’s stamp of approval for your church and gives you tax exempt status, and this implies ownership. These tax exempt churches are owned by the State, and the beast system (State) has control over who you are and what you do and say.
Either you represent God and His law-Word or you represent man and his law-word. You can’t have it both ways.
Source: washingtonpost.com
Declaring that clergy have a constitutional right to endorse political candidates from their pulpits, the socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund is recruiting several dozen pastors to do just that on Sept. 28, in defiance of Internal Revenue Service rules.
The effort by the Arizona-based legal consortium is designed to trigger an IRS investigation that ADF lawyers would then challenge in federal court. The ultimate goal is to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out a 54-year-old ban on political endorsements by tax-exempt houses of worship.
“For so long, there has been this cloud of intimidation over the church,” ADF attorney Erik Stanley said. “It is the job of the pastors of America to debate the proper role of church in society. It’s not for the government to mandate the role of church in society.”
Yet an opposing collection of Christian and Jewish clergy will petition the IRS today to stop the protest before it starts, calling the ADF’s “Pulpit Initiative” an assault on the rule of law and the separation of church and state.
Backed by three former top IRS officials, the group also wants the IRS to determine whether the nonprofit ADF is risking its own tax-exempt status by organizing an “inappropriate, unethical and illegal” series of political endorsements.
“As religious leaders, we have grave concerns about the ethical implications of soliciting and organizing churches to violate core principles of our society,” the clergy wrote in an advance copy of their claim obtained by The Washington Post.
Full Story…
So here is a church that prides itself in being good stewards and in harmony with mankind and nature…
Via: eastvalleytribune.com
Three years have passed since Jim Walters shepherded construction of a “green church” in Scottsdale that incorporated 71 items aimed at saving energy, water and earth resources. His pride in the project continues to parallel his passion for environmental stewardship.”Why do we think we can try to change what God created without disrespecting the Creator?” said Walters, who was building superintendent in 2005 for the campus of Papago Buttes Church of the Brethren, 2450 N. 64th St., Scottsdale. “Part of showing the love of God is to care for creation. Man’s first profession was to tend the Garden” of Eden, as told in Genesis 2:15, he said.
Walters, who also serves as the church’s moderator and its custodian, draws the metaphor that humans should honor whatever God created just as a parent or grandparent prizes a child’s primitive artwork. “When a child marks a piece of paper with crayons, you hang it on the refrigerator no matter what you think of it,” he said.
Full Sad Story
But wait a minute… We should look at Gods handiwork like a grandparent looking at a grandchild’s work? Are you serious, Jim Walters ? If so, how much more arrogant can you get ? Didn’t God say all that He created was “very good” ? All we can say to this is “ripe for judgment”….
The short answer is ‘no.’
TIME
A 3-ft.-high tablet romantically dubbed “Gabriel’s Revelation” could challenge the uniqueness of the idea of the Christian Resurrection. The tablet appears to date authentically to the years just before the birth of Jesus and yet — at least according to one Israeli scholar — it announces the raising of a messiah after three days in the grave. If true, this could mean that Jesus’ followers had access to a well-established paradigm when they decreed that Christ himself rose on the third day — and it might even hint that they they could have applied it in their grief after their master was crucified. However, such a contentious reading of the 87-line tablet depends on creative interpretation of a smudged passage, making it the latest entry in the woulda/coulda/shoulda category of possible New Testament artifacts; they are useful to prove less-spectacular points and to stir discussion on the big ones, but probably not to settle them nor shake anyone’s faith.
Both of these guys are distorting the Scriptures. There is not much difference between a “top U.S. evangelical leader” and being a presidential candidate, in that both are political in nature, and both are well know to subscribe to and teach any number of false doctrines.
Via: CNN.com
A top U.S. evangelical leader is accusing Sen. Barack Obama of deliberately distorting the Bible and taking a “fruitcake interpretation” of the U.S. Constitution.
James Dobson says Barack Obama is distorting bibical teachings to fit “his own confused theology.”
James Dobson says Barack Obama is distorting bibical teachings to fit “his own confused theology.”
In comments to be aired on his radio show Tuesday, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson criticizes the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for comments he made in a June 2006 speech to the liberal Christian group Call to Renewal.
In the speech, Obama suggested that it would be impractical to govern based solely on the word of the Bible, noting that some passages suggest slavery is permissible and eating shellfish is disgraceful.
“Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy?” Obama asked in the speech. “Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount?
Fouke residents worry about notorious evangelist in their midst.
Fouke isn’t a town so much as a crossroads, a Miller County outpost in Southwest Arkansas, on Highway 71 between Texarkana and Shreveport. The businesses at its center can be counted on two hands; the city hall is a prefab metal structure. Until recently, its main claim to fame was the Fouke Monster, which, like similar mythical beasts, has inspired a weird combination of fear and pride in the people who live near its territory.
The monster has gone into hibernation since its manifestation in 1971, but the 814 residents of Fouke aren’t free of their demons just yet. Just a five-minute walk from the town’s traffic light lives another reclusive creature that, to some people at least, is much scarier than the Fouke Monster, one that is demonstrably flesh and blood. His name is World Pastor Tony Alamo, and nine years after from his release from prison on tax evasion charges, he’s in back in business, with churches in Fouke, Fort Smith and California.
Full Story
Technorati Tags: Christianity today, false teachers, Pastor Tony Alamo, Fouke Monster
Oh my, it seems as though the nation is about to be injected with Oprah’s take on polygamy, with the assistance of private investigator named Lisa Ling. I won’t be watching the show, because we don’t watch television, but I will be watching the log files to see if any of the buzz generated finds it’s way to the site. 
“It is a society that you may think you know, but you have never seen it like this until Friday’s show. A polygamist husband comes forward for the first time and shares why he is risking everything to tell his side. And, Lisa Ling journeys to the dark side of polygamy to give us an inside look at this secret world.”
Oprah, Carolyn Jessop, Centennial Park, plural marriage, polygamy, false teachers, polygyny, Joshuah’s House
