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Christian Internet News

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Click and ye shall be saved...

By: Chris McGillion

Copyright  © 2004. The Sydney Morning Herald

January 6, 2004

Photo illustration: Louie Douvis

Does path to heaven commence on information superhighway?

More than 3rd of all online Americans use Web to access religious, spiritual data.

God works in mysterious ways, it is claimed, and one of them increasingly appears to be via the World Wide Web.

According to a major new survey on internet use in the United States, more than a third of all Americans who are connected to the web (in total 126 million people as of August 2003) have used it to access religious and spiritual information.

This compares with 40 per cent of American internet users who have searched the web for political information, and 66 per cent who have sought health and medical data.

But while the number of people using the web for these last two purposes increased 57 per cent and 59 per cent respectively between March 2000 and November 2002, what the researchers call "religion surfers" almost doubled in number over the same period, from 18 million to 35 million (or an increase of 94 per cent).

Moreover, there has been a significant increase in the daily use of the internet to access religious information. While the overall numbers remain low, they nevertheless did climb from 3 million in 2000 to 5 million in 2002, an increase of 66 per cent.

The survey was conducted by the Pew Research Centre of Washington DC and the report of its findings was released just before Christmas. It can be found, appropriately enough, on the centre's website (www.pewinternet.org).

It is tempting to dismiss this increased interest in religion as a one-off response to its abrupt intrusion into public affairs in the form of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. But the September 11 bounce was accounted for in an earlier Pew Centre survey documented in a report entitled CyberFaith: How Americans Pursue Religion Online, which was released two years ago.

This survey found that religion surfers increased from 18 million to 28 million between March 2000 and September 2001. Post-September 11, more than 40 per cent of them had used the internet to send or receive prayer requests associated with that day's tragedies, 23 per cent had accessed information about Islam specifically, and 7 per cent had made online donations to relief charities.

What's important, however, is that not only had the number of religion surfers held since September 2001, but that it increased by 25 per cent during the next 15 months.

The 2002 survey also found that those people accessing web-based religious information were evenly distributed across educational and socio-economic groups (previous surveys had shown them to be concentrated on the lower rungs of each). Their age breakdown, however, had not changed: internet users in the 18- to 29-year-old bracket were the least interested in employing the web as a religious resource (24 per cent); those aged 30-49 years were the most interested (33 per cent).

The latest survey also showed that the more experience one had on the internet, the more likely one was to use it to search out religious material. Only 19 per cent of people who had been wired for a year or less used the internet as a source of information on religion. For those with six or more years of experience, the figure was closer to 40 per cent.

That suggests that the volume of religion-related traffic on the web will continue to grow. On the face of it, this should be a boon to the religious communities (the great majority of religion surfers tend to be the most active in their faith offline as well), but how well prepared are they to deal with the consequences?

Most churches have a well established web presence, for instance, but some have embraced the new technology much more readily than others.

It took until February 2002, for instance, for the Catholic Church's pontifical council for social communications to give its official blessing to the internet.

That month it released two long-awaited documents: Ethics and the Internet and The Church and the Internet. The president of the council, Archbishop John Foley, summarised the underlying message of both when he told the assembled press that the church recognised the internet as "an opportunity and a challenge, and not a threat".

While the opportunity has yet to be fully explored, the challenge is clear enough. The anarchic nature of the web makes it harder for religious authorities to control information, silence critics, or shield members of their faith from almost instant access to competing religious ideas and organisations.

Last, but not least, is the issue of autonomy. What people make of the religious information they access on the web untutored and unministered to, at least in the conventional sense, is anyone's guess. God may indeed work in mysterious ways.

Hummm...! Do you think...? :-) Yep, God certainly does! CK

A shaky life for young without belief...

By: Chris McGillion

Copyright  © 2003. The Sydney Morning Herald

October 28, 2003

In 1967, the American sociologist Daniel Bell was commissioned by Life magazine to write a series of articles explaining the turbulence in US society, especially as it was then manifesting itself in the rebelliousness of youth. Bell's overall conclusion was that 1960s America had become the first society in history to rear its young in an environment that lacked fixed points of reference to guide them through life.

"For millennia," he wrote, "children were initiated into stable ways and ritualised routines, and maintained a basic familiarity with place and family. Today, not only is there a radical rupture with the past, but a child must necessarily be trained for an unknown future."

An important new study, the findings of which were released in the US last month, suggests that Bell was certainly half right: a society that fails to connect its young to solid personal and moral foundations is failing to provide them with much needed direction in life. But, according to the study, such a society is also acting in ways harmful to their essential biology.

Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities is the report of the Commission on Children at Risk - a group of 33 prominent research scientists, doctors and mental health and youth professionals jointly sponsored by Dartmouth Medical School, the Institute of American Values, and the YMCA.

The commission set out to establish why, amid increasing material wealth, American children and adolescents were registering rising rates of mental illness, emotional distress and anti-social behaviour.

For instance, 21 per cent of American children aged nine to 17 now have a diagnosable mental disorder or addiction; 8 per cent of high school students suffer from clinical depression and 20 per cent of students report having seriously considered suicide in the past year.

The study found convincing scientific evidence that the mechanisms by which we become and remain attached to others - and thus lead healthy lives - have a biological basis discernible in the structure of the brain. Children are "hardwired" to form close attachments to their mothers, fathers, and other relatives and, through all of these, to the broader community.

Part of this neural circuitry leads inexorably to a search for moral meaning, a propensity to seek answers to questions about ultimate meaning and purpose and an openness to the possibility of a transcendent reality.

According to the report, the ecology of childhood in the US has become "at best anaemic, in the sense of weak and inadequate to foster full human flourishing, and at worst toxic, inadvertently depressing health and engendering emotional distress and mental illness".

The reason is the steady decline of social institutions that foster connectedness and spiritual growth amid the rising tide of individualism and secular materialism.

One notable finding was the health benefits of what some scholars call "personal devotion", or a young person's sense of taking part in a "direct personal relationship with the Divine".

The report found, for example, that for adolescents, religiosity is significantly associated with a reduced likelihood of intentional and unintentional injury, that religious teenagers are less likely to become prone to substance abuse, less likely to become juvenile delinquents or adult criminals and more likely to have higher self-esteem and more positive attitudes about life.

The report also argues that mainstream therapies for addressing childhood and adolescent mental illnesses are insufficient because they focus on individual risk assessment and treatment and ignore the broader environmental conditions contributing to the growing number of sufferers.

In conclusion, the researchers insist that more and better service delivery is not the key to improving the mental and emotional lives of children.

Nothing short of major social change, they say, will do the trick.

That change requires the nurturing once again of what the researchers call "authoritative communities" - groups of people who are committed to each other's welfare and who are able to model what it means to be a good person and to lead a good life (families, community and civic organisations, churches, and so forth).

In the 1960s it was sex and drugs and rock 'n roll that were regarded as the pathologies of wayward youth. By the 1980s, American children as a group were reporting more anxiety than had children who were institutionalised as psychiatric patients in the 1950s. Twenty years on, youth suicide and indiscriminate violence of the Columbine High School variety had become a major problem.

That trend suggests that American culture - and by degrees those, like ours, that are influenced by it - is in the process of consuming itself. It is a worrying enough thought to warrant the recommendations of Hardwired to Connect to be given serious attention by policy makers and everyone concerned about the future of our youth.

Google bans Christian ad...

By: Ron Strom

Copyright  © 2004, WorldNetDaily.com

August 17, 2004

Google has banned a Christian organization's advertisements promoting its stance against homosexuality, saying the group promotes "hate."

Stand to Reason, a nonprofit apologetics organization, says its "AdWord" advertisement on Google recently was pulled down. Specific AdWord ads are listed in the right-hand margin of search results on the popular site when key words an advertiser submits match with those put in by a Net user. A company promoting hats, for example, could have their site displayed when a user searches for information about hats.

Melinda Penner, director of operations for Stand to Reason, says the organization placed four ads on Google. Three of the ads remain on the system, but one leading Net surfers to a Q&A about same-sex marriage was taken down after running for two or three weeks.

"Google's objections had to do with other articles on our website pertaining to homosexuality," Penner told WND. "They claimed that their specialist had deemed us a hate site and that their policies didn't allow people to have ads that discriminated against certain groups, which include sexual orientation."

Penner said she asked Google what specifically it thought was "hate speech."

"The things they cited were all moral judgments from our religious perspective about homosexuality, that it's wrong," she explained.

"The irony is that in one of the articles they cited, we have an admonition that one of our moral perspective is that we treat homosexuals respectfully and kindly."

The Stand to Reason website has a special page with articles on homosexuality issues.

Penner says she has asked Google for its definition of "hate," saying Stand to Reason's positions are not hateful based on dictionary definitions.

When it comes to "discrimination," she says, it is actually Google that is discriminating by disallowing Stand to Reason's ads.

An e-mail Penner received from "Kristie" at Google used the "H" word, saying, "Google AdWords policy never permits ads or keywords promoting hate, violence, or crimes toward any organization, person or group protected by law," including those distinguished by their "sexual orientation/gender identity."

Penner countered via e-mail: "Your suspension of our advertisement illegitimately excludes one side of the [same-sex marriage] debate. If you deem the issue itself off limits, then consistency would require you to suspend all searches of the issue. Instead, your search criteria return links to sites strongly advocating same-sex marriage. …"

Kristie responded by reiterating the company's verdict that the Stand to Reason website includes "unacceptable content." In the same e-mail, she said, "Google believes strongly in freedom of expression. We therefore offer broad access to content across the Web without censoring results. Please note that the decisions we make concerning advertising in no way affect the search results we deliver."

Penner noted that Google, which is in the midst of an IPO, or Initial Public Offering of stock, takes pride in its company motto: "Don't be evil."

"If that's your company motto then there must be some things that you don't want to do," she told WND, "and if your definition of 'hate' is calling something 'evil,' then aren't you a hate group?"

According to Penner, no anti-homosexuality ads currently are coming up in the right-hand ads; they are all pro-homosexual.

"I'm sure there must be some homosexual advocacy groups behind this," she said.

Penner says she contacted a religious legal group and was told because Google is a private organization, there is really no legal action that can be taken.

The other three Stand to Reason ads that are still running on Google have to do with evolution, Christian apologetics and abortion.

Though the organization's pro-life ad is still running on Google, another advertiser's pro-life ad was removed.

In June, Google took down pro-life T-shirt ads a clothing company, Run2316, had run for a time in 2003 without a problem, the firm's operations administrator, Christopher Clay, says.

In an e-mail to Clay, Google said, "At this time, Google policy does not permit the advertisement of websites that contain 'religion and abortion or contraceptive content.' As noted in our advertising terms and conditions, we reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when it comes to the advertising we accept on our site."

Clay believes Google's IPO has caused the company to clamp down on advertising it finds distasteful. Google might begin trading its stocks as early as tomorrow on Nasdaq, according to news reports.

A spokesman from Google was reluctant to go on the record with WND either about the specific instances mentioned or the company's "hate speech" policy.

He explained that the company does not allow advertising from organizations that speak negatively of a so-called "protected group."

The spokesman would not talk about the pro-life issue or the reason one group's pro-life ad might be acceptable and another group's ad would not.

Google's online guidelines for AdWord advertisers say nothing about homosexuality or protected classes of people. It does have, however, include a prohibition against advertising for casinos.

So is Google becoming more aggressive combating "hate speech" to coordinate with its IPO? Since the company is in a "quiet period" in conjunction with the public offering, the spokesman could not address the issue.

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Ron Strom is a news editor for WorldNetDaily.com.

A Christian business eye for the queer guy...

By: Joe Johnson

Copyright  © 2004, Business Reform

October 27, 2004

In an article published last week on the Gay Financial Network website, "The Next Frontier: Gay Shareholder Activism", Shelley Alpern lays out a vision for how the GLBT community can have more of an influence in corporate and business culture. Her conclusion? Putting their mouths where their stock certificates are.

There's been a disturbing trend over the past few years of corporate policies bending under the weight of the homosexual community's demands. Companies like IBM, McDonalds, Johnson and Johnson, and Daimler Chrysler (and the list goes on) have taken steps to taper their benefit packages and policy structures to meet the supposed needs of their gay employees. Alpern, in this article, clamors for more of the same.

What most Christians seem to have forgotten—and what this article makes horribly apparent—is how integral business is to shaping not only the market itself, but also public morality in general. When businesses begin adopting policies that set a certain moral precedent, governmental policies soon follow. For example, New York City last spring implemented a policy that all organizations that contract with the city must offer benefits to unwed and gay partners of employees—a policy that followed closely behind (and, significantly, not before) corporate giants like IBM that took the same steps within their ranks.

Everything begins with business. Money has an amazing knack for changing minds. And it is high time that the Christian business community began using their investment dollars and stock options to stem the tide of dissident and immoral groups taking control of this country's moral canvas.

The first step, of course, is within your own business. Align your company's policies with Scripture and remain consistent. Hold to those principles and grow your wealth so that your dollars can support companies and organizations that are dedicated to God's ways.

The second step: Do business with other Christians and those partners that share your worldview. Form strategic alliances with businesses that seek to better society by putting God back into the marketplace.

Thirdly, either don't invest in companies that cater to immoral minorities, or invest heavily in these places and become very outspoken when it comes to the moral policies of those companies. Alpern's whole strategy revolves around that idea that shareholders should submit shareholder proposals to company boards in order to change the corporate moral climate. Christians should be doing the same thing—with more efficiency and at a higher volume.

Business matters. It's more than a question of dollars, cents, and a thriving economy. The morality of a country is directly related to what its business culture is promoting. It's time for Christians in business to take a page out of the gay community's book and begin to turn the tide back for the glory of God. 

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Editor's note: Joe Johnson is editor-in-chief of Business Reform Magazine, the leading Christian business magazine with over 100,000 readers. Each issue features practical advice on operating successfully in business while glorifying God.

The problem of wealth...

By: Marilyn Barnewall

Copyright  © 2004, Business Reform

October 26, 2004

If you do not like people who have money, chances are you do not have it. Jealousy and envy are nothing new to the human psyche.

There has been a trend in the United States since the 1960s. Affluent people feel guilty about having money.

Some people probably should feel guilty about having money. And, the power that goes with it. They did nothing to earn it. They were lucky eggs fertilized by affluent sperm -- or vice versa. This is jokingly referred to as "Gaining wealth the old fashioned way... through inheritance."

Stories about children who suffered because of the wealth of their parents -- poor little Gloria Vanderbilt, for example -- made most Americans cognizant that wealth does not equate to happiness.

Children of wealthy parents often have more difficulties to face in life than those of the non-wealthy. Because of money, they have more options. The more options you have in life, the more choices you must make. The more choices you must make, the greater your chance for error.

In today's drug culture, children of the wealthy who make bad choices end up in Amsterdam and Zurich and Sweden where socialist forms of government provide protected living areas in parks for drug addicts and clean needles to prevent the spread of AIDS.

These children of great opportunity and misdirected choices frequently receive from a wealthy parent the funds to maintain misbegotten lifestyles. It conveniently keeps offspring from the front doorstep of his or her family. This is certainly not a lifestyle to be envied or emulated.

When a person does not feel worthy of what he or she receives, the person does not feel deserving of the gift.

Years after winning large sums of money from state lotteries, winners who are asked about the positive impact of their windfalls do not have much to say that is good. They find money does not bring a life without problems, only a life with a different set of them.

People who are happy in spite of money realize it is more important to be self-fulfilled than self-gratified. To achieve fulfillment, people direct themselves to the outward; to achieve gratification, people look inward to personal wants and desires.

Earned wealth also seems to present problems, if one can believe the number of people who started successful businesses and ended up with a bundle of cash. They appear on talk show television to bemoan that "money has not brought me happiness."

To those souls who have no money and the benefits it buys -- like housing, clothing, and food -- such claims are not to be believed. "I'd rather have your problems than mine," says the person sleeping in the streets for lack of a job. Everyone, it seems, would rather have someone else's problems.

What is the problem with wealth? Why do so many people dislike those who have it while so aggressively pursuing it themselves? Can those who find affluence be happy until they realize the words "money" and "problem-free" are not synonymous?

Success, not money, is what brings happiness. Money is merely a byproduct of success. Most people think it happens the other way around -- that money brings success.

It is a rather natural mistake to see the apparent -- the social lifestyle that money brings -- as the objective. Rather we must work to see the subtle -- the building of character that occurs when challenges are faced and overcome __ as the thing that makes people both wealthy and happy.

We live in a country where wealth is a very important factor, yet we seem to understand little about the subject. Is wealth good for society? Or, is it bad?

There is no "good wealth" and "bad wealth". There are merely people who make fulfillment rather than money their objective. There are others who seek money for self-gratification. The former group appears to find more happiness than does the latter. At least it does if one looks at long-term, permanent rather than short-term, temporary successes who, overall, achieve long-term failure.

At the very least, fulfillment rather than gratification seekers appear to do less harm to society.

Whether people seeking self-gratification are Wall Street brokers who compromise their integrity to gain gratification by violating insider confidentiality, or a YUPPIE couple in suburbia who violate their responsibilities to children so they can buy a bigger car, or a politician who takes an illegal campaign contribution, the result is the same.

People who seek wealth for its own sake and who compromise their responsibilities to basic principles of integrity or family obligation or social responsibility in the process are doomed to be short-term successes and long-term failures.

Creating wealth, however, is a critical factor in maintaining a healthy American economy. As wealth is created, jobs are created. If someone doesn't start a successful company and realize resultant financial rewards in the process, jobs are not created. Thus, the American trend to worship the have-nots and trivialize the haves is a dangerous one.

There is nothing wrong with money. Sometimes the people who have it are as obnoxious as some people who don't have money. We are all human. Some of us are likeable, some of us are not.

The American people need to give the respect due those people who risk their personal assets to build a dream.

Especially since the success of that dream provides employment to so many people.

Don't get me wrong. I like poor people. I used to be one of them. But until they are willing to make compromises necessary to achieve success, no one can give it to them. Success is a process, not a position.

Needed compromises range from completing an education (rather than dropping out) to working long hours at jobs you sometimes don't like and certainly wouldn't seek as an entire career.

When you think about it, the system of "welfare" in the United States has really been to the "well fare" of no one.

When you think about it, very few poor and underprivileged people provide employment for others. When you think about it, the poor are not very well situated to lead anyone to a better life in America. Thus, perhaps they should not rank as high on the list of political favor as they do.

Ahh… but they do, as voters, have numbers.

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Marilyn Barnewall, in 1978, was the first female to be named vice president in charge of a major loan and deposit portfolio at Denver's largest bank. She started the nation's first private bank, resigned to start her own firm and consulted for banks of all sizes in America and other countries. In June 1992, Forbes dubbed Barnewall "the dean of American private banking." Author of several banking texts, she has written extensively for the American Banker, Bank Marketing Magazine, and was U.S. consulting editor for Private Banker International (Lafferty Publications, London/Dublin). Article originally appeared in the Grand Junction Free Press. Marilyn can be reached at marilynmacg@yahoo.com.

Editor's note: Business Reform Magazine provides real biblical answers for real business issues.

Christian company snubbed by University of Wisconsin...

By: Business Reform

Copyright  © 2004, Business Reform

October 28, 2004

Applegate Insulation, located in Wisconsin, was recently dropped from the University of Wisconsin's annual list of environmentally friendly companies. The Green List, as it is called, honors and supports companies and organizations that have taken steps to reduce waste and pollution with the health of the environment in mind. But the reason that the company has been dropped has nothing to do with the environment. It instead has everything to do with the fact that they are a Christian company.

In a series of e-mails from the UW offices said, "We will not be able to list your company on our listing of green building products because of the explicit religious principles on which Applegate is based."

The company, which is owned by Terry Applegate, is very outspoken about the faith on which the company is based, and has on its website a series of psalms at the bottom of each page. The mission statement on the site also speaks to the Christian purpose of the company---a fact that UW can't stomach, apparently.

The site states: "Applegate Insulation's mission is to honor God, as the world's premier cellulose insulation manufacturer, partnering with professionals, promoting the growth of their business by providing premium-quality cellulose insulation, individualized per...

Student sues district over policy on religious statements...

By: William Kates, Associated Press Writer

Copyright  © 2004, The Associated Press

October 28, 2004

LIVERPOOL, N.Y. -- A fourth-grader claims a school district violated her constitutional rights to free speech and equal protection by refusing to allow her to distribute "personal statement" fliers to other students because they carried a religious message.

The lawsuit was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court against the Liverpool Central School District by Nicole Martin and her daughter, Michaela Bloodgood, a fourth-grader at Nate Perry Elementary School.

"This is nothing less than viewpoint discrimination," said Mat Staver, an attorney and executive director of Liberty Counsel, an Orlando, Fla.-based conservative legal group, which is representing Bloodgood.

"The idea that people would think the district was endorsing Michaela's statements is simply absurd. Schools do not endorse everything they allow students to distribute," Staver said.

Staver said religious speech is constitutionally protected even in the public schools. He said school officials had no right to single out Michaela's religious literature for disfavored treatment.

"She has every right to express her religious views in this way, and we intend to fight to protect her rights," Staver said.

Liverpool Superintendent Jan Matousek said she had not been informed of the lawsuit and therefore could not comment.

According to the 16-page lawsuit, beginning when her daughter was in third-grade, Martin three times tried to obtain permission from school district officials so that Michaela could pass out a homemade "personal statement" flier to other students, but was denied each time. The last time was in September.

The flier, about the size of a greeting card, starts out: "Hi! My name is Michaela and I would like to tell you about my life and how Jesus Christ gave me a new one." The flier then mentions five ways in which Jesus had come into her life.

Staver said Michaela never intended to distribute her flier during class time and that Martin's requests to school officials indicated that her daughter would hand them out only during "non-instructional time," such as on the bus before school, lunch, recess and after school. Or, as the lawsuit put it, a time when "students are free to talk to each other about any topic, including religion, draw pictures, pass notes, and do school work."

Additionally, the lawsuit noted that Michaela has received literature from other students at school, including literature concerning a YMCA basketball camp, Syracuse Children's Theater promotion of the show "Dragon Slayers" and the Camp Fire USA's summer camps.

According to the lawsuit, Liverpool officials reviewed the request but said Michaela could not distribute it because her flier was religious and that there was "a substantial probability" that other parents and students might misunderstand and presume that the district was "endorsing" the religious statements in the flier.

On the Web: Liberty Counsel: www.lc.org

Spirited away: End is nigh for 'religion', says research...

Christianity said to be eclipsed in UK by 'spirituality' in 30 years

By: Carol Midgley

Copyright  © 2004, Times Newspapers Ltd.

November 4, 2004

IN THE beginning there was the Church. And people liked to dress up in their best clothes and go there on Sundays and they praised the Lord and it was good. But it came to pass that people grew tired of the Church and they stopped going, and began to be uplifted by new things such as yoga and t'ai chi instead. And, lo, a spiritual revolution was born.

It is unlikely that you, the average punter going to your aromatherapy or meditation group this evening, imagine that you are revol