Soul and Spirit | Ain't Complicated

Repeat Customer

As I scanned the email orders, my scan jolted to a stop. The email address was familiar. So was the last name. I opened the order and confirmed it is the same person.

Last year the customer ordered and paid for 24 CDs.

After a series of emails and phone calls, the customer ended up with 12 duplicate CDs from us.

And I ended up convinced we’d been lied to and defrauded.

By someone claiming to be “Reverend.”

Now we have another order.

And the payment for it.

I’m planning to refund the payment and cancel the order, explaining that I just can’t take the risk.

What would you do with the rev’s order?

Would you do further business with her?

The Trokosi

The Trokosi: Religious Slavery Today

Slavery in the West has largely become a shamed subject of history. Most Westerners are unaware of the thousands of slaves still suffering and dying in various locations around the world. One such group are the Trokosi slaves of Ghana.

Guayo was never told why her family gave her to the fetish priest when she was a young child. Raped by the priest from the age of 12, Guayo gave birth to four children over the years. The priest had no obligation to provide for Guayo’s basic needs or for her children, who were also considered his slaves. The young mother has lived in constant despair, seeking to feed herself and her children while working hard long days for the priest. Now Guayo is 30 and has few skills and no education. Yet, since the priest has died, nobody will dare to help her, since the community believes she is owned by the gods.

Guayo’s situation is typical of the Trokosi slaves in Ghana. In the ju-ju religious system in Ghana, the local fetish priest is the mediator between the villagers and the gods. There is great fear among the villagers that if they do not abide by the priest’s demands, they will be cursed and die. If the priest says there must be a payment made for some sin in the family, families will give a virgin daughter to become his property and she will go to live at the shrine in the service of “the gods” – often for the rest of her life.

Click the link to see what some Christian groups are doing to liberate and restore these women and their children.

Jesus came to set the captives free!

Mexican Army: Wish Them Well

The UK Mail Online reports:

Thousands of Mexican soldiers pour into the country’s most violent city in crackdown on drug gangs

Armed to the hilt, they came from land and air, determined to restore order to Mexico’s most violent city.

Nearly 2,000 Mexican soldiers and armed federal police poured into the border town of Ciudad Juarez last weekend.

The city – just across from El Paso in Texas – has been ravaged by drug gangs. Just this month 250 people were killed there by hitmen fighting for lucrative smuggling routes.

The soldiers’ mandate is clear – and ambitious.

‘This is to reinforce the operation in general … to eradicate kidnappings, extortion, assaults and homicide,’ army spokesman Enrique Torres said.

The soldiers are the first contingent of as many as 5,000 troops and federal police being sent to Juarez.

President Felipe Calderon’s military operation is supported by the United States, which is concerned the violence could destabilize Mexico, a key trading partner, and spill over the border.

Mexico has deployed some 45,000 troops across the country to try to crush drug gangs, but clashes between rival cartels and security forces killed around 6,000 people last year.

Read it all

“A Triumph for Human Rights”

United Nations Population Fund Leader Says Family Breakdown is a Triumph for Human Rights

A leader in the United Nations Population Fund UNFPA has declared that the breakdown of traditional families, far from being a “crisis,’ is actually a triumph for human rights.

Speaking at a colloquium held last month at Colegio Mexico in Mexico City, UNFPA representative Arie Hoekman denounced the idea that high rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births represent a social crisis, claiming that they represent instead the triumph of “human rights” against “patriarchy.”

“In the eyes of conservative forces, these changes mean that the family is in crisis,” he said. “In crisis? More than a crisis, we are in the presence of a weakening of the patriarchal structure, as a result of the disappearance of the economic base that sustains it and because of the rise of new values centered in the recognition of fundamental human rights.”

“Day after day, Mexico experiences a process of this diversity and there are those who understand it as a crisis, because they only recognize one type of family,” one of the speakers on the panel also told the audience.

This must be one of those stories buried by the regular press.

Maybe they just missed it.

HT: The Berean Call

Pre-Christian Behavior

Over the last couple of years or so, I’ve had various times to wonder why Christians insist (at times) on behaving in Christ-less manners.

Making someone else look bad
Undermining authority
Paying back spitefully what someone else did unwittingly
Spreading an evil report about another
Reacting viciously against contradiction or correction
Dishonoring parents
Belittling children
Returning evil for evil

That’s only the beginning of the list, of course. But why do Christians indulge that kind of behavior?

When I see it, I’m left feeling puzzled.

And (at times) angry or vindictive or hurt or depressed or scornful.

Which raises another question: Aren’t those also forms of pre-Christian behavior?

Baby, Beware!

This morning, LifeNews is reporting:

President Obama Starts Process of Removing Doctors’ Protections on Abortions

The White House quietly announced on Friday that President Barack Obama is starting the process of overturning protections President Bush put in place to make sure medical staff and centers are not forced to do abortions.

I checked the White House site but didn’t find any mention of it yet.

Cannon Fodder from America?

American Somali children join jihad

Several Somali children have left the US to join the ‘jihad’ against foreign forces in Somalia, it has been reported.

According to the MidEast News Source, the children, mainly from Minneapolis and Minnesota left the country in secret, with one mother claiming that the first she knew of it was when her son called her from Mogadishu. She had earlier reported her son missing to police.

[…]

Observers believe that American children are now joining the jihad, and they have suggested that some were involved in a string of suicide attacks in Somaliland and Puntland.

It seems that their involvement coincided with the arrival of Ethiopian troops, who defeated the Islamic Courts Union. Following the recent peace deal, the Ethiopian troops have now departed.

Most of the children appear to have links with Abubakar Alsiddiq mosque in Minneapolis. But the imam there, Sheikh Abdirahman Ahmed, claimed the accusations were baseless and denied that he was recruiting fighters. There are also concerns in Europe and other continents that children are leaving for jihad in Somalia.