Soul and Spirit | Ain't Complicated

Orissa Update

To put the financial crisis in a different perspective:

Christian villages burned, 12,000 people missing from refugee camps

About 12,000 people have disappeared from the refugee camps set up by the government of Orissa to accommodate the Christians fleeing from the violence of Hindu radicals and from their destroyed villages. Meanwhile, a dozen more houses have been burned, while the government of the state assures that it is doing everything possible to maintain security.

Since August 24, a campaign of attacks against Christians and their institutions has been underway in the district of Kandhamal, killing 60 people and forcing 50,000 more to flee. Of these, at least 15,000 have been accommodated in refugee camps overseen by the government. But the Christians do not feel safe; in recent days, attacks have been conducted by Hindu fundamentalist groups against Christians in the camps, with threats and attempts to reconvert them to Hinduism. No Christians from the outside are permitted to enter the camps, and even volunteers and medical personnel from nongovernmental organizations are closely monitored, under the suspicion of wanting to favor conversions to Christianity.

Meanwhile, news of more burned villages is coming from the diocese of Bhubaneshwar. Yesterday, in the village of Balligada, 25 homes belonging to Christians were first ransacked and then set on fire. On October 7 in Phiringia and Sujeli (G. Udayagiri), six homes were attacked and destroyed.

Unique Adversaries

After the flirtation came the fatwa:

With some overly friendly comments to Gov. Sarah Palin at the United Nations, Asif Ali Zardari has succeeded in uniting one of Pakistan’s hard-line mosques and its feminists after a few weeks in office.

A radical Muslim prayer leader said the president shamed the nation for “indecent gestures, filthy remarks, and repeated praise of a non-Muslim lady wearing a short skirt.”

Feminists charged that once again a male Pakistani leader has embarrassed the country with sexist remarks. And across the board, the Pakistani press has shown disapproval.

Muslims and feminists and the press — I wonder how often that axis teams up!

Oh, what did he say to her?

“The whole of America is crazy” — actually, he said more. 🙄

Orissa

First, from the Indian Catholic:

The death toll in the continuing anti-Christian violence in Orissa state rose to 50 as India celebrated the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, father of the nation and champion of peace.
The latest victim, Lalgi Nayak, a Protestant, succumbed to a gash on his neck and other injuries on Oct. 1. He was injured on Sept. 30, when Hindu extremists attacked his Rudangia village, UCA News reported.

Bibhu Datta Das, a legal consultant for the Church of North India, told UCA News on Oct. 2 that Nayak and others were attacked because they “heroically” resisted demands by Hindu fanatics to denounce their Christian faith.

“Such murders are rampant” in Orissa, said the lawyer representing the unified Protestant Church. He added that perpetrators of the violence that began on Aug. 24 not only burn down houses and churches but “demand that Christians accept Hinduism or face death.”

Sindh Today reports:

The Manmohan Singh government has committed to buy energy worth $70 billion from the ‘dying US nuclear industry’ under the nuclear deal, Communist Party of India-Marxist CPI-M general secretary Prakash Karat said here Thursday.

[…]

Karat condemned the continuing violence against Chrisitians in Orissa and serial bomb blasts in Tripura late Wednesday.

‘The Orissa government has failed to control the violence. It is shocking. The Naveen Patnaik government and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders should be held responsible for it,’ he said.

World Sikh News has this:

There was little that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh could do to persuade the French President Nicholas Sarkozy on the issue of Sikh turbans as he was under fire with the European Union ticking him off for New Delhi’s failure to prevent massacre of Christians in Orissa and Karnataka. At the India-EU summit, Sarkozy, as head of the European Council, and Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, took up the issue very strongly about Hindutva terror outfit’s attacks on Christians, leaving Manmohan Singh with little room to push the Sikh demand for removing the ban on turbans in French schools.

Recruiting Defiant Pastors

Late last night, I noticed WorldMagBlog was calling attention to this event:

Pulpit politics: Pastors to defy IRS

During sermons this Sunday, some 35 pastors across the country will tell their congregations which presidential candidate they should vote for, “according to the Scriptures.”

Their endorsements represent a direct challenge to federal tax law, which prohibits tax-exempt organizations from engaging in partisan political activity.

The clergy have embraced that risk, hoping their actions will trigger an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service, which would then enable a Christian legal advocacy group to take the IRS to court and challenge the constitutionality of the ban.

The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a conservative legal group based in Arizona, recruited the pastors for “Pulpit Freedom Sunday” to press their claim that the IRS tax code violates the free speech of religious leaders.

These pastors really were “recruited” for this purpose?

If that is the case, it seems the pastors are being moved by the wrong spirit, no? It certainly appears to me that whatever they “preach” would have more political and civic motivation than it would Spirit motivation.

Or am I missing something here?

(For a little more perspective on this: Church and State.)

I Don’t Want To Alarm You

I’m no banking expert. Or anything remotely related to one. Period.

I don’t know what to make of the current crisis in the finance system.

I don’t even know if I’m using the right lingo.

But here’s something I just read:

Dominoes: Large Euro, US Banks On The Brink

We are witnessing a failure in government. Our Congress cannot work together to provide an immediate fix to a problem it created in the first place: forcing the American financial sector to extend mortgages to those who were high risk borrowers in order to champion to the American people that more minorities own homes than ever. That worked well under a booming economy. But when the natural cycle of economics turned downward, fear dismissed became reality unavoidable. The house of cards came tumbling down.

And even still, amid all the haggling and fighting going on in Congress over how to shore up the financial cash crisis, not a word is mentioned about changing the counter-intuitive practices forced upon mortgage lenders in the first place. In this respect, it’s not unlike how Congress and the White House chose to address illegal immigration: by trying to deal with those already here first rather than initially addressing the cause: the influx of illegals that continues to flow unabated.

Make no mistake, if we wake to Black Monday this week, the responsibility lies squarely upon Congress and the electorate which has put them there, not our banks. Our banks’ hands were forced by mandates from Washington, not their boardrooms.

And here we are. With a Congress so polarized that they are incapable of working together.

[…]

America does not seem nearly as polarized as its elected representation. But perhaps in less than one full week, it really won’t matter but for hindsight and lessons going forward. Hard, painful, demanding lessons.

I don’t have time to say more, though there’s plenty I could say.

For now, I remind you about Roger Hertzler’s article I posted here.

Two Exciting Investment Opportunities

I’m sure that by now most of you have heard of the financial meltdown being faced by the United States economy. It all started with the banking system starting to tremble. No, wait, it all started with people not being able to pay back all the money they had borrowed from the banks. Actually, I think it all started with real estate prices going down. Well, come to think of it, it really started before that, back when real estate prices went up. Or I guess it started before that, back when the banks decided to loan money to anybody who was willing to borrow money, which is what helped make the land prices go up.

Anyway, it started somewhere, sometime. And by all appearances, getting it started was a lot simpler than getting it stopped is going to be. You see, just this evening President Bush got on the radio, TV, and just about everything else he could get on and told Americans in general that there is going to be a widespread financial disaster. In other words, the average person would lose his house, his job, his retirement, his savings, his insurance, his sanity, and perhaps an arm and a leg. Unless, of course, we allow the government to step in and bail us out. Bail us out, mind you, to the tune of seven hundred billion dollars. For those of you who don’t know how much money that is, it is a 7 with a whole wagon load of zeros.

Anyway, in the midst of a world full of financial turmoil and uncertainty, I thought you would all be excited about a couple of wonderful investment opportunities I recently learned about. These are both guaranteed not to lose any of their value, and will not be affected by moth, rust, thieves, or financial market melt-downs. You have no need to fear when you invest in these securities, because they are backed by a pool of wealth far in excess of a measly 700 billion greenbacks. Read it all

At Work: For the People

Here’s “proof” that some CongressFolks are still doing stuff:

Brand new push in Congress to prevent Shariah invasion

Congressman Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., introduced a bill to the House of Representatives that seeks to prevent Islam’s radical Shariah law from gaining a foothold in the U.S. legal system, as it has in other countries.

Tancredo introduced HR 6975, the Jihad Prevention Act, last week. If made into law, the bill would allow American authorities to prevent advocates of Shariah law from entering the country, revoke the visa of any foreigners that did champion Shariah law and revoke naturalization for citizens that seek to implement Shariah law in the U.S.

The radical form of Islam’s Shariah religious law includes several statutes often objectionable to Western minds, including stoning for adulterous women, amputation for thieves and the death sentence for converting from Islam.

That one has no chance of becoming law.

And the chances for this one are somewhat better, though not by much:

Another Bright Idea

An act sponsored by 25 representatives asking the government to reconsider its ban on incandescent light bulbs has been stalled in committee – and the leading sponsor is faulting Democratic leadership.

The Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act highlights growing concerns over the safety and environmental impact of compact fluorescent bulbs, or CFLs. Before the sale of incandescent bulbs is banned, the representatives are asking the comptroller general to prove replacement with CFLs will be cost-effective, reduce overall carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent in the United States by 2025 and that the bulbs will not pose a health risk to the general public.

[…]

As WND reported, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 was signed into law in December, phasing out the use of traditional, incandescent light bulbs in favor of CFLs beginning in 2012 and culminating in a ban on incandescent bulbs in 2014.

Concerns about mercury in the bulbs and mercury vapor released when a CFL is broken led Bachmann and a group of legislators in the House to second-guess the government’s choice.