ROME, Aug 29 (Reuters) - "Christianophobia" is a growing problem around the world and it must be fought with the same determination as anti-Semitism or Islamophobia, the Vatican said on Friday.
Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, the Vatican's foreign minister, spoke in the wake of attacks against Christians in India that have left at least 13 people dead this week.
Mamberti, addressing a conference in northern Italy, said religious freedom was a vital part of international relations and human dignity.
"In order to promote this dignity in an integral way, so-called 'Christianophobia' should be combated as decisively as 'Islamophobia' and anti-Semitism," he said.
This week in eastern India, thousands of people, most of them Christians, have sought shelter in makeshift government camps, driven from their homes by religious violence.
Hindu mobs burnt more than a dozen churches and attacked Christians after a Hindu leader was killed.
Mamberti said the events in India made the issue of religious liberty today all the more pressing.
While Hindu groups accuse Christian priests of bribing poor tribes and low-caste Hindus to change their faith, the Christians say lower-caste Hindus convert willingly to escape a complex caste system.

In Japan there is concern that the temple - traditional place of worship for Buddhists across the country - is under threat, particularly in rural areas where the population is aging and the younger generation are leaving for big cities, as Chris Hogg discovered

Shinkyo Toyoma has three sons and they are all mad keen on judo.

The eldest is 18, a big lad, and he is grimacing at me. No teenager likes to be shown off to guests.

Mr Toyoma takes no notice. He is proud of his three boys. But he is also worried about them.

One day one of them is going to have to take over the family business and none of them is keen.

He tells me that, when he was 18, he did not want to inherit the family firm either.

He rebelled at first but then, as now, there was a lot of expectation in the small community where they live that he would follow his father's example.

(July 14th, 2008) When Army Specialist Jeremy Hall declined to participate in a Christian prayer ceremony to commemorate Thanksgiving in November 2006 he said he was alienated by his staff sergeant and subjected to vicious personal attacks for stating that he did not believe in God.

Determined to find soldiers who were also atheists, Hall organized a meeting for freethinkers at Combat Operations Base Speicher, Iraq. He said he received permission from the Army chaplain stationed at Speicher to post flyers to publicize the gathering.

But just minutes after the soldiers convened their first meeting last July, Army Maj. Freddy Welborn burst into a room where the soldiers gathered, broke up the atheist meeting and allegedly threatened to block Hall’s reenlistment in the Army and have charged brought against him for violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Fearing that higher ranking Army officials would not come to his defense, Hall contacted the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a watchdog group whose core mission is to force the military to adhere to the constitutional provision mandating the separation of church and state.

So Hall and MRFF filed a lawsuit last September against the Pentagon, Welborn, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, for allegedly violating the soldier’s First Amendment rights and for permitting a pattern of fundamentalist Christianity to permeate throughout the military. The complaint was amended in March to include new allegations alleging that Hall's promotion in the Army was withdrawn because of he sued the military.

Last week, the Justice Department filed a response to the lawsuit—a massive document exceeding 300 pages that essentially says the lawsuit should be dismissed because Hall “failed to exhaust intramilitary remedies, and assert claims that are nonjusticiable.”

The Democratic National Convention kicked off yesterday, and I couldn’t help but notice the opening invocation. Polly Baca, a former Colorado state senator, led off with a prayer that mentioned Jesus Christ and ended with her crossing herself “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

That’s how Roman Catholics pray. Others do things differently – and, of course, some people don’t pray at all. It surprised me to see such a sectarian invocation before what was surely a very diverse audience.
There’s been a lot of talk about the increased religiosity at the Democratic Convention. Over at the Religion Clause Blog, Howard M. Friedman raises some provocative questions about whether the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause applies to political parties. Are they government entities or private associations?

Don Byrd at the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty’s blog is also looking at the issue, laying down a series of recommendations for how both parties ought to deal with religion.
But the most interesting reaction came from Focus on the Family’s Tom Minnery. For years, Minnery and other FOF honchos have carped that the Democrats are too secular, that the party lacks an outreach to religious voters and that it is even hostile to faith.
Now that the Democrats are adding a hefty dose of religion to their plate, how does Minnery react? He attacks the party for adopting a “gloss of prayer and God-talk” and criticizes it for including non-Christian faiths!

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NEW DELHI — The remote, destitute state of Orissa, marred for years by Hindu-versus-Christian violence, erupted in a retaliatory killing on Monday after the murder of a Hindu leader led a mob to burn small Christian churches, prayer halls and an orphanage that had housed 21 children.

The police said a woman’s body, charred beyond recognition, was found inside the church orphanage. The church’s pastor, whom the police did not identify and who was injured in the fire, told the authorities that the body was that of a nun working there. No children were injured.

The attack on the orphanage on Monday, in an isolated district called Bargarh, came after the killing Saturday of a Hindu leader who had been associated with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, or World Hindu Council, and who was leading a drive to wean local villagers from Christianity. Radical Hindu groups like the council are vehemently opposed to conversions to Christianity, which in India tend to focus on traditionally downtrodden lower-caste and indigenous groups, and have lately taken to conducting mass ceremonies to convert them back to Hinduism.

The Hindu leader who was killed, Laxmanananda Saraswati, was among five people slain by unidentified armed men who stormed a Hindu school in the nearby district of Kandhamal. The police blamed Maoist insurgents who prevail in the area. Mr. Saraswati’s followers, however, blamed Christians, and called for a statewide strike on Monday. The state government ordered all schools closed.

JERUSALEM — In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half a dozen specialists embarked this week on a historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file — among the most sought-after and examined documents on earth — available to all on the Internet.

Equipped with high-powered cameras with resolution and clarity many times greater than those of conventional models, and with lights that emit neither heat nor ultraviolet rays, the scientists and technicians are uncovering previously illegible sections and letters of the scrolls, discoveries that could have significant scholarly impact.

The 2,000-year-old scrolls, found in the late 1940s in caves near the Dead Sea east of Jerusalem, contain the earliest known copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible (missing only the Book of Esther), as well as apocryphal texts and descriptions of rituals of a Jewish sect at the time of Jesus. The texts, most of them on parchment but some on papyrus, date from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D.

Only a handful of the scrolls exist in large pieces, with several on permanent exhibit at the Israel Museum here in its dimly lighted Shrine of the Book. Most of what was found is separated into 15,000 fragments that make up about 900 documents, fueling a longstanding debate on how to order the fragments as well as the origin and meaning of what is written on them.

The report claims more than 50,000 women a year have deserted their congregations over the past two decades because they feel the church is not relevant to their lives.
It says that instead young women are becoming attracted to the pagan religion Wicca, where females play a central role, which has grown in popularity after being featured positively in films, TV shows and books.
The study comes amid ongoing controversy over the role of women in all Christian denominations. Last month its governing body voted to allow women to become bishops for the first time, having admitted them to the priesthood in 1994, but traditionalist bishops have warned that hundreds of clergy and parishes will leave if the move goes ahead as planned.
The report's author, Dr Kristin Aune, a sociologist at the University of Derby, said: "In short, women are abandoning the church.
"Because of its focus on female empowerment, young women are attracted by Wicca, popularised by the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
"Young women tend to express egalitarian values and dislike the traditionalism and hierarchies they imagine are integral to the church.
"Women's ordination, as priests and now bishops, has dominated debate and headlines – but while looking at women in the pulpit we have taken our eyes off the pews, where a shift with more consequences for the church's survival is underway."
Her research, published in a new book called Women and Religion in the West, cites an English Church Census which found more than a million women worshippers have left churches since 1989.

ORANGE PARK, Fla. — David Campbell switched on the overhead projector and wrote “Evolution” in the rectangle of light on the screen.

He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as fact. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gymnasium.

“If I do this wrong,” Mr. Campbell remembers thinking on that humid spring morning, “I’ll lose him.”

In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state’s public schools to teach evolution, calling it “the organizing principle of life science.” Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years.

Far from becoming extinct 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs actually co-existed with early humans, and even helped in the construction of the pyramids.
This is the word of Vince Fenech, Evangelist pastor and director of a fully licensed, State-approved Creationist institution which admits children aged between four and 18.
“Of course the ‘dinoceros’ existed (as Fenech pronounces the word). It is mentioned in the Book of Job. They were used to help build the pyramids,” he says, adding that this latter observation is only “his personal belief”, and that it does not form part of the school’s curriculum.
But the curriculum of the Accelerated Christian Academy in Mosta is not exactly free of such fanciful reinventions of history. Fenech reiterates the basic Evangelist tenet that the entire universe was created in 4004 BC… and this time, he also supplies “proof”.
“When man landed on the moon (in 1969), they expected the landing module to sink in a deep layer of dust. But the layer was only a few inches deep. This proves that the universe is still young!”
Does it? I would have thought it merely illustrates that unlike the Earth, the moon has little or nothing in the way of atmosphere… and dust is usually generated as a result of particles which combine as they are buffeted around by the movement of atmospheric molecules. Also, the moon’s gravity is two thirds less than it is on Earth… which in turn means that dust is practically weightless, and therefore doesn’t settle.

Social conservatives are growing more wary of church involvement in politics, joining moderates and liberals in their unease about blurring the lines between pulpit and ballot box, a new study found

Fifty percent of conservatives think churches and other places of worship should stay out of social and political matters, up from 30 percent four years ago, according to a survey released Thursday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

That significant shift in conservative thought has brought the country to a tipping point on the question: a slim majority of Americans — 52 percent — now think churches should keep out of politics.

That's an eight percentage point increase over 2004 and the first time a majority of Americans has held that opinion since Pew officials started asking the question 12 years ago.

On this question, the gap between conservatives and liberals is narrowing: just four years ago, liberals were twice as likely as conservatives to say churches should stay out of politics. Now, 50 percent of conservatives and 57 percent of liberals think that. Four years ago, 62 percent of liberals opposed church involvement in politics. Democrats and Republicans are about even on the question, as well.