Sharia Down Under

A mosque minaret in Sydney, Australia. (Photo by Cole Bennetts/Getty Images)

 

• Sharia law, the president at the time of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils ludicrously argued, far from discriminating against women, “guarantees women’s rights that are not recognised in mainstream Australian courts”.
• The Australian Federal Police investigated 69 incidents of forced or under-age marriage in the 2015-16 financial year, up from 33 the previous year. While there are no official numbers, it is estimated that there are 83,000 women and girls in Australia who may have been subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM).
• The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which has spent the past four years probing numerous religious organizations, has made no inquiries into Islam. The commission has held 6,500 one-on-one private interview sessions with survivors or witnesses making allegations of child sexual abuse within institutions, but only three sessions in relation to Islamic institutions.

What legacy did Australia’s former Grand Mufti, Sheikh Taj Din al-Hilali — named “Muslim Man of the Year” in 2005 and the country’s most senior, longest-serving (1988-2007) Muslim cleric — leave behind?

It’s time to acknowledge the war on Christianity

Why do Westerners behave oddly when it’s Christians being murdered abroad? Photo: Fairfax Media

 

We live in an age of martyrs. Also, an age of wilful ignorance. When Christians are killed for being Christians, politicians overlook it and public interest fades.

Those few of us in the West who still go to church don’t realise how lucky we are. Others are dying for the right to do that.

On Palm Sunday two bombings in Egyptian churches killed at least 44 people. The targets were Coptic Christians.

In one case, the bomb was situated at the front of the church, tearing through pews and bodies.

The Church That Swallowed a Church

So far, you can say six out of eight predictions are correct.

From 2010:

 

“Protestantism will be absorbed into the ‘mother’ church—and totally abolished” (Plain Truth, October 1961). Herbert W. Armstrong—the founder of the Trumpet’s predecessor, the Plain Truth—made that bold prediction 48 years ago. On Oct. 20, 2009, the Vatican unveiled plans to do just that.

In a press conference at the Vatican, Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, announced that the Catholic Church would offer a free ticket to Rome for all Anglicans who choose to reject the policies of their liberalized hierarchy. He offered membership of the Church of Rome to those who choose to convert, with the historic concessions that they may keep their Anglican practices and that married clergy may be accepted as priests in a newly established Catholic/Anglican community.

The move was bold, as swift and as sudden as a blitzkrieg frontal attack. With it, Pope Benedict xvi struck at Anglo-Saxon Protestantism’s leading light, the Anglican Church, blindsiding a weakened and divided Anglican community.

Vatican Warning: Don’t Be Pontius Pilate

Don’t abrogate the responsibility to prevent radical Muslims from murdering Christians.

Western people and institutions could do more to prevent the slaughter of Christians, a Vatican cleric implied on the day after al-Shabaab’s Muslim militants besieged a university in Garissa, Kenya, and discriminately killed Christians.

Pope Francis: ‘Pagan’ Christians ‘in Name Only’ are ‘Enemies of the Cross’

This was meant to be more divisive rather than pointing towards a difference between the two. It’s also has an eerie historical ring to it where the Catholic church persecuted Christians for their beliefs not in sync with church doctrine and instead chose to follow God. They were labeled as heretics, handed over to secular governments and persecuted. The handing over and execution by the state allowed them to claim they technically had no blood on their hands.

 

Not all those who claim to be Christians really are, said Pope Francis Friday morning. Some are Christians “in name only,” he said. “They bear the name of Christians but live a life of pagans.”

In his homily at Mass, the Pope that there have always been two types of Christian, those who truly followed Christ and those who only pretended to. At the time of Saint Paul, there were “worldly Christians, Christians in name only, with two or three Christian features, but nothing more.” The Pope called this sort of people “Pagan Christians,” whom St. Paul called “enemies of the cross of Christ.”

In Paul’s time, the Pope said, the two groups of Christians “were in church together, went to Mass on Sunday, praised the Lord, and were called Christians.” So what was the difference? He asked. The second were “enemies of the cross of Christ.”

Why Is Germany Collecting Taxes for the Catholic Church?

The German Catholic Bishops Conference issued a decree in September warning that those Germans who opted out of paying the country’s “church tax” would no longer be entitled to sacraments, religious burial or any part of parish life.

This “church tax” is a special tax collected in Germany and several other Western European nations that was introduced in the 19th century in compensation for the nationalization of religious property. All Germans who officially register as Catholics, Protestants or Jews on their tax documentation must pay a religious tax of 8 to 9 percent on their annual income tax bill.