China Continues To Harass House Church After Sentencing Pastor To Two Years Forced Labor

It's been a while since we heard of the Persecution of our brethren in China. We need to pray for them.

10/06/11 China (ChinaAid) - ChinaAid has learned that after Pastor Shi Enhao, head of Suqian House Church of Jiangsu Province and vice-president of Chinese House Church Alliance, was sentenced to two years of reeducation through labor in July of this year for no apparent legal basis, Sister Chang Meiling, a co-worker of the church, is again persecuted.

At 2 p.m. on October 1, 2011, Chang Meiling was taken away by DSPS (Domestic Security Protection Squad) agents of Suqian Municipal Public Security Bureau and was handed over to Nanguan Neighborhood Committee of Suqian where she was forced to be placed under house arrest for two days and was not released until October 3.

 During the house arrest, they threatened her and did not allow her to go out to attend worship meeting of house churches. They told her she must go to government-run Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) controlled church for worship. Besides, they also vilified Pastor Shi Enhao by saying he has established an anti-Party organization. They told her to go to the neighborhood committee once every half a month to record an oral confession and tell her whereabouts in the past half a month.

On May 31, 2011, Pastor Shi Enhao and some co-workers were arrested. Among them, Shi Enhao and Sister Chang Meiling were placed under 12-day administration detention and other people were released(Source).

Fired Christian Teacher: ‘I Teach All Aspects of Evolution’

Wow, what a coincidence, we're talking about evolution in Chapel and a Christian teacher got fired for teaching evolution in a less than pleasing way. On another note, this is just another sign of how we as western Christians aren't immune from persecution.

10/07/2011 United States (The Christian Post)-An Ohio school board's decision to fire a middle-school teacher under the allegations of teaching creationism and religious doctrine in his classroom was upheld by a local judge Wednesday. The science teacher, who was dismissed in January, plans to file an appeal.
John Freshwater sought to overturn the Mount Vernon City School District Board firing in order to get his job back. The decision to uphold the school board’s action was handed down by Knox County Common Pleas Court Judge Otho Eyster.

Freshwater was suspended under allegations that he failed to remove religious materials from his classroom and burned crosses on students' arms with a Tesla coil during science experiments. The suspension from Mount Vernon Middle School occurred in 2008 and he was terminated in January 2011.

The case against him began as a request by the school administration to remove his Bible from his classroom desk and was compounded with other accusations after his refusal to do so, Freshwater told The Christian Post. Having an exemplary teaching record for 24 years, he said the allegations began when there were several changes in the school district’s personnel, including three new school board members.

“It came down to that they wanted me to remove the Bible from my desk and I refused to remove my Bible from my desk,” Freshwater said. “The Bible has been resting on my desk for all 24 years of teaching. So, what has changed? What has changed is the administration.”

School officials also did not like the way he taught the evolution curriculum, Freshwater said.
“The school board justified its actions by accusing Freshwater of improperly injecting religion into the classroom by giving students "reason to doubt the accuracy and/or veracity of scientists, science textbooks and/or science in general," according to his lawyers from the Rutherford Institute.

“He never had a negative performance evaluation in 20-plus years. He is a good teacher,” Rutherfor Institute President John W. Whitehead told CP. “The real issue here is that he has obligedly challenged a sacred object in public education, which is the theory of evolution.

“People forget it is a theory. So, our argument is that he should have the academic freedom to do that. If schools just want an official version they should just show a video or get a robot to do it. It would be easier,” Whitehead said.
...
Freshwater’s suit, filed in February, stated that state law and school procedures protecting his rights were violated, according to an article by The Columbus Dispatch. He also said that the hearing referee's conclusions were flawed.
Eyster reviewed 6,344 pages of hearing transcript involving 80 witnesses during 38 days of hearings, the Dispatch reported. The judge ruled that “Freshwater’s request that the court conduct additional hearings is not well taken.”
Freshwater said the judge's decision on Wednesday was unfair.

“I teach all the aspects of evolution... those things that support evolution, those things that do not support evolution. I teach a robust evolution. The students have a right to see it,” he said. “Students need to hear the evidence and maybe some of the evidence is not for evolution, but they need to hear the evidence. Did I stand up and preach and share Creationism with them? No. I just shared the evidence of evolution and that shows the flaw of evolution enough(Source).”

Christian Farmer Gets Abuse Over Rihanna Incident

A brother in Christ, asks a celebrity to leave his farm and convert to Christianity and when all else fails you abuse, label and slander this man as graphically and disgustingly as your imagination will allow you to do.

10/04/2011 UK (The Christian Institute)-The Christian farmer who asked pop star Rihanna to leave his wheat field when he saw she was half naked has reportedly received hate mail for his actions.
Alan Graham’s move made headlines last week when he asked the singer to leave – and also encouraged her to seek after God and his Son Jesus Christ. Now he has been branded a “bible-bashing maniac”. But he told a national newspaper: “I’m taking it all in my stride, it’ll soon die down”.

Shook hands
Last week Mr Graham told of how he has no ill will towards the singer, but asked the film crew to stop shooting the music video on his farm in Northern Ireland when things got out of hand.
“I thought it was inappropriate. I requested them to stop and they did,” he explained.

Gracious
On Monday he explained to The Sun: “To be honest, all this fuss has kept me back a bit.

He said: “I’d love to have her back. She was lovely and gracious when I spoke to her.
“Just as long as I know what she’s wearing before the visit(Source).”

Another Church in Egypt Attacked By Muslims

10/4/2011 Egypt (AINA) – On Monday, October 3, Muslims surrounded St. Mary's Church in the Upper Egyptian village of Elmadmar, Tema district, Sohag province, in an effort to demolish it. The Muslims blocked the road to the church and hurled bricks at the building. Church personnel contacted the authorities. "For the first time, security came and in big numbers," said activist George Bouchra.
None of the assailants were arrested.

According to the priest of the church, Muslims came early before 8 AM and held banners with "No to the Church" and demanded that no prayers be held. He described the assailants as young people under the leadership of some village Muslims, "whom I know by name."

The Muslims insisted that it was never a church but a house that was turned into a church. This was refuted by the priest, who said the church was built eight years ago, to be used as a church and belongs to the Coptic Diocese. "It has state security approval to operate, but its license is still pending." The church was used once a month and a mass has been held every Saturday for five months. Muslims claim that we hold a mass every day at 4 PM, and we ring the church bell, which the church does not have, besides singing hymns, which they claim disturbs them."

ICC: Rape Often Used To Persecute Christian Girls In Pakistan

The Quran allows Muslims to rape their female captives:

Quran 4:24-And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess.

Quran 23:1-6- Successful indeed are the believers, who are humble in their prayers, and who keep aloof from what is vain, and who are givers of poor-rate, and who guard their private parts, except before their mates or those whom their right hands possess, for they surely are not blameable,

Therefore we should be unamazed that Muslims use rape and/or sexual assault to persecute my sisters in Christ Jesus.

09/28/2011 Pakistan (The Christian Post)-A Christian teen was reportedly raped in Pakistan by three Muslim men while she was working, it emerged Tuesday and her case, according to an international advocacy group, is part of a troubling trend in which Muslim men use sexual assault as a weapon against Christian girls.

The incident took place on Sept. 16, ICC has established. The 18-year-old girl, whose name was not revealed for security reasons, was working alone on a Muslim farm in the Village of Muphat Pura, in Kasur district. At 5 p.m. local time, three relatives of her Muslim employer came to her and allegedly raped her.
Later, they warned her not to report the rape to anyone or else they would kill her and her brother, who also works on the farm, the teen told ICC.

She explained that if she reports this case, it will be difficult for her and her family to live in the area.
"It's impossible for her to do [report the rape]," Racho told CP. "They have already warned her not to tell to the police. In Pakistan, when Christians bring their case to court or to the police there is a reluctance from the government to protect them."

The teen left the farm where she was working, according to Racho. This case is not an isolated one, as many Christian girls are being raped by Muslim men in Pakistan, according to ICC.

"Rape has been used as weapon of persecution against Christian girls in Pakistan, a country where Christians are treated as third-class citizens," Racho said in a report on ICC's website. "In the Muslim majority country, Christian girls are particularly vulnerable to these types of crimes because Muslim authorities are reluctant to protect them when their rights are being violated by Muslims."

The president of the Pakistan Christian Congress, Nazir Bhatti, told ICC that the incidents of rape and enforced conversion of Christian women to Islam are rising every year. He added that 99.9 percent of rape cases in Pakistan are not being reported.

"If a Muslim man rapes a Christian girl, then he easily forces her to convert to Islam, marries her and covers up his heinous crime of rape under Islamic law," Bhatti told ICC.

In January, CP wrote about a Pakistani Muslim who allegedly confessed to sexually assaulting five Christian girls, and then reportedly raped a sixth one, a 10-year-old Catholic girl in Punjab Province(Source).

I pray that the Lord Jesus Christ will protect my sisters in Christ Jesus and that justice will be brought to the Muslims who did this to them.

Egyptian Muslims Burn Coptic Church in Aswan Province

Egypt is back to “business as usual” with the Islamic majority harassing and attacking its Christian minority.
A group of Muslims burnt down part of a church Friday – the Islamic Sabbath – in the village of Marinab, according to a report published in the daily Al Masry Al Youm. The village, situated close to the town of Edfu in the Aswan Governorate, is located some 800 kilometers south of Cairo.

Security sources said Muslims rampaged through the village in what appeared to be a pogrom, clashing with the
Christian residents and destroying their shops. Central Security Forces cordoned off the village “to control the clashes,” according to the newspaper report. Christian websites reported in September that a group of Salafi Islamists had threatened the Christians, warning them not to leave their homes in the village unless they first removed the church dome. Saint George's Church had been restored earlier in the month, according to the report.

A gang of Salafi Muslims boasted to a victim they were torturing in March, “We won't leave any Christians in this country,” according to a report published several months ago in the Wall Street Journal. The attackers were never arrested.

The phenomenon of Muslims attacking Coptic Christians in Egypt is not new.  But during the Tahrir Square Revolution that unseated former President Hosni Mubarak in February, protesters claimed the “new order” would bring peace and equality between the country's majority and minority populations. But although intentions may have been positive among the organizers, the rank and file have since returned to their roots.

Since the revolution, there have been numerous murders by Muslims visited upon the Coptic Christian community, which comprises about 10 percent of the 83 million-strong Egyptian population(Source).

Genocide Used To Destroy Spread Of Christianity In North Korea

While it is certain that North Korea has committed a political and ideological genocide, which has claimed millions of innocent lives, it is often overlooked that the North Korean regime has also in every aspect violated the UN Genocide Convention, to which it is a state party.

Raphael Lemkin's Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was enacted in the wake of the Holocaust and the unprecedented devastation of World War-II. This was the first human rights treaty adopted by the United Nations, and was intended to serve as a legal infrastructure which, if followed faithfully, would not only assist in preventing genocide from happening again, but also facilitate intervention in the event of a genocide which is underway.

Article 2 of the 1948 Convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."


...
Before the division of Korea, the north was considered to be the center of Christianity in East Asia with millions of believers; 25 to 30 percent of the population in Pyongyang was Christian. Today, North Korea is internationally recognized as the worst violator of religious freedom in the world and true religious belief is not tolerated. Christians are either publicly executed or forcibly transferred to concentration camps where they are systematically starved, tortured and worked to death along with their entire families to three generations, including non-religious relatives and children. The cruelty and barbarity occurring in these camps has no parallel in the world today. In 2002, the National Association of Evangelicals stated that North Korea is "more brutal, more deliberate, more implacable, and more purely genocidal" than any other nation in the world.


Every method which constitutes genocide as outlined in the Convention is being utilized by the regime to destroy its indigenous religious population through the widespread practice of public executions, systematic use of torture, deliberate deprivation of food and medicine in concentration camps, persecution of the children of religious believers, and the forcible transfer and imprisonment of children(Source).