A Muslim terrorist group has attacked a university in Kenya and killed 147 people. Christians at Garissa University College – in a region previously considered one of Kenya’s safest -- were specifically targeted. 147 people were killed, including the four attackers; that’s 11 times as many as in the similarly-targeted Columbine High School massacre in Denver, Colorado. Kenya has been so outraged by the attack that it has bombed Al-Shabaab training camps in nearby Somalia. The attack has been condemned across the world, but President Obama of the U.S.A. has been criticised by some for failing to mention that the victims were Christian. Obama suffered the same criticism after the kidnapping and execution of 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya earlier this year.
There has been a major argument in the U.S. state of Indiana over a law designed to provide freedom of conscience for religious reasons to businesses. Some other mayors and states, including the Mayor of San Francisco, saw this as an attack on same-sex marriage and associated issues and started a boycott, banning all state-funded travel to Indiana; and pressure was put on businesses and major conferences to avoid the state. The Governor of Indiana has now relented and amended the law. However, even members of the gay community are now getting fed up of the “activism” that is being pursued in their name; a pizzeria in Indiana that refused to cater for a gay wedding was shut down after receiving threats through social media that caused police to step up security. But a fund to support the pizzeria owners raised $800,000 , including a donation from a gay woman who wrote, “We are outraged at the level of hate and intolerance that has been directed against you.”
I reported a while ago that the fastest growing Christian population in the world is in Iran, where a large number of ex-Muslims report that they became Christians because Jesus appeared to them in dreams or visions, often unbidden. A new report suggests there may be as many as 350 million Christians, who have converted from Islam, living secretly in Muslim countries (that’s about one sixth of the worldwide Muslim community).Some have suggested that this is the real reason for increased attempts by some Muslim groups to persecute Christians or to impose strict Muslim law.
In the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron published an Easter message in which he (again) described Britain as a Christian country. However, his message was described as “curiously sanitised”; he said that, “Easter is all about remembering the importance of change, responsibility, and doing the right thing for the good of our children.” A journalist in the Spectator responded, “Generally the heart of the Christian message is considered to be a man called the son of God dying in agony on a cross and then rising from the dead, saying he was taking a punishment that men deserved”.
A Coptic Christian woman, known as the “Mother Teresa of Cairo”, has helped educate children from 30,000 low-income families in Egypt over the past 20 years. Maggie Gobran has said that seven of the 21 Coptic Christians executed by Muslims recently went through her schools, and she knew five of them by name.
In technology news, Google has patented an acronym designed to solve a very 21st century problem – that of seeing spoilers on social media. For example, if you type in the names of contestants in a reality show, or characters in a drama series that has been shown elsewhere in the world, the acronym would block you from seeing posts containing those names until you turned the filter off.
And finally, a Girl Scout in San Francisco, given the annual task of selling cookies to raise funds, had the bright idea of setting up her stall outside a dispensary for medical marijuana. She sold 208 boxes of cookies in 2 hours.
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