A Christian ministry that works to rescue slaves in sex trafficking and other industries has just made the largest rescue that its Bangalore branch has ever attempted. With the help of two state government officials, 260 people were rescued from brick factories just outside the town. The rescued families had been forced to work 12 hours per day, 7 days a week. The rigid rules were enforced with violence and threats. They were hundreds of miles from home and did not speak the local language. After 3 days in a community centre where ministry staff fed them and explained what was happening, all 260 have been returned to their home state of Orissa.
Elsewhere in India, Hindu groups have continued to attack churches and Christians. Worryingly, the national government, which is currently led by the Hindu BJP party, has denied that the attacks on Christians are motivated by politics or religion; a Cabinet minister denied this on national television, and a Hindu MP claimed that the accusations were made by “elements who want to defame the government.” These claims followed an attack in Agra where icons in a Catholic church (including Mary and Jesus) were damaged. Members of the Christ Jesus Witness Prayer Church in Hyderabad were also attacked when they objected to the raising of a saffron flag – which has been used by Hindus to denote a non-Hindu place of worship that has been forcibly converted into a Hindu temple – over the church.
Saeed Abedini is an Iranian-American pastor who has been imprisoned in Iran since 2012 for organising house churches in the country – despite the fact that he was living in America as an American citizen at the time, and was merely visiting Iran. The US Senate has now unanimously passed a motion calling on President Obama to secure the release of him and other “hostages being held in Iran.”
Five Egyptian Christian teenagers, who made a home video that mocked Islamic State, have been arrested and charged with blasphemy. The video wasn’t published, but was found by some local Muslims. Despite the fact that Islamic State are just as violent towards non-compliant Muslims as toward other religions, the police first arrested the Coptic teacher; then, when a Muslim mob started throwing stones at the teenagers’ houses, they arrested them too.
In the USA, a professor from Princeton has spoken out against spending money on health treatments for disabled babies. Peter Singer said, “I don’t want my health insurance premiums to be higher so that infants who experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.” Ironically, he was promoting his book which is called, “The Most Good You can Do: Howe Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically.”
Also in the USA, a 16 year old Christian student in Florida is taking legal advice after getting four straight zeroes from a humanist college professor for refusing to answer his questions in the anti-Christian way he wanted. The professor’s assignments included asking the class to outline Martin Luther’s work as a “humanist”; to discuss why Michelangelo’s paintings and sculptures showed that “same-sex relationship is not a sin and will not keep someone out of Heaven”; and also to accept that Christianity was false and oppressive of women.
A new Bill against human trafficking is going through the Scottish Parliament. However, the Bill will not outlaw the buying of sex, despite calls from faith groups and other organisations, and despite a similar provision being passed into law in the Northern Ireland Assembly last year. The committee that examined the Bill decided that this Bill was “not the correct vehicle” to deal with criminalising all purchases of sex (which is still legal as long as it’s not bought on the street, or within a brothel).
Alveda King, the grand-daughter of Martin Luther King Sr. has been speaking about how her grandfather saved her from being aborted – because he saw her in a dream three years before she was born. She quoted a “feminist theologian” who recently wrote, "If you were born before women had access to safe, affordable, accessible abortion, chances are your mother was an angry mother.” Alveda’s reply was, "The Bible says, ‘In your anger, do not sin’.” And she added, “Abortion does not cure anger.”
In film news, Denzel Washington recently gave a speech to graduates at Dillard University in New Orleans at which he urged them to put God first. He said that when his career began to take off, he told his mother of all the things he had accomplished… and she said, “Boy, stop it right there” and told him of all the people who had prayed for him and of her own prayers. His final point was, “You never see a U-Haul trailer behind a hearse! You can’t take it with you … it’s not what you have, it’s what you DO with what you have.”
And finally, a large church in San Diego was struggling financially because the average amount of money given by U.S. Christians is now 2.5% of their income – which is a lower percentage than during the Great Depression. Four years ago, they decided that, rather than lecturing people on the church’s needs, they would draw attention to people’s own relative abundance. They took the opportunity of switching their church to a web-based electronic giving system to add a page called “GivUp”, where people could choose to sacrifice something and give the money to the church, and record what they had sacrificed on the web page. The web page now lists almost 2,000 items that have been given up, ranging from $3.50 for Starbucks to $4,000 for new wooden floors. Some of the more unusual items include $5 for a week’s worth of vending machine snacks; $200 for alcohol; and $25 for marijuana.
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