A Louisiana lawmaker has abandoned his bill to make the Bible the state’s official book.
State Rep. Thomas Carmody had filed HB 503 and it had even passed through a committee hearing before he took the action to pull the bill from consideration. The bill would have made a specific Bible currently in the possession of the state the “official state book.”
Carmody pulled the bill after other lawmakers said it caused a “distraction” that took away from other issues that needed to be addressed by the state legislature.
Several Democratic opponents to the bill kept pointing out that it would likely be challenged in court, drawing away tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars on something that did not need to be spent. However, at least one legal scholar believes the law would have been just fine.
“Judges are likely to think that this is de minimis, too minor to care about,” Professor Douglas Laycock of the Virginia School of Law told the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “They don’t tell the President he can’t issue Thanksgiving proclamations or host a national prayer breakfast, and judges are likely to view this the same way.”
The Bible was seen all over the hallways at a Missouri school after a teacher told two students they weren’t allowed to even read their Bibles in the hallway.
Kiela English, 15, a freshman at Potosi High School, was reading the Bible with a friend and discussing a passage when a teacher confronted them and said they had to put the Bible away and stop pushing their religion on people. The two girls had not been speaking to anyone else about the Bible or its contents.
Kiela’s mother posted on Facebook about the incident and it developed into a call for students to bring their Bibles to school and carry them around as a form of protest showing their rights to have their Bibles in school.
Students say the protest was effective in that not only did they show their dedication to the Scriptures, they also did it in way that did not disrupt the school day or show disrespect to the administration.
Potosi Superintendent Randy Davis said an investigation is ongoing regarding the incident but that he had no problem with the girls bringing their Bibles.
“We have absolutely no problem with our students bringing their Bible,” Davis said. “We firmly believe in freedom of religion and students practicing their religion.”
A California school district has ruled that teachers violated the rights of Christian students when they prohibited the distribution of a series of Bible coins.
The students were giving classmates coins that were printed with different Bible verses including John 3:16 and John 3:36.
“We’re going to make sure that students are protected,” Apple Valley School District Superintendent Thomas Hoegerman told the San Bernadino Sun. “There was no malicious intent but we clearly had folks who didn’t fully understand the implications.”
The children were giving the coins to their friends during recess periods and not during actual class time when they were stopped by teachers.
One of the teachers, Stormy DeHaro, told her student she hated the coins and they were a distraction to her class. A second teacher removed them from Valentine’s cards a student brought to her class and returned them to the child saying they were a violation “of the Ed Code.”
The superintendent says he regrets the incident and the problems it caused to the student’s family.
The state of Louisiana is moving closer to naming the Holy Bible the official state book.
A committee in the House of Representatives approved the legislation last week and the bill now moves to the entire House for discussion and floor vote. The House Committee on Municipal, Parochial and Cultural Affairs passed the bill on an 8 to 5 vote.
The bill’s sponsor says that the purpose of the measure is not an attempt to establish an official state religion.
“It’s not to the exclusion of anyone else’s sacred literature,” Republican Representative Thomas Carmody told the Christian Post. Carmody said the Bible reflects America’s history and founding principles as outlined by the Founding Fathers.
Critics of the bill say its unnecessary and makes the state open to lawsuits by anti-Christian activists. The ACLU of Louisiana has also expressed their concerns about the bill saying the official state book should related to the history of Louisiana.
In the wake of the devastating explosion that destroyed two buildings in Harlem, the discovery of a Bible is being called a miracle by not only members of the Spanish Christian Church that was destroyed in the blast but firefighters and emergency personnel.
On the third day of their recovery efforts, rescue workers found a waterlogged Bible under the debris of the church. The Bible was not singed by fire at all and the water damage was minimal.
Members of the church hailed it as a miracle because the Bible was the one placed on the church’s altar because it was the used for the founding of the church 80 years ago.
The church’s pastor, Rev. Thomas Perez, became so overwhelmed at the sight of the Bible being brought out intact from the rubble that he had to be hospitalized for observation.
Attendees told reporters the Spanish-language Bible belonged to the founding couple of the church.
Fire Commissioner Sal Cassano said the discovery of the Bible means a lot because now the church will have a remnant as they rebuild.
Air Force officials have banned Gideon volunteers from giving Bibles to new recruits at Maxwell Air Force Base.
Gideon’s volunteer Michael Fredenburg told Fox News they were told by base officials to “get their Bibles out.”
The public affairs officer for Military Entrance Processing Command told Fox News that the Gideon’s claim was not “entirely” true. Gaylan Johnson said that the Gideons have been banned from standing at a table and speaking with anyone who is a recruit. They will still be able to put materials on a table.
The Gideons had been meeting recruits and handing out Bibles for over a decade. Four days a week the Gideons would stand by a table, shaking the hands of those who had just enlisted and offering them a pocket-sized Bible.
Johnson told Fox that the Gideons are no longer allowed to be within the building to speak to anyone. Johnson is claiming that this is a new command-wide policy against any organization that is not a member of the Federal Government.
A woman who ordered two prints online of Bible verses for her Bible study from her local Walgreens was told she couldn’t print them because Bible verses violated copyright law.
After a clerk told Kelly Taylor that they would not print her order, she received an e-mail that told her to contact a photo team associate. When she called the number, she was told that printing Scripture violated copyright law.
She was given prints of the Bible verses after Fox News obtained copies of the e-mails between Taylor and store officials and provided them to Walgreens’ corporate offices.
A Walgreens spokesman then sent a statement to Fox News that the employee who rejected the printing of the verses was not acting on behalf of the company.
He went on to say the employee may have had concerns that graphic designs behind the verses could fall under copyright protection and that the whole situation could be resolved by Taylor signing a waiver of copyright law.
Taylor said she hopes the incident will be a teachable moment for Walgreens and that in the future Christians won’t be denied the opportunity to print Scripture verses.
Many teachers of Bible prophecy believe that the antichrist himself will suffer a fatal head wound, but if you look at the scripture carefully, you can easily get a different impression: “One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed” (13:3, niv).
Remember, John saw the Beast rising out of the sea, which probably means rising from many peoples. But John used the term “beast” in several ways in Revelation, sometimes talking about the antichrist and at other times talking about the antichrist system, the one-world government system that is against God. Here, I believe the latter is the more correct understanding, that is, this beast is the antichrist system. This one-world government will have ten horns, seven heads, and ten diadems (13:1).
Revelation 17:12–13 tells us that the ten horns are ten kings who will receive power with the Beast for a relatively short time, and their sole purpose is to give their power to the Beast. The seven heads, according to Revelation 17:9–10, are seven mountains on which the harlot rides and seven kings: “Five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; and when he comes, he must remain a little while.” Continue reading →
A copy of the Message translation of the Bible was more than a spiritual lifesaver for a Dayton, Ohio bus driver.
49-year-old Rickey Waggoner, a driver for the Dayton Regional Transit Authority, had been working on his bus when he was approached by three youths. The youths shot Waggoner in the chest at point blank range.
However, a copy of the Message Bible that Waggoner had in his pocket stopped both of the bullets. Police say the Bible saved Waggoner’s life.
While not specifically attributing the act to divine will, a Dayton police officer said there had to be something special that happened for the bus driver.
“There was obviously some kind of intervention involved in this incident because he should probably not be here,” Dayton Police Sergeant Michael Pauley told the Dayton Daily News.
Police believe the attack was a gang initiation because Waggoner reported one of the youths said “if you want to be all the way in the club” to the one who pulled the trigger.
The man who created the Message translation, Eugene Peterson, said that he had heard of similar incidents in World War II where Bibles stopped bullets.
“It’s good to be in the club,” Peterson told Fox News.
The anti-Christian Freedom From Religion Foundation is suing another municipality to try and remove any trace of Christianity from any public area.
The FFRF sent a letter to Pinellas Park officials saying that the existence of the Bible on a podium inside the city council chamber means the city is endorsing Christianity over every other religion. According to Fox News, their letter cites court cases that resulted in the removal of Bibles from public facilities.
“Not only is the city council sending a message of endorsement for Christianity over other religions and nonreligion,” the letter says, “but display of this King James Bible sends a message of endorsement of one particular Christian sect over all others.”
Incoming city manager Doug Lewis says they are reviewing the FFRF’s most recent letter but they believe because the Bible was given to the city during the dedication of the building by the city’s Kiwanis Club, it’s part of the history of the building.
