A Texas city’s mayor is drawing fire after he declared 2014 the “Year of the Bible” in his city.
Tom Hayden, the mayor of Flower Mound, Texas, made the declaration at last month’s city council meeting. Hayden told reporters that he had been considering the declaration for two years because he wants his community to connect through the Bible.
“The morality that helped build our country is based on the values that are found in the Bible,” Hayden told Fox News. “And as we look at problems, maybe we’re getting away from those values. And in my little small way, I want to encourage people to get back into those values.”
Hayden hopes to encourage residents to join together in reading the Bible in its entirety in 2014.
While some residents are critical of the Mayor’s move, it is not without precedent. President Ronald Reagan made a similar declaration in 1983.
Costco released an apology yesterday for Bibles at a California store being labeled as fiction. Now, a woman in Missouri has discovered Bibles labeled as fiction in a store in Manchester, Missouri.
Not only were the Bibles labeled fiction, they were put in a display with Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
Mary-Margaret Meyers-Walker said she offered to move the Bibles to the correct section of the store. She called the regional office and was told that the store apparently never received the memo to move the Bibles.
Meyers-Walker said she visited the store because she had heard of the controversy in California.
The local management refused to talk to St. Louis area station KMOX about the incident.
Costco has released a statement apologizing for at least one of their stores selling Bibles with a label on them that read “fiction.”
“We deeply regret the mislabeling of the Bible and meant no offense to anyone,” read an e-mail statement. “The buyer has let us know that this was an error and the books are being pulled off the shelves to be re-marked.”
Fox News says Costco sent them a statement claiming their distributor made a mislabeling mistake on a small percentage of Bibles but that the company should have spotted and corrected the mistake before the books were placed on store shelves.
A pastor in Simi Valley, California who snapped a picture of the Bible and posted it on twitter first discovered the labeling. The photo of the Bible went viral and led to hundreds of complaints to Costco’s offices.
The government of North Korea has murdered Christians for possessing a Bible.
A South Korean newspaper reports that the people labeled criminals by the North Korean government for owning a Bible were killed in public execution events arranged by Kim Jong-un’s government.
A source said in the city of Wonsan, those being executed were tied to stakes in a local stadium and shot to death with machine guns while over 10,000 residents were forced by military forces to watch. He said the bodies were so riddled with machine gun bullets that identities could not be determined.
Relatives or accomplices of those murdered were taken to prison camps.
Some North Korean experts say the executions are an effort by the government to quell any possible opposition.
The American Bible Society has released their 2013 “State of the Bible” report and revealed that just over 4 in 10 Americans reads the Bible online.
The report says 29% of Americans search for Bible verses on smartphones while 17% use a Kindle or iPad. Continue reading →
Vanderbilt University, which has been aggressively taking steps to remove Christian student organizations from their campus, has a professor who says that the Bible played a “prominent” role in arguments for starting the American Revolution.
James P. Byrd writes in his new book Scared Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution that the origins of the American Revolution are not purely secular as some modern day activists wish to claim. Continue reading →
