A group of anti-Christianists are getting their way with a Florida school board.
A New York based Satanic organization descended on the Orange County School Board after the virulent anti-Christian Freedom From Religion Foundation threatened the district over allowing Bibles to be distributed in schools. The Satanists wanted to distribute a coloring book praising Satan.
“This really has, frankly, gotten out of hand,” Orange County Chairman Bill Sublette told reporters this week. “I think we’ve seen a group or groups take advantage of the open forum we’ve had.”
The Satanic Temple says they just want to educate children about worshipping Satan.
“I am quite certain that all of the children in these Florida schools are already aware of the Christian religion and it’s Bible, and this might be the first exposure these children have to the actual practice of Satanism,” spokesperson Lucien Greaves said.
The school is now banning the distribution of Bibles because of the extra attention, which is the original goal of the anti-Christianists.
Riding the coattails of a national anti-Christian organization, a group of New York Satanists plan to give students of a Florida information how to worship satan.
Orlando high school students had Bibles made available to them on what the school called “Religious Freedom Day.” The anti-Christian group Freedom From Religion Foundation filed a suit against the school after they were not allowed to give out anti-Christian materials at the event.
The material in question contained explicit and inappropriate content for children.
The school backed down from the FFRF after the lawsuit was filed and permission was given for the FFRF to promote their hate against Christians in the school.
Now, the New York based Satanic Temple has announced they will be providing materials to the students during Religious Freedom Day.
“I am quite certain that all of the children in these Florida schools are already aware of the Christian religion and it’s Bible, and this might be the first exposure these children have to the actual practice of Satanism,” spokesperson Lucien Greaves wrote in a recent press release about the matter. “We think many students will be very curious to see what we offer.”
The materials from the group including coloring pages of goat’s heads.
She may be beaten and bruised but a Florida woman is refusing to let a violent encounter with a homeless man stop her from doing the Lord’s work.
Tara Barnes, 69, was kidnapped by a homeless man who climbed into the backseat of her car and put a knife to her throat. He ordered Barnes to drive to the Ocala National Forest. However, before they reached that destination, the man ordered her to pull over, threw a rope around her neck, dragged her from the car and beat her with a club.
The man kept yelling, “you rich [word deleted] think we need your help?” as he beat the elderly woman.
He then stuck Barnes back in the car and took her to a K-Mart parking lot where he then beat her unconscious.
Barnes was hospitalized for over a day with various injuries. The man who kidnapped the woman is still at large.
“This is God’s work,” Barnes told the New York Daily News about feeding the homeless. “We’re not going to let this one nut stop us.”
She was back the following week cooking meals for the homeless.
A federal judge threw out a lawsuit this week from an atheist group angered over not being able to give uncensored pornographic material to students when Bibles were given out without censorship.
Senior Judge Kendall Sharpe said he threw out the lawsuit because of a change in school policy that allowed the atheists to eventually distribute their book “An X-Rated Sex Book: Sex & Obscenity In The Bible.”
The school had been permitting World Changers of Florida to deliver Bibles to students without interference or censorship when the atheists discovered the program and launched a series of complaints. The radically hostile anti-Christian group Freedom From Religion Foundation backed the atheist group.
The Central Florida Freethought Community says they plan to flood schools with more anti-Christian publications as a result of the court ruling.
The anti-Christian groups said despite the dismissal, the situation was a win for advancing the cause of removing Christians from society.
Forecasters say a tropical storm has formed off the Florida coast and conditions are right for it to strengthen over the next few days.
That means Florida could be facing a Fourth of July hurricane.
A tropical storm watch has been put into effect for parts of Florida’s east coast because of Tropical Storm Arthur. The storm is centered about 95 miles southeast of Cape Canaveral. The cell was mostly stationary through Tuesday morning but was expected to begin moving toward land later in the day.
The storm had maximum sustained winds of 40 miles per hour as of noon Tuesday.
While the official storm track from NOAA predicts the eye of the storm will stay far offshore, some forecasters are seeing parallels between this storm and a similar storm in 2004 that battered the eastern seaboard despite the eye staying offshore.
Meterologist Joe Bastardi of WeatherBELL says that the storm is very similar to the tropical storm that ended up as Hurricane Alex in 2004. That hurricane ended up with wind gusts over 115 miles per hour that hammered the east coast from Florida to Virginia.
Florida health officials are raising the alarm about two mosquito-borne diseases that have shown up in the state.
The Florida Department of Health stated in its latest weekly report that 24 cases of potentially fatal Dengue Fever have been found in the state along with 18 cases of the extremely painful Chikungunya virus. Both diseases are viral and spread through mosquito bites.
All of the infected people reportedly traveled through the Caribbean or South America and most likely were infected during their travels. However, the health officials cannot confirm they did not contract the virus from a domestic mosquito bite.
“The threat is greater than I’ve seen in my lifetime,” said Walter Tabachnick, director of the Florida Medical Entomological Laboratory and 30-year veteran of epidemiology. “Sooner or later, our mosquitoes will pick it up and transmit it to us. That is the imminent threat.”
Health officials are asking residents to work with local governments to eliminate areas where mosquitos breed. This includes elimination of standing water such as in buckets and rain barrels.
“If there is public apathy and people don’t clean up the yards, we’re going to have a problem,” Tabachnick said.
A woman who brought the lives of thousands of babies to an end during her over ten years running a Florida abortion clinic has walked away and dedicated her life to Christ.
The woman, who has only been identified as Terri, accepted Christ after stopping and talking with the protesters that had been standing outside her clinic for years.
“I thought she was going to be angry or something,” John Barros told Christian News Network.
After speaking with the pro-life counselors that Barros’ ministry brought to speak to the women in an attempt to have them keep their babies, she began to see the great error of her beliefs in abortion and her decade of promoting it.
“She’s really showing repentance and she’s really broken up over what she’s done,” Barros explained. “At one point she said, ‘I can’t do enough to erase this. And I said, ‘None of us can. 1st John tells us that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin, and that includes what you’ve done.’”
Terri quit her job, severed all ties with the clinic and has told friends and family that she renounces all of her work in ending the lives of babies.
“I dedicate my life to Christ and I thank Him—believe it or not—every day that I am no longer affiliated with a clinic,” she stated. “It’s a wonderful thing that I got out of there. I thank God every day I’m gone.”
A Florida school district is responding to the release of a video showing two students beating another student by putting armed police on busses.
“We are going to have order on that bus one way or another,” said Dick Mullenax, head of the Polk County School Board. “We provide transportation to those schools, but if they can’t behave, we will see where we go from there.”
The video shows two students beating a third until they knocked out their victim with a sucker punch.
A spokesman for the sheriff’s office says that while the measure seems a little shocking at first, it’s necessary on a temporary basis to protect the safety of the children. They also believe that having the deputies on the bus gives them a chance to build relationships with the students that could lead to benefits in the future.
“They’re not going to be these hard-core monitors, they’re just going to be there, have a chance to interact with those kids, maybe get some information with things that are going on, It’s not going to be an adversarial relationship,” Sheriff’s Office spokesman Scott Wilder said.
Southern Alabama and the Florida Panhandle were slammed by a severe storm, bringing death and destruction across the South.
Drivers on Interstate 10 at the Alabama-Florida state line were forced to abandon their vehicles and walk to safety after officials shut it down due to high water.
The flooding also kept fire rescue crews from being able to respond to calls for help in the Pensacola area.
“It’s gotten to the point where we can’t send EMS and fire rescue crews out on some 911 calls because they can’t get there,” Escambia County spokesman Bill Pearson said. “We’ve had people whose homes are flooding and they’ve had to climb up to the attic.”
Alabama was hit with 11.5 inches of rain overnight. Officials were calling people living south of Interstate 10 warning them not to travel.
Drivers in Pensacola, Florida were stranded when the cross country storm pummeled the town with more than 2 feet of water.
More rain fell in a single hour during Tuesday’s storm “than during the entirety of Hurricane Ivan” according to The Weather Channel’s lead meteorologist, Kevin Roth.
Forecasters believe that Tuesday’s rain in Pensacola set a record, but no official data could be gathered due to damage to the National Weather Service’s equipment.
“It went on and on and on. It was relentless,” Cheryl Clendenon, who was stranded in her home in Pensacola Beach until a friend picked her up, told NBC News. “I used to like the sound of rain to help me get to sleep, but this was like Chinese water torture. It just did not stop.”
The current storm system hitting the country has killed 38 people in eight states.
