GHANA — A 28-year-old self-styled pastor, Yaw Dadzie, who claim to have divine powers to heal the sick, especially lunatics, has been arrested by the police for his violent behaviour towards his patients.

Pastor Dadzie, who starts prayers for his patients by attacking them physically, said the people who went to him and the lunatics on the streets were possessed by multiple demonic spirits which could only be dealt with through violence.

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By Daniel Morgan

Here is the video on YouTube.

I wanted to point out a couple of things about the interview for clarification.

1. I was contacted by FoxNews and asked if I would be willing to do this segment. I was not involved in any way with this story before, or besides, this small interview.
   
2. I am not a lawyer, although they pitted me against one and tacitly framed me that way.
3. The name of our group was mangled by Sean. It's the "Atheist, Agnostic and Freethinking Student Association" at UF. Oh well...

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By Pete Blackwell

Some Atheists...assert that Atheism is not a religion but instead is the total absence of religion.... But this is like saying that "black," (which physicists define as the total absence of color) is not a color.... In common practice throughout the world, "black" is understood to be a color, despite the technical definition of the physicists. Likewise, "Atheism" is a religion, despite any technical definitions to the contrary. If black is a color, then Atheism is a religion.

—Rev. Bill McGinnis, "The Religion of Atheism"

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LITTLETON - A local woman says a pastor now preaching in Tulsa, Oklahoma bilked her father of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

According to Sandy Chrisman, Reverend Johnny Chambers encouraged her dad to give him and his worship center in Arizona his entire life savings, more than $300,000.

Chrisman's dad died in 1997 and she has been looking for the money and for answers ever since.

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HICKMAM, CA — A former Hickman Community Church pastor has been arrested on a murder warrant linked to the death of an 85-year-old Hickman man in 2004.

Doug Porter was detained by federal authorities Monday afternoon at a border checkpoint near San Diego while trying to return to the United States from Mexico.

Stanislaus County authorities said they believe Porter, 55, intended to kill Frank Craig in a pair of auto crashes two years apart in order to inherit Craig's reportedly multimillion-dollar trust. Craig died in the second crash in April 2004.

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A church banner from US-1 outside of Princeton, NJ

Sent in by a friend of ExChristian.Net

This church banner asks the question "What if it's true?" The apparent intent is to solicit church attendance from those who aren't sure whether or not they believe in the Christian mythology, just in case Christianity is actually true.

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DAYTON OHIO — Riverside police arrested Pastor Dennis Bowling early Tuesday after a group of women associated with the Kingdom Harvest Church at 2360 Valley Pike told police Bowling had sexually assaulted female members of the congregation over a 10-year period.

Police met with the women Monday night and gathered physical evidence at the church, said Riverside police Sgt. David A. Crigler. "There were 12 victims there (Monday) night and they alleged either improper contact or rape," Crigler said.
Extras

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Richard Dawkins at Randolf-Macon Woman's College reading from his book, "The God Delusion."

One hour 50 minute video presentation.

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"There is no such thing as a Christian child, there is only a child of Christian parents. Whenever you hear the phrase Christian child or Muslim child or Protestant child or Catholic child, the phrase should grate like fingernails on a blackboard."

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Colin McGinn (born 1950) is a British philosopher currently working at the University of Miami. McGinn has also held major teaching positions at Oxford University and Rutgers University. McGinn is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind, though he has written on topics across the breadth of modern philosophy. Chief among his works intended for general audience is the intellectual memoir The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy (2002).

McGinn's "Atheism Tapes" were available for a time on Google Video, but were removed. Now the interviews are available again on You Tube, so for as long as they last, enjoy:

(Click here to view...)

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Sent in by Embracing Ambivalence

Sincerity is among the most beautiful things to grace this earth. It is the result of a free flowing desire that doesn't get manipulated or distorted by the mind, but rather is blessed by it to go forth into the world as is. Sincerity has this precious way of striking you're affections and breaking down you're guard to protect some false image you wish to preserve. Sincerity of another sets you free to be yourself. It sets you free to be vulnerable, and stupid, and ugly. Its rips down the damns that prevent you from expressing yourself. Sincerity is infectious, it begets sincerity. A sincere life, is the fullest life.

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Tyrone Moore appears on South Carolina's sex offender registry.

On Sundays, he also appears behind the pulpit at a nondenominational North Charleston church.

Police on Tuesday arrested the senior pastor at Full Word Ministries on a new charge of second- degree criminal sexual conduct.

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In the early 1990s, leading U.S. creationists came to speak at several anti-evolution conferences in Turkey.

Since then, a home-grown strain of anti-Darwinist books has developed with a clearly political message:

"The root of the terrorism that plagues our planet is not any of the divine religions, but atheism, and the expression of atheism in our times (is) Darwinism and materialism."

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Atheists are often asked, "If you don't believe in God, why do you care about religion?" This is one atheist's answer to that very question.

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By Slavoj Zizek

For centuries, we have been told that without religion we are no more than egotistic animals fighting for our share, our only morality that of a pack of wolves; only religion, it is said, can elevate us to a higher spiritual level. Today, when religion is emerging as the wellspring of murderous violence around the world, assurances that Christian or Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists are only abusing and perverting the noble spiritual messages of their creeds ring increasingly hollow. What about restoring the dignity of atheism, one of Europe's greatest legacies and perhaps our only chance for peace?

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Excerpted from The Evangelical Phenomenon: What is it? How should the rest of us respond? - a panel discussion at Town Hall Seattle on November 16, 2006. These remarks were addressed to an audience of modernist Christians, non-theists, and Jews.

Sometime around 1986, after leading children to Jesus as a counselor at Child Evangelism Camp, after dialing to win souls during the "I Found It" Campaign, after attending the Wheaton College of Billy Graham fame, and after struggling for years to deal with the moral and rational contradictions in my fundamentalist Evangelical faith, I finally got mad at my God and said, "I'm not making excuses for you any more." I walked away, and didn't really look back.

But something is happening around us that is hard to ignore.

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Maybe the pivotal moment came when Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, warned that "the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief,” or when a Nobelist in chemistry, Sir Harold Kroto, called for the John Templeton Foundation to give its next $1.5 million prize for "progress in spiritual discoveries" to an atheist — Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist whose book "The God Delusion" is a national best-seller.

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Sent in by Don O'Connor (pseudonym)

I was born into a family of four in the summer of '85. We were from and soon settled in the Bible Belt after my dad left the service. The Church of Christ was the only viable religion, and hence the only way to god. That's what I was led to believe, anyway. The name was correct, and the policies were unquestionable. This was made clear from an early age, so naturally I adopted their attitudes. My father was strict about maintaining appearances, though he was often too lazy or unwilling to put his tirades and rants into personal practice. This was my first encounter with religious hypocrisy, and a necessary first step in my ultimate exodus from the faith itself. For now, however, I simply became non-denominational. I believe I was about 10 at the time. (I was a very serious child.)

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Sent in by John

I was a saved baptized, spirit-filled, born-again Christian by choice for many years and as such I knew that every person who is not a saved, born-again Christian is going to burn in the depths of hell for all eternity. I also knew that every TV show, every movie, every book that did not glorify Jesus Christ is "of the world" and therefore "satanic" for Satan is the "lord of this world." More importantly I knew that every religion, every spiritual path, every faith, every creed, denomination and belief that was not "King James Bible Christianity" was a satanic deception straight from the pit of hell.

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Having demonstrated a complete apostasy from Christianity, it is apparent that I am bound for a "Christ-less" grave. My purposeless, meaningless, hedonistic life will be snuffed out one day soon where I will be subject to the dark cold oblivion of death. Everything I have built on this Earth will crumble and fall. All the goals and ambitions I thought worth my time will amount to nothing after I am gone. All memory of me will be erased from history all too soon. Any possessions accumulated will be dissipated as those who come afterwards divvy them up between themselves, and I will return to the dust from which I came, rarely to be thought of again. My existential world view offers me no hope of continued conscious existence, no escape from the Grim Reaper's sickle, and no assurance of a higher purpose beyond that shared by the plants and animals. The law of the jungle is the rule of life, and the vain pursuit of pleasure is the only motivation to continue breathing.

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By Mattias Lehman

Often I hear people claim that they are 'Agnostic.' However, this is a misnomer, due to misunderstanding of Agnosticism. What such people mean to claim, is that they are weak atheists, or negative atheists, who lack belief in god. Such a description applies to babies, or people who have never heard of the idea of a god. Some would argue that it applies to people who simply don't know what they believe yet. However, not knowing implies a lack of conviction. A belief is a conviction in some thing's truth. If they lack that conviction in the existence of god, that means that they are at least an implicit atheist.

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There's a common belief among many American Christians that the American Thanksgiving holiday is somehow religious. Aside from the apparent desire to turn everything into an expression of their religion, the primary reason behind this seems to be the idea that the whole point must be to give thanks to their god — not any other gods, just theirs, thus making it a Christian holiday too. If this is true, then it makes no sense for non-Christians, or at least non-theists, to celebrate Thanksgiving.

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By Daniel

Intro: I simply want to lay out a fair representation of the positive case for intelligent design (ID) in this article, and examine why the case has been ruled a failure by the greater scientific community. Because ID is so vague, eg defined by the Discovery Institute as,

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

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"Are you out to hang me because I made a mistake? You should walk in my shoes, about how I have felt about that. This thing has eaten me like a cancer," the pastor said to the girl's father in a telephone call.

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Mentalist Derren Brown poses as James Lawrence who claims to be able to convert atheists into believing in God with a touch of his hand. Derren makes the following statement at the beginning of each episode of 'Trick of the Mind':

"This program fuses magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship. I achieve all the results you'll see through a varied mixture of those techniques. At no point are actors or stooges used in the show."

(Click here to watch the video...)

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GREENWOOD VILLAGE, Colo. -- A high school pastor at Greenwood Community Church surrendered to authorities Wednesday after stating he had been sexually involved with a 16-year-old girl.

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A letter from D. O'Hara

The fact that misguided people such as yourselves are "dogging" Christianity proves the truth of the Bible. It is always curious to me why Christianity is the subject of intense and frankly often misguided scrutiny when other false religions get a pass.

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Michael Shermer takes us on a hilarious romp through the strange claims we humans put forth as truth — from alien encounters to Virgin Mary sightings on pizza pies, to hidden messages revealed while playing "Stairway to Heaven" backwards — and explains the evolutionary and cognitive basis for these lapses in reason. Don't miss the one-minute challenge testing your own observational skills...

(Click to watch the video...)

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I’ve been reading news articles and commentaries on the Ted Haggard episode and have been surprised to find that the majority of stories haven’t been all that condemning. Although no one is denying Haggard’s homosexual lifestyle or his drug use, almost without exception the articles contain phrases such as “We are all subject to falling to temptation” or “Satan attacks successful Christians” or “Ministers are just people too” and “We should remember David and Bathsheba” or “We must seek for his restoration and forgiveness” or similar banal rhetoric. And these trite phrases have been weaved into columns written by secular and Christian writers alike!

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Sent in by Zen

I am Zen who wrote my testimony November 7th 2006 (how study can change you).

I want to share a little story how physic change my faith from Christianity to Naturalist, Universalist, Pantheist, Daoist, or whatever you call it (it doesn’t matter for me).

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This post is excerpted from The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth, by Valerie Tarico, www.lulu.com/tarico

The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. —Isaiah 11:6–7

Biologists teach us that the bodies of predators are optimized for predation: teeth that tear into muscle or crunch bone rather than grinding vegetation into paste, jaws that unhinge to accommodate large, infrequent prey, claws that cling, muscles that spring, padded feet for silent stalking, digestive systems that separate meat and blood from useless bits of fur and bone, poisons that can paralyze, kill, or even dissolve the innards of a hapless victim. The words of the prophet about lions and lambs are beautiful to me, as beautiful as the notion of beating swords into plowshares (Isa. 2:4). But a lion that eats straw isn’t a lion.

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The passionate, sometimes rhythmic, language-like patter that pours forth from religious people who “speak in tongues” reflects a state of mental possession, many of them say. Now they have some neuroscience to back them up.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania took brain images of five women while they spoke in tongues and found that their frontal lobes — the thinking, willful part of the brain through which people control what they do — were relatively quiet, as were the language centers. The regions involved in maintaining self-consciousness were active. The women were not in blind trances, and it was unclear which region was driving the behavior.

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I don't have the stunning logic that you have, nor the intense knowledge of the Bible. I know that it was written by fallible human beings. To be honest, I actually don't buy into the idea of organized religion much at all. I think it causes more problems than it solves. However, I have experienced God in ways that defy human logic. I'm excited to dialogue with you and see who you are. I'm not out to make you a 'Christian.' You've been there, and I don't think you're keen on going back, and I'm not really concerned with getting you there. I think what makes me most curious is the why. I want to know what makes you tick, and why you've devoted so much time to this. I know that Christians do it to, but I think it's because they think they have to. So why, Dave?

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Organizers of an evangelical summer camp for children featured in the documentary "Jesus Camp" are discontinuing the camp because of negative reaction sparked by the film and recent vandalism at the camp site in Devils Lake, North Dakota.

"We have decided to hold different activities in future," Pentecostal pastor and camp organizer Becky Fischer told Reuters.

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Michael Moore goes after Fred Phelps with his gang of gay men.

(Click here to watch a short video...)

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Haggard condemns homosexuality in a clip from the "Jesus Camp" movie.

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Jesse James, a punk band from London, England, released the music video "Dear Jesus" in 2005. It was banned from UK Television for being too controversial.

(Click here to watch the music video...)

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Sent in by Ken

I was born into the Catholic faith. As a young boy, all I can recall was that it meant making sure I attended Sunday Mass and going for Sunday School. You could do anything you wanted during the week but God forbid if you ever missed a Mass. When I was about 12, I went for Confession. I rattled off some typical young boy's sins. The priest listened quietly until I said I missed Mass last 2 Sundays. I got a stern rebuke from the priest. He upped the number of Hail Mary's I had to recite in penance in the hope that "Mother Mary" will lead me to attend Mass.

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Sent in by Justin Taylor

At the age of 18, I have witnessed God firsthand! I wanted proof and I got proof! More than I could handle! God spoke to me and showed me that the way i was living wasn't right and that He is coming back to Earth soon!

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Sent in by Zen

Hi,

Call me Zen. I want to share my story as an ex Christian.

I am Indonesian Chinese. My father raised me as an “ordinary” Chinese, I mean, my father believes in God but never explain his faith deeply. He only pointed out that conscience is better than religions.

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You should all be ashamed of yourselves, this is one sick site. We will all stand before Almighty God one day, whether you believe it or not. Try searching and you will find the truth, not perfect people but a perfect & loving God. I will pray for you as I know someone must have prayed for me before I found God.

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By Alan M. Perlman, PhD

I’ve been just as surprised as any liberally-educated secular humanist by the resurgence of religious superstition and fundamentalism in my lifetime. After all, we’ve had the brilliance of Greek and Roman civilization, then the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and, most recently, the dawn of the Information Age.

After decades of painstaking research and observation, we have a theory of how things began: Big Bang (or some other equally momentous event), followed by the creation of simple, then more complex chemical elements, the solidification of planets, then just the right mix of circumstances to set up our blessed little globe for us.

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After resigning as head of a national evangelical group, Ted Haggard is removed from his New Life leadership post.

DENVER — An investigative committee of independent pastors concluded "without a doubt" on Saturday that the Rev. Ted Haggard had committed "sexually immoral conduct" and removed him from his duties as senior pastor at a mega-church in Colorado Springs, Colo.

The committee's decision took away Haggard's last position of church leadership — and cast doubt on his assertion that he had visited a male prostitute for a massage but never had sex with him.

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Pensacola evangelist and tax protester Kent Hovind winked at his wife and gave her a reassuring smile as he was led away to jail.

Jo Hovind clutched the necktie he had been wearing. She kept her eyes on her husband until he was out of sight.

A 12-person jury deliberated for 21/2 hours on Thursday before finding the couple guilty of all counts in their tax-fraud case.

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By Ian

Hi Jesus.

Jet me start out by saying F*** you. Yeah, that's right. F*** you. F*** you uncle f***er. What the f***? you ask. Allow me to explain. After careful consideration and a lot of thinking, I have come to the conclusion that you, as presented in the bible and your followers, are a f***er.

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A prominent evangelical preacher is denying allegations by a former gay male escort that the two had a three-year sexual relationship.

Ted Haggard, founder of the 14,000-member New Life Church and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, told KUSA Channel 9 that the escort is lying.

"I’ve never had a gay relationship with anybody, and I’m steady with my wife. I’m faithful to my wife," Haggard said.

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