FILE – This combination

of 2012 file photos shows U.S. President Barack Obama, left, and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Boulder, Colo. and Cape Canaveral, Fla. How unthinkable it was, not so long ago, that a presidential election would pit a candidate fathered by an African against another condemned as un-Christian. And yet, here it is: Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney, an African-American and a white Mormon, representatives of two groups and that have endured oppression to carve out a place in the United States. How much progress has America made against bigotry? (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, Charles Dharapak) CAROLYN KASTER, CHARLES DHARAPAK — AP

How unthinkable it was, not so long ago, that a presidential election would pit a candidate fathered by an African against another condemned as un-Christian.

Yet here it is: Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney, an African-American and a white Mormon, representatives of two groups and that have endured oppression to carve out a place in the United States.

How much progress has America made against bigotry? By November, we should have some idea.

Perhaps mindful of the lingering power of prejudice, both men soft-pedal their status as racial or religious pioneers. But these things “will be factors whether they’re explicitly stated or not, because both Obama and Romney are minorities,” said Nancy Wadsworth, co-editor of the anthology “Faith and Race in American Political Life.”

Mormons are 1.7 percent of the U.S. population, according to the Pew Research Center. African-Americans are 12.6 percent

“Americans like to obsess about ways that people are different,” said Wadsworth, a political science professor

The Raw Story

Sweden’s Missionary Church of Kopimism, which was founded in the fall of 2010 and grantedofficial recognition by the Swedish government this past January, has already established branches in eighteen countries, including the United States. Now the upstart religion is beginning to attract mainstream attention.

Kopimism is currently featured in a <a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/04/20/kopimism-swedens-pirate-religion-begins-to-p

lunder-america” target=”_blank”>story in US News and World Report, somewhat misleadingly titled “Kopimism, Sweden’s Pirate Religion, Begins to Plunder America.” Christopher Carmean, the founder of the U.S. branch, told US News, “Data is what we are made of, data is what defines our life, and data is how we express ourselves. … Attempts to hinder sharing are antithetical to our data-driven existence.”

The Church of Kopimism comes across partly as a spoof of organized religion similar to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, partly as an attempt to gain support for its desire to do away with most copyright laws, and in part completely in earnest. READ

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/321960#ixzz1qk4USwQG

The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia has said it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region,” following Kuwait’s moves to ban their construction.

Speaking to a delegation in Kuwait, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, stressed that since the tiny Gulf state was a part of the Arabian Peninsula, it was necessary to destroy all of the churches in the country, Arabic media have reported.

Saudi Arabia’s top cleric made the comment in view of an age-old rule that only Islam can be practiced in the region.

The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia is the highest official of religious law in the Sunni Muslim kingdom. He is also the head of the Supreme Council of Ulema (Islamic scholars) and of the Standing Committee for Scientific Research and Issuing of Fatwas.

The French have grown more likely to believe that Jews hold too much power in business or world finance, as well as other “classical anti-Semitic notions,” according to a new survey from the Anti-Defamation League that compares attitudes in 2009 and 2012.

The poll, released Tuesday, found nearly half of the French people surveyed said they think it is “probably true” that Jews there are more loyal to Israel than France, an increase from years past. Asked if Jews “still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust,” more than a third of the respondents agreed.

Bias against Jews is in the spotlight in France after a gunman killed a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday. The French interior minister said the alleged attacker, suspected to have links to a group associated with Al Qaeda, said he shot them in revenge for the killing of Palestinian children.

THE Knights Templars drugs cartel is calling a short truce – but only to welcome Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico.

“They did put up signs announcing this,” a Guanajuato state government source told AFP privately on Sunday.

The Knights Templars are holding off on all violent action, we are not killers, welcome to the Pope,” the official said paraphrasing one of the signs put up in the town of Irapuato, Guanajuato state.

The signs were seen in at least seven towns statewide.

The Pope arrives March 23 in Leon, in the neighbouring state of Michoacan, where the Knights Templars were founded.

President Felipe Calderon has launched a military crackdown against the cartels battling it out for control of the lucrative drug trade, in which some 50,000 Mexicans have lost their lives since 2006.

Pope Benedict XVI led a solemn ceremony in Saint Peter’s Basilica on Saturday to induct 22 new cardinals into the prestigious college that will one day elect his successor.

The 84-year-old pope, who entered the vast basilica on a rolling platform wearing red and gold vestments, presented the new “princes of the Church” with scarlet-red birettas and gold rings during the consistory that Vatican observers say could increase the chances of the next pope being Italian.

The new cardinals “are asked to serve the Church with love and vigour, with the clarity and wisdom of masters, with the energy and moral force of pastors (and) with the faith and courage of martyrs,” the pope said. READ

After several years of scandal in which the Catholic Church has faced allegations of financial impropriety, paedophile priests and rumours of plots to kill the Pope, the Vatican is now facing a new €600m-a-year tax bill as Rome seeks to head off European Commission censure over controversial property tax breaks enjoyed by the Church.

Millions of Evangelical Christians Want to Start World War III … to Speed Up the Second Coming

Conservative Christians were the biggest backers of the Iraq war.

Millions of Americans believe that Christ will not come again until Israel wipes out its competitors and there is widespread war in the Middle East. Some of these folks want to start a huge fire of war and death and destruction, so that Jesus comes quickly.

According to French President Chirac, Bush told him that the Iraq war was needed to bring on the apocalypse:

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”…

There can be little doubt now that President Bush’s reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.

 READ MORE HERE!!!!

Tamara Lowe, a frequent guest on “The 700 Club” and author of the book Get Motivated, and her husband Peter are in the midst of an acrimonious divorce that just got uglier: in court documents, Peter accused Tamara and her new boyfriend of stealing his porn.

According to south Florida website Gossip Extra, the Christian motivation speaker and her spouse are on the verge of closing their marriage of 24 years.

In a motion filed to the court, Peter Lowe claimed Tamara’s new boyfriend and two other men stole items from his Miami house while he was in Las Vegas, including porn videos. Other items reported as missing include photos, five laptops, a desktop and boxes of documents. Lawyers from Tamara Lowe claimed that their client returned all of her husband’s items.

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