EGYPTIAN CHRISTIAN BURNED ALIVE; FATHER MURDERED; PRAY AND MAKE A DIFFERENCE....

A young Christian man was suddenly set on fire by a Muslim man in Egypt after a rumor circulated that the Christian man had a relationship with the Muslim man’s sister.
Yasser Ahmed Qasim approached 25-year-old Sabri Shihata and poured gasoline on the Coptic Christian and then set him on fire, reported the Voice of the Copts on Friday. The young Copt tried to put out the fire by throwing himself into a nearby canal, but the burns were too severe and he later died.
His 60-year-old father, Sabri Shihata, later arrived at a village rally where a group of Muslims stabbed him to death. One stab reportedly entered his back and came out of his abdomen below the rib cage, according to Voice of the Copts. The elder Shihata was taken to the hospital but nevertheless died from the attacks.
The Muslim group also attacked the Coptic man’s younger brother, 22-year-old Rami Sabri Shihata, causing a deep injury to his head.
Local police have arrested those involved in the attack, including Yasser Ahmed Kassem, as well as victim Sabri Shihata, who is being held in custody at Dmas Hospital, located in the northern province of Qalubiya, north of Cairo. The perpetrators are charged with deliberate homicide.
Security forces have also surrounded the victims’ house and extra security has been deployed throughout the village of 60,000 people.
A media blackout has been put in place as the prosecution and the State Security Services continue investigation.
In Egypt recently, sectarian violence has been on the rise as Christian-Muslim relations have been strained by conversions to Christianity and government opposition to recognizing the conversions.
Furthermore, changes in living arrangements have also contributed to increased tension between the two groups. Previously, Christians and Muslims used to live peacefully in mixed communities, but recently the two groups have tended to live separately only among their own religious communities and there have been less interaction between the two groups.
Egypt has the largest Christian population in the Middle East with an estimated 10 million Copts in Egypt, making up about 10 percent of the country’s population.

COMCAST, DIRECT TV TO ALLOW PORN PROMOTION IN LOS ANGELES; PRAY AND MAKE A DIFFERENCE ...

LOS ANGELES -- The economy may be in shambles, but satellite and cable companies are making whoopee.
Faced with increased competition from former phone companies such as AT&T and Verizon, satellite and cable companies are loosening their chastity belts and getting more aggressive about promoting adult content on other male-heavy channels such as ESPN and Spike TV. What's more, even as they raise prices on regular channels, the price of their adult fare is about to get much cheaper and more attractive.
Region by regionLate last year, Rupert Murdoch's DirecTV quietly ended its moratorium on hyping adult video-on-demand offerings on other channels. Meanwhile, the nation's largest cable company, Comcast may soon start promoting adult content, though on a region by region basis, insiders say.
A spokeswoman for Comcast declined to comment, but Robert Mercer, a spokesman for DirecTV, said that while the company still has "a long-standing policy of not marketing adult content at retail or to consumers in general," it will now run promotional spots "for existing customers on certain male-oriented channels in the early morning hours -- between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. ET, say."
"We've always been extremely discreet about this," wrote Mr. Mercer in an e-mailed statement to Ad Age, "for obvious reasons."
All about the bottom lineStill, Ali Joone, CEO of Digital Playground, a Van Nuys, Calif.-based adult studio, notes, "We're coming out of an eight-year political administration that was very tough on the adult business. What is driving cable operators now is money, not fear. They're starting to not really care what people say; they're looking at their bottom line."
In a down economy, adult PPV is almost pure profit for both cable and satellite operators. And those profits are substantial. Mr. Joone said that while the split of revenue between cable operators and Hollywood studios favors Hollywood, when it comes to adult content, "90% of the revenue goes to cable operators. They have the lion's share of the profits."
Accounts vary as to porn's actual economic impact because, like most men, the adult industry also tends to misrepresent its true size. But a 2007 Kagan Research report found that adult video on-demand and pay-per-view is expected to make up a $1.4 billion market by 2014.
More bang for buck

Curiously, while DirecTV and Comcast are in the midst of raising overall prices on their TV channel subscription packages (DirecTV by 4% just this month; Comcast by 4.5% on average this year), pay-per-view porn will be coming down in price.
"I don't know if its going to be a [McDonald's] 'Dollar Menu,' but giving people more for their money is on the agenda," said Ken Boenish, president of New Frontier Media, the Boulder, Colo.-based adult pay-per-view firm that operates both The Erotic Network and Penthouse On-Demand.
The main reason?
Pay-per-view porn is being slowly nibbled to death by more cheaply-priced (or free) internet smut, while adult studios are suffering from stalled DVD sales.
"Five years ago, 90% of our business was DVD," said Mr. Joone, "This year it will probably be less than 60%."
He added: "And a lot of the broadcasters, they're putting out the same material out that you can pay for by the minute on the internet. At that point, the consumer is like, 'I can get this for pennies!'"
Just last week, rival Playboy Enterprises posted a massive $145 million loss, with fourth-quarter domestic TV revenue essentially flat.
But a lack of marketing may also be to blame for porn's ills.
'Shattering' conventional wisdom

In an industry awash with exaggerating raconteurs, Mr. Boenish is one of the few adult-industry executives with the distribution relationships needed to commission serious, factual research of consumers' porn habits. A recent New Frontiers Media in-house study of satellite customers found that almost 75% of satellite customers are unaware that hard-core content is available to them; 56% of cable customers are unaware of the option.
The study "shattered a lot of conventional wisdom at the company," said Mr. Boenish. "We used to be of the opinion that people who purchased adult entertainment on cable were ignorant of the internet. But we found that of the 80% of customers who buy adult content from their cable operator, 63% pay for content on the internet as well."
These surprisingly "dual users" of both internet and PPV porn cited the value proposition that pay-per-view offered: better video quality, superior overall viewing experience on larger screens, and, of course, the freedom from worry about the ultimate sexually transmitted disease -- the internet-porn computer virus.
Package deals

As such, many of New Frontier's adult PPV offerings are now packaged with free adult internet offerings, or with a subscription package that will allow access to 50 adult movies a month for $15.99 instead of a single adult film for just 24 hours. The result has been a 5% increase in adult revenues year-on-year at New Frontier.
Whether more aggressive adult PPV marketing alone will equal higher profits for the cable and satellite companies remains unclear.
"It's a Band-Aid," said Mr. Joone. "Is it a long-term solution? Absolutely not."
He insists the answer is to spend more not only marketing adult content, but on making it, too. While the typical adult film costs between $15,000 and $25,000, Mr. Joone often spends three times that amount to shoot in exotic tropical locations, in high definition video with well-known stars. His "Pirates 2" just crested 1 million units sold in a business where a blockbuster porn title typically sells just 5,000 copies.
"If you you're creating something that's just going to be masturbatory, fine, but if you want to stay alive in this business, you have to do better. I like to say, 'Water is free, but we pay for it in a bottle.' That makes a lot of sense to me."

SCIENTISTS LOCATE ' GOD SPOT ' IN HUMAN BRAIN

Science can't say whether God represents a loving, vengeful or nonexistent being. But researchers have revealed for the first time how such religious beliefs trigger different parts of the brain.
Brain scans showed that participants fell back on higher thought patterns when reacting to religious statements, whether trying to figure out God's thoughts and emotions or thinking about metaphorical meaning behind religious teachings.
"That suggests that religion is not a special case of a belief system, but evolved along with other belief and social cognitive abilities," said Jordan Grafman, a cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland.
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Such results fit with previous research which shows that no single "God spot" exists in the brain. Both believers and nonbelievers participated in the new study, detailed in this week's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A first part of the study established a range or spectrum of religious beliefs relating to God's perceived involvement in this world, God's perceived emotion, and personal experiences as opposed to abstract doctrine. The second part examined how participants responded to religious statements reflecting those beliefs, with the help of fMRI scanners.
The brain scans showed that people use known, higher-function brain regions to sort out their thoughts on God and religion. For instance, parts of the brain linked with theory of mind (ToM) lit up when trying to understand a supposedly detached God's intentions – although individual minds varied wildly when pondering a more involved God.
A possible explanation: "Probably because we would tend to use theory of mind when we were puzzled, concerned, or threatened by another’s behavior," Grafman told LiveScience.

People again relied on theory of mind, as well as brain regions that detect emotion through facial expression and language, when they read statements reflecting God's anger. Statements of God's love stimulated regions connected with positive emotions and suppression of sadness
Unsurprisingly, statements of religious doctrine activated parts of the brain that help decode metaphor and abstractness. That contrasted with statements reflecting religious experience, which prodded the brain to retrieve memories and imagery of self in action.
Even statements that believers or nonbelievers disagreed with produced intriguing results.
"Reading a statement that you have been asked to compare your own personal beliefs with certainly will activate your own belief system," Grafman pointed out. He and his colleagues observed brain regions relating to disgust or conflict lighting up in response.
One question that remains unanswered is whether religion evolved as a central functional preoccupation for human brains in early societies, or whether it simply relied on brain regions which had evolved for other types of thought-processing.
Future research may also try to see if human brains respond similarly for different religions, given that this study focused only on Western Christian beliefs.
"The more interesting studies will wind up comparing different belief systems with similar dimensions to see if they also activate the same brain areas," Grafman said. "If they do, we can better define why those brain areas evolved in humans."

SUPPORTERS OF ' ANTI-CHRIST ' MINISTER PROTEST MIAMI-DADE JUDGES; PROTEST AGAINST HIS PERSECUTION

Wearing white T-shirts emblazoned with ''666'', about a dozen followers of Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda, the Miami-based minister who proclaimed himself the Antichrist, protested his ''persecution'' by the justice system in front of the family courthouse on Tuesday.
Last year, after a bitter divorce that featured dueling claims of lesbianism and physical abuse, Miami-Dade judge Roberto Pineiro awarded more than $2.2 million to the minister's ex-wife, Josefina de Jesus Torres.
In his ruling, Pineiro determined that de Jesus' Growing in Grace church was a personal business, rather than a religious nonprofit, so the ex-wife was entitled to half of its assets.
Jo-Ann de Jesus, the minister's daughter who also handles the church's finances, said the judge based his decision on a ''prejudice against my dad'' and not on evidence.
De Jesus and her father's followers are hoping to get the multimillion dollar judgement overturned.
Pineiro could not be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.
The minister, who claimed his teachings have replaced those of Jesus Christ and therefore he should be known as the Antichrist, has refused to pay up.
He has been ''moving around a lot lately'', his daughter said, to avoid the arrest warrant issued against him for contempt.
''My father is afraid if he is captured, people will sell their houses to help him because they love him so much,'' she said.
Many of de Jesus' followers say his clash with the secular justice system is further proof that he is the Second Coming. The original Messiah also faced significant legal difficulties, they note.
''It just makes me more secure,'' said 38-year-old de Jesus follower Angel Toro. ``His persecution means he's really divine.''
While de Jesus cannot preach before a live congregation for fear of being dragged away in handcuffs, he still records video sermons that are broadcast to more than 20 nations through a sister church in Colombia, his daughter said. In explaining his decision to treat de Jesus' and the church's finances as one, the judge wrote that de Jesus ``dominates the ministry like only a god can. . . . In what other corporation does the board of directors literally worship the president?''
De Jesus exploded into popularity -- and controversy -- in the past few years after he declared himself to be Christ. His ministry, Growing in Grace, quickly expanded to more than 300 churches in 30 countries. Eventually, de Jesus amended his title to Antichrist and he, his ex-wife and many followers got tattooed with the number of the beast, a practice that generated headlines worldwide.

15% OF AMERICANS HAVE NO RELIGION; FEWER CALL THEMSELVES CHRISTIAN; NON DENOMINATIONAL IDENTIFICATION INCREASES; STUDY OF U.S RELIGION

The percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians has dropped dramatically over the past two decades, and those who do are increasingly identifying themselves without traditional denomination labels, according to a major study of U.S. religion being released today.

The survey of more than 54,000 people conducted between February and November of last year showed that the percentage of Americans identifying as Christians has dropped to 76 percent of the population, down from 86 percent in 1990. Those who do call themselves Christian are more frequently describing themselves as "nondenominational" "evangelical" or "born again," according to the American Religious Identification Survey.
The survey is conducted by researchers at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and funded by the Lilly Endowment and the Posen Foundation. Conducted in 1990, 2001 and last year, it is one of the nation's largest major surveys of religion.

The increase in people labeling themselves in more generic Christian terms corresponds strongly with the decline in people identifying themselves as Protestant, the survey found. People calling themselves mainline Protestants, including Methodists and Lutherans, have dropped to 13 percent of the population, down from 19 percent in 1990. The number of people who describe themselves as generically "Protestant" went from approximately 17 million in 1990 to 5 million.
Meanwhile, the number of people who use nondenominational terms has gone from 194,000 in 1990 to more than 8 million.
"There is now this shift in the non-Catholic population -- and maybe among American Christians in general -- into a sort of generic, soft evangelicalism," said Mark Silk, who directs Trinity's Program on Public Values and helped supervise the survey.
The survey substantiated several general trends already identified by sociologists: the slipping importance of denomination in America, the growing number of people who say they have "no" religion and the increase in religious minorities including Muslims, Mormons and such movements as Wicca and paganism.
The only group that grew in every U.S. state since the 2001 survey was people saying they had "no" religion; the survey says this group is now 15 percent of the population. Silk said this group is likely responsible for the shrinking percentage of Christians in the United States.
Northern New England has surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious section of the country; 34 percent of Vermont residents say they have "no religion." The report said that the country has a "growing non-religious or irreligious minority." Twenty-seven percent of those interviewed said they did not expect to have a religious funeral or service when they died, and 30 percent of people who had married said their service was not religious. Those questions weren't asked in previous surveys.
The survey reflects a key question that demographers, sociologists and political scientists have been asking in recent years: Who makes up this growing group of evangelicals? Forty-four percent of America's 77 million Christian adults say they are born again or evangelical. Meanwhile, 18 percent of Catholics also chose that label, as did 40 percent of mainline Christians.
"If people call themselves 'evangelical,' it doesn't tell you as much as you think it tells you about what kind of church they go to," Silk said. "It deepens the conundrum about who evangelicals are."

ANOTHER NU METAL BAND KORN MEMBER BECAME A CHRISTIAN

A member of nu metal band Korn will release a book on Tuesday about his journey through addiction, faith, and recovery.

And, no it’s not former guitarist Brian “Head” Welch, who split from the group in 2005 following his conversion to Christianity.
This time, it’s bass guitarist Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu, who is still a member of the band but reveals how different he is now from his former self in Got the Life.
“I was an expert at drinking, smoking dope, popping pills, using foul language, being mean, and partying without any remorse,” Fieldy recalls in his soon-to-release book, published by Harper Collins. “You don’t get that good at anything without lots of practice.”
The turning point for now 39-year-old came after his father became ill.
“When Dad got sick, I thought I could fix him because I had money, power, and influence,” he recalls. “I was rich and famous, right? I thought I could fix anything.”
As time went by, however, his father’s condition went from bad to worse. Every doctor Fieldy took his father to insisted that he had cancer, though all the tests returned negative.
To cope with the mounting frustration, Fieldy turned to partying, drinking, smoking, and pill popping – activities he had been engrossed with for the last twenty years of his life.
But Fieldy’s “deep denial” of his father’s illness would soon come to an end. In 2005, Fieldy’s father – a “total Holy Roller, completely into Jesus” – died.
And following his father’s dying wish, Fieldy found God.
“I’ve been clean for three years. I don’t fight with my wife anymore. I don’t lust or cheat anymore .... I don’t wake up feeling like hell anymore. I don’t spend money on things I later regret anymore. I don’t deny my blessed life that has been waiting for me ... anymore,” Fieldy writes since his father’s death.
“Losing Dad was my wake-up call to see that I had to change the way I lived or I was going to die, too,” he adds.
With never-before-seen photos and never-before-heard stories, Got the Life offers Fieldy’s raw, candid, and inspiring story of rock and redemption.
The bassist’s hope is that his thoughts will somehow inspire readers.
“Don’t waste your life. There are only so many hours in a day and you can never get those back,” he writes. “You were made to make a difference.”
Today, Fieldy is a happily married father of three who lives in Southern California. He is also still a member of Korn and working on a new album with the band as well as a few side projects. Among the side projects is his own clothing line, Immanuel One Twenty Three.