IN A SHOCKING SURVEY, MOST OF THE AMERICAN CHRISTIANS DOESN'T BELIVE IN SATAN AND HOLY SPIRIT

The majority of American Christians do not believe that Satan is a real being or that the Holy Spirit is a living entity, the latest Barna survey found.Nearly six out of ten Christians either strongly agreed or somewhat agreed with the statement that Satan "is not a living being but is a symbol of evil," the survey found.

Forty percent strongly agreed with the statement while 19 percent of American Christians somewhat agreed.In contrast, about 35 percent of American Christians believe Satan is real. Twenty-six percent strongly disagreed with the statement that Satan is merely symbolic and about one-tenth (9 percent) somewhat disagreed.The remaining eight percent of American Christians responded they were unsure what to believe about the existence of Satan.

Interestingly, the majority of Christians believe a person can be under the influence of spiritual forces, such as demons or evil spirits, even though many of these same people believe Satan is merely a symbol of evil. Two out of three Christians agreed that such forces are real (39 percent agreed strongly, 25 percent agreed somewhat).Likewise, most Christians in the United States do not believe that the Holy Spirit is a living force. Fifty-eight percent strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement that the Holy Spirit is "a symbol of God's power or presence but is not a living entity."Only one-third of Christians disagreed with the statement that the Holy Spirit is not just symbolic (9 percent disagreed somewhat, 25 percent disagreed strongly). Nine percent expressed they were unsure.Interestingly, about half (49 percent) of those who agreed that the Holy Spirit is only a symbol but not a living entity, agreed that the Bible is totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches. The Bible states that the Holy Spirit is God's power or presence, not just symbolic."Most Americans, even those who say they are Christian, have doubts about the intrusion of the supernatural into the natural world," commented George Barna, founder of The Barna Group and author of books analyzing research concerning America's faith."Hollywood has made evil accessible and tame, making Satan and demons less worrisome than the Bible suggests they really are," he said. "It's hard for achievement-driven, self-reliant, independent people to believe that their lives can be impacted by unseen forces."But a large majority of American Christians agree that a person must choose to side with either good or evil. More than six out of ten American Christians strongly agreed (61 percent) with the idea that a person must either side with God or with the devil - that there is no in-between position. Another 15 percent somewhat agreed.Just one out of ten adults disagreed somewhat (10 percent) and a similar proportion (11 percent) strongly disagreed. Only a few adults (3 percent) did not have an opinion on the issue.

Barna explained that because of the "sheer force of repetition" many Americans "intellectually" accept the idea that you either side with God or Satan and there's no in-between, even though this idea does "not get translated into practice."Other survey findings include a significant number of self-described Christians believing that Jesus sinned when he lived on earth, contrary to the core teaching of Christianity that teaches the divinity and perfection of Jesus.More than one-fifth (22 percent) strongly agreed that Jesus Christ sinned when He lived on earth, with an additional 17 percent agreeing somewhat.However, nearly half of American Christians (46 percent) strongly disagreed with the idea that Jesus sinned, and 9 percent disagreed somewhat. Six percent did not have an opinion on the statement.The Barna report is based on telephone interviews for two surveys among people who described themselves as Christians. A total of 1,871 adults were randomly selected from across the 48 continental states, with the first 873 interviews conducted in January and February 2008, and the remaining 998 interviews conducted in November 2008.

CHRISTIAN BILLIONAIRE BUILDS FIRST BIBLICALLY - SIZED NOAH'S ARK

An evangelical Chinese billionaire and his two billionaire brothers are behind a massive project of building the world’s first biblically proportioned Noah’s ark.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Kwok brothers, heirs to Hong Kong’s largest real estate developer Sun Hung Kai Properties, has built the 450-foot-long ark/luxury hotel complete with 67 pairs of fiberglass animals to draw visitors from beyond the city’s limit.
Middle brother Thomas Kwok, an evangelical Christian, is the main champion of the project that has been in discussion for 17 years. The ark is inspired by his Christian faith, but will not be promoted in an overtly religious manner.
Instead, the message being promoted is that the financial storm will soon be over and new life, represented by the animals emerging from the ark, will soon be opened up.
But despite avoiding an obvious religious message, the ark - the foundation of which was laid in 2004 - was developed in partnership with five Christian organizations.
The Hong Kong ark is made of concrete and glass fiber and includes a restaurant, exhibition hall, children’s museum, and the main Noah’s Resort hotel. Builders had tried to construct a permanent rainbow through light refraction, but the science proved too hard. So far, no ark replicas in the world have successfully built a rainbow.
Previously built arks include one in the Netherlands that could float on water and contained real animals. But the Netherlands ark was about one-fifth the size of the biblical ark. Another ark was built by Greenpeace in 2007 on Turkey’s Mount Ararat that was intended to be a warning of impending disaster from climate change.
Thomas Kwok had previously mixed his business and Christian faith when he set up a church on the 75th floor of the Sun Hung Kai’s Central Plaza office in the 1990s.

ELECTIONS PROMPT PRAYER CAMPAIGN FOR CHRISTIANS INDIA

A ministry working with the persecuted church is calling on Christians around the world to pray for fellow believers in India as the country begins its nationwide parliamentary elections Thursday.

With the start of the election, which is the largest in the democratic world and will span four weeks, religious minorities are fearful that political parties will intimidate and coerce them into voting for candidates they do not want to support or force them to stay home.
The Global Council of Indian Christians (GCIC) estimates that as many as 70,000 Christians, who would normally vote for opposition political candidates, may be affected by Hindu extremist political parties in a way that would allow them to go unchallenged.
In response to the threat of unfair elections, Christian leaders across India have called on all political parties in India to guarantee safety for religious minorities, ensure their participation in the elections, defend freedom of religion and bring to justice those who discriminate against Christian minorities.
“India is a democracy, but unfortunately in practice the law is being restricted in its application in favor of the Hindu majority – 80 percent of the population – and to the disadvantage of minorities such as Christians and Muslims,” said Abhishek Singh, director of Open Doors in India.
Singh described the violence against Christians as “quite great” and noted that not a day passes without there being two or three attacks against Christians somewhere in India. The police, he said, are under the influence of Hindus so in many cases they do not act to protect religious minorities, and when they do act, it is with leniency towards Hindus.
“The violence against Christians is not the random work of a few break-away gangs,” Singh said. “There is a close-knit network of Hindu fundamentalist organizations. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is nothing other than the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the umbrella organization which promotes the ideal of a national state for Hindus.”
Christians in India are particularly afraid during this year’s elections because of the extraordinary violence against believers over the past nine months. Following the death of a Hindu fundamentalist leader, mobs of extremists have brutally attacked Christians in the eastern state of Orissa and elsewhere in India.
At least 60 Christians have been killed – although some Indian leaders say hundreds have died – 18,000, wounded; 252 churches, razed or destroyed; 5,031 Christian homes, burned; and more than 50,000 Christians, displaced in Orissa alone since August.
Hindu extremists accuse Christians of being behind the murder of their leader, even though Maoist rebels have publicly stated that they are the perpetrators of the assassination. Hindu assailants also justify their attacks by accusing Christian missionaries of using bribery or coercion to convert poor Indians, mostly the lower-caste Dalits, to Christianity.
“Unfortunately, 2008 saw the worst kind of regression in our society as the church in India experienced a wave of violence and persecution unprecedented since the origin of Christianity in India 2,000 years ago,” said Dr. Sajan K. George, national president of the Global Council of Indian Christians.
Open Doors, which works with partner organizations in India to help the displaced Christians with basic food supplies and medicines, listed India at No. 22 this year on its World Watch List of countries where Christians suffer the most severe persecution. India jumped eight spots since last year when it was listed at No. 30.
Christians are asked to pray for:

officials in the government ignoring persecution of Christians will be replaced by officials who support and protect religious freedom

• the freedom and liberty of the church and missionaries in India to share the Gospel and disciple believers

• God would move in the culture to remove the caste system and create equal opportunities and rights for all people

HINDU NATIONALIST ARRESTED FOR MAKING ANTI-CHRISTIAN SPEECH IN ORISSA ( INDIA )

BHUBANESWAR, India — Indian police Tuesday arrested a Hindu nationalist politician for an alleged anti-Christian hate speech at a poll rally in Orissa state, which was hit by Hindu-Christian riots last year.
Ashok Sahu, a member of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was charged with promoting hostility between communities during an election meeting in Kandhamal district, the centre of violence that erupted in August.
His arrest is a further embarrassment to the BJP, which has been accused of whipping up inter-faith tensions during campaigning.
One high-profile BJP candidate, Varun Gandhi -- a scion of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty -- was jailed after threatening to cut off the hands of anyone who dared harm India's majority Hindus.


In his speech on April 5, Sahu, a former police officer, allegedly justified last year's riots in Orissa in which Christian groups say more than 100 people were massacred by rampaging Hindu mobs.
The riots were sparked by the murder of a revered Hindu holy man, whose killing was blamed on Christians.
"Who killed Swamiji? Did he not know that there would be dire consequences for such an act? If I say it too often, I am accused of being communal and blamed for spreading communal hatred," Sahu reportedly told supporters.
Sahu, who is the BJP's candidate for the Kandhamal constituency, was detained at Phulbani town, 220 kilometres (140 miles) from the state capital Bhubaneshwar, Pravin Kumar, police superintendent of the area said.
Orissa goes to the polls in two phases on April 16 and 23 as part of India's mammoth five-stage national elections slated to end on May 13.
Thousands of Christians still live in state-run relief camps after Hindu mobs burned their houses, churches, orphanages and schools in the impoverished state.

DE-BAPTISM GAINS A FOLLOWING IN BRITAIN ; PRAY AND MAKE A DIFFERENCE

More than 100,000 former Christians have downloaded "certificates of de-baptism" in a bid to publicly renounce the faith, according to the London-based National Secular Society (NSS).

Terry Sanderson, the society's president, says the group started the online de-baptism initiative five years ago to mock the practice of baptizing infants too young to consent to religious rites. Their web site invites visitors to "Liberate yourself from the Original Mumbo-Jumbo that liberated you from the Original Sin you never had" and allows them to print out a paper certificate that uses quasi-formal language to "reject baptism's creeds and other such superstitions." But in recent months, as tens of thousands began to download the certificate, organizers realized that they had struck a chord with atheists and once-devout church members who are leaving churches they see as increasingly out-of-tune with modern life. "Churches have become so reactionary, so politically active that people actually want to make a protest against them now," Sanderson says. "They're not just indifferent anymore. They're actively hostile." (See pictures at a drive-in church.)
The campaign has become so popular — with nearly 1,000 certificates downloaded each week — that the NSS has started taking orders for certificates printed on parchment, at $4.50 each; they've sold nearly 2,000 in just three weeks. "Every time the Pope says something outrageous we get another rush on the certificate," Sanderson says, noting that traffic to the site skyrocketed last month following Pope Benedict XVI's comment that condoms could worsen the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa.
Public gaffes like that one may explain the anti-Catholic backlash driving similar movements elsewhere in the world. In October last year, Italy's Union of Rationalist Atheist and Agnostics sponsored the country's first-ever "De-baptism Day," when the no-longer faithful attended protests and passed out de-baptism forms to areligious people who didn't have internet connections to download them. More recently, on March 2, atheists and feminists in Argentina teamed up to launch the "Not in my Name" Internet campaign which encourages Roman Catholics to notify their local bishops of their desire to officially leave the church. So far more than 1,800 have joined their Facebook group or signed the petition on their website http://www.time.com/time/world/article/www.apostasiacolectiva.org.
According to Argentine campaigner Ariel Bellino, a former Catholic: "The church counts all those who've been baptized as Catholic and lobbies for legislation based on that number, so we're trying to convey the importance of people expressing they no longer belong to the church." Campaigners say that's particularly important in Argentina, where liberal social values frequently clash with Roman Catholic doctrine related to issues such as birth control, abstinence before marriage and homosexuality; in 2003, Buenos Aries became the first city in South America to legalize gay civil unions.
Back in Britain, Michael Evans, an atheist and former journalist who downloaded the de-baptism certificate in March, believes the Church of England claims more members than it actually has in order to shore up its influence in the secular world. "It claims to speak for the majority of people in Britain," he says. Official estimates are that fewer than one million Britons regularly attend Sunday services, but there are currently 26 Church of England bishops sitting in the House of Lords. "With churches, everybody checks in, but nobody checks out," says Evans, who was baptized as an infant. "There's no exit strategy except the funeral."
That may be changing. On April 9, John Hunt, a 56-year-old nurse in Croydon, south London, managed to have his official baptism record amended. Religious leaders from the Southwark Diocese had previously refused to delete Hunt's record of baptism, claiming it was an important historical detail. But after Hunt published a renouncement of his Christianity in the London Gazette, a journal of record dating back to the 17th century, those same religious leaders agreed to include it alongside his official baptism entry. "It's about time some of us stood up to be counted," Hunt said after receiving the news.
Nick Baines, the Bishop of Croydon, says such notation makes little difference. "Sticking John Hunt's note in the register is not 'de-anything,'" he wrote on his blog. "It is simply a note in a register that has no effect whatsoever other than to make him feel better that he has been heard." And, officials at the Church of England say, allowing such notation is not the Church's official policy because true renunciation can only take place between an individual and God.
Given that God takes on different forms for different people, the NSS has been approached by non-believers are far away as Australia, Romania and Saudi Arabia requesting certificates tailored to their former faith. "We've had Jewish people write in asking, 'Can I have a certificate to undo my bar mitzvah?'" says Sanderson. And while the group is considering those requests, there's at least one recurring query they're certain they can't undo, symbolically or otherwise: "How can I get myself uncircumcised?"

TEXAS CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY NIXES PLAN FOR GAY STUDENT HOUSING

FORT WORTH, Texas — Texas Christian University will not provide on-campus housing for gay students this fall as previously planned, officials said Monday.
"TCU will not launch any new living learning communities at this time," TCU Chancellor Victor J. Boschini Jr. said in a statement. "Instead we will assess whether the concept of housing residential students based on themes supports the academic mission of the institution as well as our objective to provide a total university experience."
He added that TCU "will maintain its long-standing commitment to the inclusiveness of all people. To that end, our numerous and diverse support groups will continue to play a vital role on our campus."

The DiversCity Q community was to open this fall in some campus apartments for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students — as well as their heterosexual classmates who support them.
Eight students had signed up so far, said Shelly Newkirk, the TCU sophomore who applied to create the program.
It would have been part of TCU's living-learning communities, designed for those who want to live with like-minded students.
TCU already has several such communities that will not change, such as one for students who want to become leaders, for those interested in the environment and for healthy living enthusiasts, said TCU spokeswoman Tracy Syler-Jones.
All others proposed for the fall are no longer being offered, in addition to the diversity community: "patriotism," "marine life," "creativity and the arts," "Christian perspectives and service" and "community service and teamwork."
TCU, a private university with about 7,500 undergraduate students, is associated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a community embracing both faith and reason, according to the school's Web site.