Dear [NAME],

Here are the updates for this week.

--------------------

Robertson Says All Other Religions Worship “Demonic Powers”

source: RightWing watch, November 16, 2006   A viewer wrote in to ask Pat Robertson a question     Why [do] evangelical Christians tell non-Christians that Jesus (God) is the only way to Heaven? Those who are Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, etc. already know and have a relationship with God.  Why is this?  It seems disrespectful. Robertson replied that it is not all disrespectful because all other religions really just worship “demonic powers.”   No.  They don’t have a relationship.  There is the god of the Bible, who is Jehovah.  When you see L-O-R-D in caps, that is the name.  It’s not Allah, it’s not Brahma, it’s not Shiva, it’s not Vishnu, it’s not Buddha.  It is Jehovah God.  They don’t have a relationship with him.  He is the God of all Gods.  These others are mostly demonic powers. Sure they’re demons.  There are many demons in the world.

http://www.crusadewatch.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=558

Will churches’ changing funding priorities harm SBC mission work?

To give or not to give—that isn’t the question.   The Cooperative Program has been Southern Baptists’ unified missions mechanism for more than 80 years as churches faithfully allocate funds for collaborative missionary efforts. But a rapid decline in the average portion churches give through CP raises the question of whether church priorities are changing.

http://www.crusadewatch.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=557

Southern Baptists’ ‘missional’ focus must include cooperative funding, strategy report says

Average church CP giving has fallen from 10.6 to 6.7 percent since 1984.

http://www.crusadewatch.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=556

Tempting Fraud: David Kuo, The faith based Initiative and religious minorities

A few weeks ago during the ongoing coverage of the 2006 Congressional elections, I watched several journalists and major news outlets focus their attention on a new book that was published last October, Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. Tempting Faith openly criticized President Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative, a program that was designed to level the playing field between religious and secular groups when they apply for federal funding to aid social service programs. Unlike other criticisms of the Initiative, Tempting Faith was authored by an inside source David Kuo, a conservative Christian and former deputy director of Initiative. In his book, Kuo asserts that the Faith-Based Initiative was little more than a vehicle used by self-interested politicians to swindle votes out of well-meaning people of faith, who were counting on the Initiative to help them serve the poor. While Kuo’s book had generated speculation as to whether such accusations will affect the Republican party’s appeal to religious conservatives (one headline by online news outlet Raw Story read, Christian Defense Coalition: Many evangelicals ‘feel used, taken for granted’ by GOP[1]), I noticed that many of the larger questions remained unasked particularly, if the government will continue to provide funding to evangelical Christians, and how such ongoing favoritism impacts minority, non-Christian faiths, both domestically and abroad.

http://www.crusadewatch.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=555