TODAY IN GOD:
RELIGION NEWS BITES FOR YOUR SNACKING PLEASURE
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Billy Graham, tourist attraction
The evangelist’s life is honored in a hometown museum. But some think the Disney-like displays cheapen his legacy.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The other day, Billy Graham toured the showy museum that will soon open here to honor his six decades of bringing God’s word to the high and the humble.

America’s best-known evangelist walked through stage-set re-creations of the barn on his parents’ dairy farm; the canvas tent where he held his first blockbuster revival; a graffiti-scarred checkpoint at the Berlin Wall, symbolizing his crusades behind the Iron Curtain.

As Graham finished the tour, his son Franklin recalled, Franklin asked how he had liked the tribute. The gruff reply: “Too much Billy Graham.”

With Graham, at 88, in failing health, his family and friends have struggled to find an appropriate way to commemorate and carry on his work. A humble man who never saw a need to upgrade his cheap suits or his modest mountaintop home, Graham at first shrank from the idea of turning his life story into a tourist attraction.

Only when he was convinced that the project would serve as a perpetual crusade — a tribute not to him but to Jesus Christ — did Graham give it his blessing.

“The last thing my father wanted was to have a monument to himself,” Franklin Graham said.
FOR THE FULL STORY (LA TIMES VIA CHICAGO TRIBUNE) CLICK HERE

From tractors to Torah in Russia’s Jewish land
BIROBIDZHAN, Russia – The tractor plant in this curious Russian outpost once made machinery to work the land settled by Jewish immigrants under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Today the derelict factory in the far east of Siberia has a new purpose. It will reopen next year as a school for young Jews, as the region bearing their name slowly rediscovers a cultural identity confused by decades of Moscow’s dominance.

Birobidzhan, capital of the Jewish Autonomous Region which skirts China’s border, greets arrivals at its railway station seven time-zones east of Moscow with signs in Yiddish and a large decorative menorah.

Yet the ‘Birobidzhan-style’ dish on a local restaurant menu is a pork cutlet. Jews in the town are outnumbered nearly 20 to one and there was not even a synagogue until three years ago.

Stalin carved a Jewish homeland out of Russia’s marshy, mosquito-ridden fringes in 1928 as part of a policy in which each national group in the Soviet Union had its own territory.

Six years later, the area was granted the status of autonomous oblast, or region.

But two-thirds of the original 40,000 settlers had left by the end of the 1930s. Despite Birobidzhan’s huge distance from Moscow, it was not remote enough to shelter from Stalin’s purges, when most local leaders were shot and religious schools crushed.

After the break-up of the Soviet Union, 12,000 Jews left for
Israel, Europe and the United States. Some are now returning.

“Today, for the fourth successive year, more Jews are coming here than are leaving,” said Valery Gurevich, deputy chairman of the regional government and the son of original Jewish settlers.
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Progress may put pilgrims on 250mph train
Millions of pilgrims in Iran could be speeding their way to the holy Shia shrine of Mashhad at 250mph (400km/h) on an air-conditioned, high-tech train built in Germany.

That, at any rate, is the aim of a deal struck between the Iranian transport ministry and a German engineering consultancy. If the plan is realised, the image of the pilgrim as a dusty footsore wanderer will have to be revised radically: the magnetic-levitation (maglev) train can cover the 800km (500 mile) journey to the shrine in just over two hours. Up to 12 million Muslims travel to the shrine every year.

The timing of the announcement by the Munich-based Schlegel company could not be more sensitive. Within a week President Bush will be urging leaders of the G8 nations to tighten sanctions against Iran in an attempt to halt its uranium-enrichment programme.

“The transportation of pilgrims is certainly not a project that would fall in the remit of a political boycott,” said Otto Wiesheu, a member of the board of German Railways, which is backing the Iranian scheme. Before joining the board Mr Wiesheu was economics minister of Bavaria and visited Tehran in 2004 to discuss how the Germans could help to develop Iran’s transport system. That was when the maglev deal was hatched. Siemens, which makes much of the technology of the train – known as the Transrapid – has its headquarters in Bavaria.

The Transrapid hovers above a raised magnetic track. It was intended originally to link Berlin with Hamburg but was scuppered by opposition from environmentalists.
FOR THE FULL STORY (UK TIMES ONLINE) CLICK HERE

Next installment of Mom vs. Harry Potter up in court
Laura Mallory and Harry Potter are to meet in court on Tuesday.

Mallory, whose children attend school in Gwinnett, wants the popular series of books about the fictional boy wizard exorcised from Gwinnett County’s public school libraries.

Mallory is scheduled to appear in Gwinnett Superior Court Tuesday morning to argue the “Potter” stories are harmful and promote witchcraft and the occult to young people. Supporters of the “Potter” books say they encourage children to read and should be available to all students.

Since she launched her anti-Potter crusade in 2005, Mallory has taken her case to administrators at the Loganville elementary school her children attend; to a school appeals committee; to the Gwinnett County Board of Education; and to the Georgia Board of Education. She’s lost at each level.

Along the way, she’s been derided by columnists and in letters to the editor in publications as far away as Canada. In a Dec. 15 editorial, the Augusta Chronicle called Mallory’s campaign “ludicrous” and said, “Ms. Mallory and her ilk are tilting at the wrong windmill.”

Still, Mallory insists her campaign to kick Harry Potter out of public school libraries has been worth it.

“Some parents who’ve heard about the controversy in the media, now, instead of taking Harry Potter at face value, they’ve started looking into the effects of it,” Mallory said.

Mallory bases her claim, in part, on testimonials and Internet articles by conservative Christian authors that she’s posted on her Web site.

Mallory acknowledges she hasn’t read any of the six books in the “Harry Potter” series. The seventh — and final one — is scheduled for release this summer.
FOR THE FULL STORY (ATLANA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION) CLICK HERE

UDATE: ROUND FIVE GOES TO HARRY POTTER
Gwinnett Superior Court Judge Ronnie Batchelor on Tuesday rejected a mother’s plea to have the Harry Potter books removed from county school libraries.

Laura Mallory of Loganville lost her argument for judicial relief.

Mallory argues the “Potter” stories are harmful and promote witchcraft and the occult to young people. Supporters of the “Potter” books say they encourage children to read and should be available to all students.

She argued her position for about an hour Tuesday before Batchelor made his ruling.

“I’ve done the best I can with all of this,” Mallory said after the hearing.

Mallory said she may now file a federal lawsuit.

Since she launched her anti-Potter crusade in 2005, Mallory has taken her case to administrators at the Loganville elementary school her children attend; to a school appeals committee; to the Gwinnett County Board of Education; and to the Georgia Board of Education. She’s lost at each level.
FOR THE FULL STORY (AJC) CLICK HERE

The Shadow of Kevorkian
LOS ANGELES — As Jack Kevorkian, 79, prepares to re-enter the national spotlight this week after eight years in prison, assisted-suicide advocates are doing all they can to distance themselves from the man called Dr. Death.

His release from a Michigan prison Friday — one week before a planned California vote on whether to join Oregon as the only states to allow assisted death for the terminally ill — could not come at a more critical or inopportune time for the movement, which has worked for years to legalize the practice and shed the ghoulish persona many associate with Kevorkian and his suicide machine.

Kevorkian — who forced the nation to squarely confront end-of-life choices for the suffering and terminally ill, and who said he actively helped 130 people to die — is now a pariah.

To advocates, he is like the embarrassing dinner guest who ruined your last party with spilt wine and a drunken rant — Kevorkian’s name is rarely, if ever, mentioned.

“He’s the equivalent of a back-alley abortionist,” said Steve Hopcraft, a Sacramento lobbyist working to pass California’s assisted-suicide proposal, echoing a common sentiment.

Added Lloyd Levine, a sponsor of the California proposal: “Kevorkian is exactly why we need to pass this law.

“He operated with flagrant disregard for the law and took the law into his own hands. We cannot distance ourselves from Dr. Jack Kevorkian enough.”

Neal Nicol, a Kevorkian associate present at nearly 100 assisted suicides, said today’s activists should be thanking Kevorkian, not burying him.

“Had Jack not been here and did what he did, they wouldn’t even be talking about assisted suicide in California,” said Nicol of Springfield Township.

Advocates have been pushing for an assisted-suicide law in California for a decade. But proposals never survived legislative committee debates. Now, advocates say they are closer than ever to getting a vote in the California Assembly. If passed, the proposal would still have to go to the California Senate and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for approval before it became law.
FOR THE FULL STORY (DETROIT FREE PRESS) CLICK HERE

Christian arrested for entering Mecca
Saudi officials have arrested a man in Mecca for being a Christian, saying that the city, which Muslims consider to be holy, is off-limits to non-Muslims.

Nirosh Kamanda, a Sri Lankan Christian, was detained by the Saudi Expatriates Monitoring Committee last week after he started to sell goods outside Mecca’s Great Mosque.

After running his fingerprints through a new security system, Saudi police discovered that he was a Christian who had arrived in the country six months earlier to take a job as a truck driver in the city of Dammam. Kamanda had subsequently left his place of work and moved to Mecca.

“The Grand Mosque and the holy city are forbidden to non-Muslims,” Col. Suhail Matrafi, head of the department of Expatriates Affairs in Mecca, told the Saudi daily Arab News. “The new fingerprints system is very helpful and will help us a lot to discover the identity of a lot of criminals,” he said.

Similar restrictions apply to the Saudi city of Medina. In a section entitled, “Traveler’s Information,” the Web site of the Saudi Embassy in Washington states that, “Mecca and Medina hold special religious significance and only persons of the Islamic faith are allowed entry.”

Highway signs at the entrance to Mecca also direct non-Muslims away from the city’s environs.
SOURCE: JERUSALEM POST

Low-caste Indian Hindus convert to Buddhism in mass
MUMBAI – Thousands of low-caste Hindus seeking to escape the oppression of India’s rigid caste system on Sunday embraced Buddhism in a mass conversion.

Some 5,000 Dalits — those at the bottom of the ancient religious hierarchy who were once known as untouchables — converted to Buddhism in Mumbai, state capital of Maharashtra in western India, a Dalit group said.

“We estimate that close to 5,000 Dalits have chosen the path towards Buddhism by the end of the day,” said Shravan Gaikwad, representative of the Samatha Sainik Dal, a Dalit group.

Large-scale Dalit conversions take place periodically in India, with close to 10,000 changing faith in October to mark the 50th anniversary of the conversion of their deceased political leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar.

Ambedkar, a low-caste Hindu who rose to become a distinguished jurist and played a key role in drafting India’s constitution, galvanised Dalits with his public rejection of caste and Hinduism itself.
FOR THE FULL STORY (AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE VIA YAHOO NEWS) CLICK HERE

SKoreans go online for divine
SEOUL – Online worship is thriving among South Koreans who are too busy to attend churches or temples, or who simply want to browse their preferred sermon, a news report said Monday.

Chosun Ilbo newspaper said some 135,000 people a day heard sermons on the website of
South Korea’s largest church, the Yoido Full Gospel Church, compared to 40,000 or 50,000 who attended its Sunday services.

It said the number of religious websites on the country’s largest Internet portal Naver was rising, with non-Catholic Christian churches accounting for 5,394, Catholicism 815 and Buddhism 1,439.

“It saves time and also allows me to pick whatever sermon I like,” artist Lee Seong-Su, 32, who logs on to a church website at home on Sundays, told the paper.

In lieu of a collection plate, he makes an online donation.

Some believers in Won Buddhism, a religion indigenous to South Korea, observed Buddha’s birthday last week only through the Internet, Chosun added.

It said priests were divided over the trend.

“The reality is that people are getting too busy to gather at a church service or Sunday mass,” one told Chosun, describing the Internet as an effective evangelical tool.
FOR THE FULL STORY (AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE VIA YAHOO NEWS) CLICK HERE