TODAY IN GOD:
RELIGION NEWS BITES FOR YOUR SNACKING PLEASURE
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Jihadi diary: Inside the mind

Until Thursday morning, the identity of Zeeshan Siddiqui, a 26-year-old British jihadi who has escaped his control order, was a closely guarded secret. The BBC has won the right to release his name, and has been given access to his diaries.

Cold, alone and suffering from terrible diarrhoea, Zeeshan Anis Siddiqui’s dream of being a heroic warrior in the name of God, was faltering.

“The greatest tests are truly to be soon alleviated and the greatest rewards will be given to those who bore them with patience only for the sake of Allah,” he comforts himself.

No running water, dreadful food and terrible neighbours who live in “filth”. Just another day in the utterly miserable existence of a would-be British jihadi who had given up the creature comforts of London surburbia to rough it in one of the poorest parts of Pakistan.

The BBC has won a legal battle to release his identity and thereby tell the story of Zeeshan Siddiqui, one of six men who have absconded from UK anti-terrorism control orders. And his story can be told thanks to a diary he kept in Pakistan after paramilitary training with British bomb plotters. The BBC obtained the diary and other papers on the 26-year-old through its court action.

Two of the men who trained with Zeeshan are better known. Mohammad Sidique Khan was the ringleader of the 2005 7 July suicide bombers. The second was Omar Khyam, the now jailed head of a plot to detonate a massive fertiliser bomb in England.

Zeeshan’s whereabouts are today unknown after he skipped his control order by jumping out of a window of a mental hospital in Britain in September 2006. He had been sectioned after suffering what he says were flashbacks of torture at the hands of the Pakistani authorities.

But back in March 2005 – two months before his arrest – he was consumed by anger, albeit often the result of rather prosaic events.
FOR THE FULL STORY (BBC NEWS) CLICK HERE
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TO READ A 2005 UK TELEGRAPH PIECE ON SIDDIQUI

‘Audience’: Let There Be Lights, Camera, Action
For Moses, it was the burning bush. For Jacob, it was the ladder. But for Richard Gazowsky, it was . . . a big-budget biblical epic about the life of Joseph, set in the future?

Yes. The 54-year-old San Francisco pastor claims to have seen enough heaven-sent images for a passel of prophets. There was the 60-megabyte computer chip he saw upon waking up one morning in 2002, which he used to design a new 70mm motion picture camera he calls the Abraham. Just the other day he saw a new invention for a digital shutter.

And with these visions, he says, he hears God’s voice.

“He speaks in my voice, out of my head,” says Gazowsky, a pudgy, amiable man whose gray-blue eyes sit benevolently behind frameless glasses. “I know it’s not me because the words that come out are totally out of the blue for me. . . . It just happens and you can’t explain it. It’s just God.”

When the big kahuna vision came, in 1999, Gazowsky was at a friend’s house in Southern California. He saw the Earth covered in ice and God told him, “That’s your movie story,” and to base his film on the Book of Revelation and reach many people. Being God’s servant — Gazowsky is also pastor of Voice of Pentecost Church in San Francisco — he rolled the cameras. Never mind that in 1995 God told him to launch a seven-station television network, leading him to sell his house, buy a former NBC soundstage and wind up bankrupt. Gazowsky is a believer — and a doer.

And Gazowsky is the central subject of “Audience of One,” Michael Jacobs’s verite-style documentary that follows the pastor’s Sisyphean bid to make “Gravity: The Shadow of Joseph.” “Audience of One,” which screens tonight at Silverdocs, the documentary film festival at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, is hardly flattering, as it follows Gazowsky’s crew to Alberobello, Italy, chronicling the disastrous results.

Everything seems to go wrong. The camera frequently jams. The Italian extras, often confused, complain. And Gazowsky returns home with only two shots. Back in San Francisco, he’s ordered to leave a soundstage after three months for not paying the rent. Then the German financier for the movie pulls out (Gazowsky predicts the film will cost $200 million). Gazowsky, his family and church followers — all production personnel — are left weeping en masse.

Nonetheless, Gazowsky has come to attend tonight’s screening. He gave Jacobs permission to film him, he says, because God had forbidden the pastor to promote his own film. So when Jacobs contacted Gazowsky, it seemed like part of God’s will to greenlight the documentary.

“God warned us, ‘It’s going to be bad,’ ” says Gazowsky, referring to Jacobs’s film. “He said, ‘They’re going to laugh at you. They’re going to mock you. And you can’t defend yourself.’ “
FOR THE FULL STORY (WASHINGTON POST) CLICK HERE

Tallying Sexual Abuse by Protestant Clergy
NASHVILLE — The three companies that insure a majority of Protestant churches say they typically receive upward of 260 reports a year of children younger than 18 being sexually abused by members of the clergy, church staff members, volunteers or congregants.

The figures released to The Associated Press offer a glimpse into what has long been a difficult phenomenon to detail, the frequency of sexual abuse in Protestant congregations.

Religious groups and victims’ supporters have been keenly interested in the figure since the Roman Catholic sexual-abuse crisis erupted five years ago. The church has said it has recorded 13,000 credible accusations against Catholic clergymen since 1950.

Protestants’ numbers are harder to come by and sketchier because the denominations are less centralized than the Catholic Church. Many congregations are independent, making reporting even more difficult.

Some of the numbers are from three insurers, the Church Mutual Insurance Company, the GuideOne Insurance Company and the Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Company.

Together, they insure 165,495 churches and worship centers for liability against child sexual abuse and other sexual misconduct, mostly Protestant congregations, as well as a few other faiths. They also insure more than 5,500 religious schools, camps and other organizations.

Reports of abuse do not mean guilt and do not necessarily result in financial awards, the companies said.
SOURCE: AP VIA NEW YORK TIMES

Ashes to ashes: cremation catches on with Catholics
Four decades after the
Vatican lifted its ban on cremating corpses, the practice is catching on like wildfire in Roman Catholic France, where one out of four deceased is incinerated nowadays.

That makes France the most cremation-oriented country of Catholic southern Europe — against 12 percent in Spain, six percent in Italy and two percent in Portugal.

But social and economic change seem as much responsible as the lifting of religious taboos.

In 1963, the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, or Vatican II, removed a time-old ban on incinerating remains under the proviso this did not undermine a believer’s faith in the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul.

The church too demanded a funeral mass before cremation and stated it did not approve scattering the ashes — there should be a place left to honour the dead, it said.

Of the half a million people who die each year in France — population 60 million — most are buried in coffins, but cremations have rocketed from one percent in 1975 to 15 percent in 1998, 26 percent today and are expected to overshoot 50 percent in 2030, according to the CREDOC research centre on living conditions.

The country, which 30 years ago had only seven crematoriums, now boasts 120, but that is far less than the 1,665 in the world’s top cremation country Japan, where 99.7 percent of corpses are incinerated at death.
FOR THE FULL STORY (AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE VIA YAHOO NEWS) CLICK HERE

Skepticism, hope greet Paris’ conversion
Socialite Paris Hilton says she has found God in jail.

The public’s response: Doesn’t everybody?

“People are right to be skeptical,” said Robert Fuller, who teaches religion at Bradley University in Peoria. “In most cases, sudden conversions don’t last.”

And for some celebrities, God is merely considered good public relations. But sometimes jailhouse conversions stick. Among the most famous:

• Malcolm X, who became steeped in the teachings of the Nation of Islam while serving time for burglary.

• Jack “Murf-the-Surf” Murphy, the playboy surfing champion-turned-jewelry thief who now runs a non-denominational prison ministry.

• Chuck Colson, who started a prison ministry after serving time for Watergate-related charges.

Some of history’s most revered saints were initially notorious sinners.

St. Francis of Assisi? Party boy.

St. Augustine? Wild sexual escapades.

St. Paul? Rebel.

Among those rooting for Hilton: Pat Nolan, the former California Republican legislator who says he found faith while serving time on racketeering charges.

“She won’t find peace chasing sex, partying and drugs,” Nolan said. “But for her sake, I hope she’s changed.”
SOURCE: SUSAN HOGAN/ALBACH IN THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

Romney Faces Another ‘Flip-Flop’ Question: Has He Changed on Stem Cells?

Mitt Romney, who as a presidential candidate has already drawn criticism for changes in his positions on other social issues, is now facing questions on whether he has shifted his stand on expanded federal support for embryonic stem cell research.

Mr. Romney says he has been entirely consistent. But some of his recent statements suggest that he has come to oppose wider financing, which in the past he appeared to support.

The question is not only highly charged but also at least potentially quite personal: Mr. Romney’s wife, Ann, suffers from multiple sclerosis, one of the diseases that supporters of the research say could someday be cured by it.

Because standard research entails destruction of embryos, federal financing is currently allowed only for work on those stem cell lines that already existed in August 2001, when President Bush adopted that cutoff as his administration’s policy.
FOR THE FULL STORY (NEW YORK TIMES) CLICK HERE