fishers, surfers and casters

Check out this web site and join in the global prayer campaign.

Gulu Prayer Project

Imagine for a moment. Imagine all the children in your town, city, region marching more than 10 miles every night to neighbouring communities. Imagine tens of thousands of children sleeping in any and every possible free space, guarded by a single armed guard, doing school work by candle light, at constant risk of being abused or exploited. Imagine them getting up each morning with the sun to make the long walk home. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. This is the reality of thousands of children in northern Uganda who make this nightly commute to escape from being kidnapped, raped and/or murdered by a militant cult.

Since 1986, northern Uganda has been ravaged by war, led by the rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). More than 250,000 lives have been lost and forced well over two million people to live in horrific conditions in camps where over 1,000 people die each week. Officially, 20,000 children in northern Uganda have been abducted by a brutal rebel army who mutilate, sexually abuse, and force their child victims to kill their parents and friends. As the kidnapping happens in small villages, this number is believed to be significantly higher in reality.

I signed up because I believe in the power of prayer, and I am both intrigued and heartened by how the net is used to start and fuel a community of prayer. I also believe, however, that if we pray for the poor without any other offering of action, we are just like the rabbis who walked past the wounded man in the story of the good Samaritan. Prayer without action is not the practice of religion. That’s why the site also has great information for active campaigns in our own local settings.

Current affairs program, Today Tonight has, yet again, targetted young people and left-wing state governments for viewers’ entertainment in tonight’s episode.In a “disturbing” report,the show tested one group of 7-10 year old children, and one group of 11-13 year old students, with Mathematics and English exams that were standard in 1976. The results were “shocking”, with an average score of 40% in both groups.

There are instances where this report “disturbed” me…

I’m not sure if I missed the information, but at no point was it stated where the children came from or their current academic successes at school.

In a news segment that lasted more than seven minutes, where the opening argument was that “our education system is failing children, with more than 15% of students illiterate and innumerate”, less than 30 seconds of the segment were offered to the opponent viewpoint:

• one line from the reporter stating, “To be fair, today’s children could access the internet without breaking a sweat, and could show their parents how to make a PowerPoint presentation with no worries,” and
• the introduction of an expert, being an ex-school principal who found a “more lucrative” career in private tutoring, advocating for teachers who are responsible for the proper delivery of an increasingly broader curriculum.

Yet the other six-and-a-half minutes were devoted to:

• the examiner’s response to the examination results (and he was prompted by the reporter to describe it as “horrifying”)
• reports that kids are “dependent” on computers with spell-checkers and calculators to get by in life with no knowledge of the basics
• reports by the parents who are “shocked” and “dismayed” by what they have found.

Once again, Australian television news takes a swipe at those who can’t swipe back, for the entertainment of its viewers. We can be safe in the knowledge that even our education system was better in the golden years – when people could spell “arithmetic”, when Bosnia was Yugoslavia, when Italian was ethnic and when bigger cars were better. And so the world of young people becomes increasingly foreign and suspicious to the newstainment viewer, fuelling their resolve to discourage change and keep old white men in power. And we can feel safe to continue our cultural abuse of an already powerless generation.

I came across this blog post today, and at first I found it a little disturbing, but realised maybe that’s what the writer wanted from his readership: Making Islam Illegal – Is It The West’s Only Choice?

Islam has become the KKK of the 21st century. The sooner we awake to this truth and take steps to ban the religion, or somehow curtail its pernicious influence the better. The west is going to have to put sever restrictions on Islamic Mosques and public display of Islam. Further, devout Muslims should not be allowed to hold public office (though it certainly should not become a racial issue – sins of the father should not be visited upon the sons).

It’s the claim of McCarthy, Lenin, Marx and Henry VIII – no matter how inherently good something is, once it’s corrupted it should be eradicated. If religion leads to violence, rather than resolve the violence, let’s just get rid of religion.

As a Christian worker who shares an office and a profession with devout Muslims, in a town where 10% of the population follows that religion, I know that Islam is not the problem. Hatred, fanaticism, fundamentalism and fear are the problems.

If making Islam illegal will end the violence in today’s culture, why didn’t we think of that 1000 years ago when Christianity invaded the Middle East?

I’ve only recently updated WordPress on my server and there’s a small bug which has made the feed URLs link to the comments feed, rather than the main feed. I think I’ve fixed the problem, only by changing the permalink structure on the blog site.

So from now on the feed URL is http://www.teusner.org/feed/ and not http://www.teusner.org/index.php/feed/ as was the case previously. The comments feed URL is also now http://www.teusner.org/comments/feed/.

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