UN resolution jeopardizes religious freedom worldwide

Christians in Muslim-dominated countries are facing increased persecution. Over the last month, churches in Indonesia have been attacked and forced to close. A mob of Pakistani Muslim extremists shot and beat dozens of Christians, including one cleared earlier of "blasphemy" charges.

These Christians, and many more worldwide, are not free to believe.

Open Doors USA is launching an advocacy campaign called "Free to Believe." The campaign will focus on helping persecuted Christians who currently do not have religious freedom like Christians do in the United States.

The campaign is a response to the United Nations Defamation of Religions Resolution which threatens the freedom of religion and expression for Christians and members of minority faiths worldwide.

This resolution seeks to criminalize words or actions perceived as attacks against a religion, with the focus being on protecting Islam. Passing this resolution would further result in the United Nations condoning state-sponsored persecution of Christians and members of other faiths.

Many of the countries supporting this resolution are the Islamic-majority countries of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) that persecute Christians and other religious minorities. Members of minority faiths such as Christians or Jews who make truth claims or even evangelize can be accused of "defamation," and those individuals can be punished under national blasphemy laws as frequently happens in countries like Pakistan. Tragically, the UN resolution provides legitimacy to these countries’ blasphemy laws.

While the Defamation of Religions Resolution has been introduced and passed by the UN in the past–in various forms and under various titles since 1999, support for the resolution has been eroding in recent years. The Open Doors advocacy team has been lobbying countries which have voted for the resolution or abstained from voting on the issue in the past. The resolution is up again this fall for re-authorization.

It is important to encourage key countries to change their vote on this resolution. These countries are not easily influenced by American citizens. But they are more receptive to pressure from our legislators. That’s why we’re asking you to send a message to your legislator, asking him or her to ask key countries to change their vote on the Defamation of Religions Resolution. A sample letter is provided for you to send which includes the necessary information for your elected officials to lobby the target UN country missions.

To send a message, go to www.freetobelieve.info

"It’s dangerous and alarming that a UN resolution provides legitimacy to national blasphemy laws that are used to persecuting Christians and other minority faith groups," says Open Doors USA Advocacy Director Lindsay Vessey. "The United Nations Defamation of Religions Resolution in effect amounts to the UN condoning state-sponsored persecution. We as Christians need to speak out against it and do all in our power to stop its passage. Everyone should be free to believe."

Report from the Christian Telegraph

Pastor Bike encourages house church despite persecution

ChinaAid (www.chinaaid.org) is reporting that this morning (Monday, September 20, 2010), during the trial of house church Christians Liu Yunhua and Gao Jianli, Pastor “Bike” (Zhang Mingxuan) and his wife, who had come to see the trial, were detained by the Public Security Bureau (PSB), reports Dan Wooding, founder of ASSIST Ministries.

“The passionate evangelist, known for riding his bike across the country on missions of encouragement, has been detained, arrested, and interrogated countless times over the past 10 years in his efforts to strengthen house church Christians. He is the Chairman of the China House Church Alliance,” said the ChinaAid story.

“The court session for the trial of second instance in the Christian persecution case of Liu Yunhua and Gao Jianli of Xuchang City, Henan province began at 9 a.m. today Monday local time, at the Intermediate People’s Court of Xuchang City. Pastor Bike and his wife arrived at the court today to watch with the audience, but were detained by the local PSB of Xuchang City. At 11:30am, they were released.”

Other Christians from Yucheng, Hennan, who had come to see the trial, were also detained by the Yucheng Public Security Bureau on their way home. They are Liu Fulan, Hua Cuiying, Li Yuxia, Ma Keai, Liu Sen (the son of the defendant Liu Yunhua). There is as of yet no record of their release.

ChinaAid urges Xuchang local government to respect Pastor Zhang Mingxuan (“Bike”) and his wife’s rights as citizens, and we call on the Yucheng local government to release the house church members who are still detained.

“We ask Christians worldwide to join us in prayer for their protection and encouragement,” a spokesperson said.

Report from the Christian Telegraph

John Piper: Should I Find a New Church if Mine Won’t Support Me in Missions?

Threat of Return to Hindu State in Nepal Looms

With deadline for new constitution approaching, Christians fear end of secular government.

KATHMANDU, Nepal, March 30 (CDN) — Four years after Nepal became officially secular, fear is growing that the country could revert to the Hindu state it was till 2006, when proclaiming Christ was a punishable offense and many churches functioned clandestinely to avoid being shut down.

Concerns were heightened after Nepal’s deposed King Gyanendra Shah, once regarded as a Hindu god, broke the silence he has observed since Nepal abolished monarchy in 2008. During his visit to a Hindu festival this month, the former king said that monarchy was not dead and could make a comeback if people so desired.

Soon after that, Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, a former prime minister and respected leader of the largest ruling party, said that instead of getting a new constitution, Nepal should revive an earlier one. The 1990 constitution declared Nepal a Hindu kingdom with a constitutional monarch.

There is now growing doubt that the ruling parties will not be able to fashion the new constitution they promised by May.

“We feel betrayed,” said Dr. K.B. Rokaya, general secretary of the National Council of Churches of Nepal. “The Constituent Assembly we elected to give us a new constitution that would strengthen democracy and secularism has frittered away the time and opportunity given to it.”

The clamor for a Hindu state has been growing as the May 28 deadline for the new constitution draws near. When a Hindu preacher, Kalidas Dahal, held a nine-day prayer ritual in Kathmandu this month seeking reinstatement of Hinduism as the state religion, thousands of people flocked to him. The throng included three former prime ministers and top leaders of the ruling parties.

“The large turnout signals that Hinduism is enshrined in the hearts of the people and can’t be abolished by the government,” said Hridayesh Tripathi, a former minister and Constituent Assembly member whose Terai Madhes Loktantrik Party is the fifth-largest in the ruling alliance. “It was a mistake to abolish Hinduism in a hurry.”

Another blow for a Hindu state was struck by the Rastriya Prajatantra Party-Nepal (RPP-N), the only party that fought the 2008 election in support of monarchy and a Hindu state. It is now calling for a referendum. As a pressure tactic, it paralyzed the capital and its two neighboring cities in February by calling a general strike.

“The election gave the Constituent Assembly the mandate of writing a new constitution, not deciding issues of national importance,” said Kamal Thapa, the RPP-N chief who also was home minister during the brief government headed by Gyanendra. “Most people in Nepal want a Hindu state and a constitutional king. If their demand is not heeded, they will feel excluded and refuse to follow the new constitution. We are asking the government to hold a referendum on the two issues before May 28.”

With only two months left, it is clear the demand can’t be met if the constitution is to come into effect within the stipulated time. Now the specter of anarchy and violence hangs over Nepal.

Nepal’s Maoists, who fought a 10-year war to make Nepal a secular republic and who remain the former king’s most bitter enemy, say attempts have begun to whip up riots in the name of a Hindu state. The former guerrillas also allege that the campaign for the restoration of Hinduism as the state religion is backed by ministers, politicians from the ruling parties and militant religious groups from India.

Effectively Hindu

Even if a new, secular constitution is approved by the deadline, there is still no guarantee that the rights of religious minorities would be protected.

Nilambar Acharya, who heads the committee that is drafting the new constitution, said it would be merely a broad guideline for the government; compatible laws would have to be drafted to protect rights.

“The previous constitution abolished ‘untouchability’ [a practice among Hindus of treating those at the bottom of the social ladder as outcasts],” Acharya told Compass. “But untouchability still exists in Nepal. To achieve all that the constitution promises, the mindset of society has to be changed first. For that, you need political will.”

Though Nepal became secular in 2006, Hinduism still gets preferential treatment. The state allocates funds for institutions like the Kumari, the tradition of choosing prepubescent girls as protective deities of the state and worshipping them as “living goddesses.” The state also gave money to organizers of a controversial, five-yearly religious festival, the Gadhimai Fair, where tens of thousands of birds are slaughtered as offerings to Hindu gods despite international condemnation.

There is no support, predictably, for Christian festivals. When the Constituent Assembly was formed – partly though election and partly by nomination – no Christian name was proposed even though the prime minister was authorized to nominate members from unrepresented communities.

Christian leaders want such religious bias abolished. Rokaya of the National Council of Churches of Nepal said Christians have recommended full freedom of religion in the new constitution: allowing one to follow the religion of one’s choice, to change one’s religion if desired or have the right not to be associated with any religion.

The churches have also asked the state not to interfere in religious matters.

“We are asking the government not to fund any religious activity, not to be part of any religious appointments and not to allow public land for any religious event,” Rokaya said.

The recommendations, however, may not be heeded. During their brief stint in power, the Maoists tried to stop state assistance for the Kumari. It led to violence and a general strike in the capital, forcing the party to withdraw the decision.

In its 2009 report on religious freedom in Nepal, the U.S. Department of State notes that while the interim constitution officially declared the country secular, “the president, in his capacity as head of state, attended major Hindu religious ceremonies over which the king previously presided.”

It also notes that there were reports of societal abuses and discrimination based on religious affiliation, belief, or practice.

“Those who converted to a different religious group occasionally faced violence and were ostracized socially,” it states. “Those who chose to convert to other religious groups, in particular Hindu citizens who converted to Islam or Christianity, were sometimes ostracized. They occasionally faced isolated incidents of hostility or discrimination from Hindu extremist groups. Some reportedly were forced to leave their villages.”

Dr. Ramesh Khatri, executive director of Association for Theological Education in Nepal, has experienced such persecution first-hand. When he became a Christian in 1972, his father disowned him. Then in 1984 he was arrested for holding a Bible camp. Though the case against him was dropped in 1990 after a pro-democracy movement, Khatri said hatred of Christians still persists.

“Christians can never sleep peacefully at night,” he said wryly. “The new constitution will make Nepal another India, where Christians are persecuted in Orissa, Gujarat and Karnataka.” The Oxford University-educated Khatri, who writes a column in a Nepali daily, said violent responses to his articles show how Nepal still regards its Christians.

“I am attacked as a ‘Rice Christian,’” he said. “It is a derogatory term implying I converted for material benefits. The antagonistic feeling society has towards Christians will not subside with the new constitution, and we can’t expect an easy life. The Bible says that, and the Bible is true.”

Christians continue to face persecution and harassment. In March, missions resource organization Timeless Impact International (TII) noted that a church in northern Nepal, near the foothills of Mt. Everest, was attacked by a local mob.

The newly established church in Dolakha district was attacked during a fellowship meeting in January. An ethnic mob headed by religious leaders destroyed the church meeting place, assaulted participants and warned them not to speak about Christianity in the village, TII said.

The situation, even now, remained unchanged.

“None of the church members have been able to return to their homes,” TII stated. “They feel completely unsafe and at risk.”

Report from Compass Direct News 

Lunar missions could prove creation true

Current space programs may set their sights on Mars, but a team of astronomers and a biochemist at the science-faith think tank Reasons To Believe (RTB) publicly encourage NASA and other space agencies to revisit the lunar surface—to look for the remains of Earth’s oldest life-forms, reports Maureen Bell and Kathy Ross, special to ASSIST News Service.

Astronomer and RTB president Hugh Ross says, “The Apollo program helped researchers solve the mystery of the Moon’s origin. Return missions to the Moon could solve the mystery of life’s origin.”

According to biochemist Fazale Rana, “Chemical signatures confirm life was present on Earth in fair abundance back to 3.8 billion years ago.” What’s missing, he says, are the fossils. “Wind and water erosion and plate tectonics have destroyed the fossils of Earth’s first life. [But] there are good reasons to expect them in abundance in pristine forms on the Moon.”

Ross and fellow astronomer Jeff Zweerink point out that when the Earth was young, it was “bombarded” by asteroids and large meteorites. “These collisions sent large amounts of the Earth’s surface material into outer space, and much of that material landed on the Moon—about a million kilograms on every 100 square kilometers of the Moon’s surface.”

New research by British earth scientist Ian Crawford indicates that at least some of this Earth material made it to the Moon with its fossil structures still intact. Crawford affirms that “substantial survivability is to be expected.”

In their book Origins of Life, Rana and Ross present their model for the origin of life. This model, totally compatible with the Bible, predicts that (1) Earth’s first life would be both complex and diverse; and (2) the origin of life occurred suddenly, as soon as Earth’s physical conditions permitted. Non-theistic models predict the opposite.

As Ross stated in a lecture at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, “We are thrilled with the prospect that lunar missions could put our creation model to the test, either affirming or showing us wrong. Finding and analyzing pristine fossils of Earth’s first life could help settle, finally, one of the great creation-evolution controversies.”

About Reasons To Believe

Reasons To Believe is a California-based science-faith think tank. Founded by Hugh Ross in 1986, the organization strives to demonstrate that science and faith are, and always will be, allies, not enemies. Through myriad resources—including books, print periodicals, podcasts, and a content-rich website—speaking engagements, and radio and TV interviews, RTB scholars present reasons for confidence in the findings of science and in the authority of the Bible. For more information and resources, visit www.reasons.org

Report from the Christian Telegraph 

VIETNAM: ALLEGED MURDERER OF CHRISTIAN STRIKES AGAIN

Local authorities complicit or turn blind eye to assaults on Christians.

LOS ANGELES, May 11 (Compass Direct News) – A Hmong man in Vietnam’s Northwest Mountainous Region who murdered his mother in February because she had become a Christian has assaulted another Christian, leaving him critically wounded, according to area Christian sources.

Lao Lia Po on April 25 allegedly attacked Koua Lo of Meo Vac district, Ha Giang Province because he had become a Christian, according to a local church leader. Koua sustained severe head injuries; according to witnesses, his head was split open in two places with parts of his brain visible.

Koua was taken to a hospital, but after three days doctors said they could do nothing more for him and sent him home. As his injuries were life-threatening, those close to Koua did not expect him to recover.

The alleged attacker, Lao, is still at large and has not been charged. The assault took place in Sung Can Village, Sung Tra Commune, Meo Vac district, Ha Giang Province.

In the same area two years ago, a 74-year-old woman became the first Christian in the village. Today there are about 100 families who follow Christ, but the cost has been high. Stories of harassment and abuse of Christians in Meo Vac district have circulated for several months, with local Christians saying government officials are either complicit or look the other way.

On Feb. 3, local Christians said, Lao murdered his mother in a similarly brutal fashion, smashing her head until she died. Police only held him overnight before releasing him without charge. The day he was released, local sources said, he again threatened Christians with death.

A Vietnamese pastor petitioned the government to investigate – with no result. Another leader informed U.S. diplomats of the details. Some Vietnamese Christians have complained to Vietnam diplomatic missions abroad, all to no avail.

Advocates of religious freedom in Vietnam say such impunity puts a serious blot on Vietnam’s slowly improving religious liberty record.

Following heavy international scrutiny of Vietnam’s oppression of religion in general and Protestantism in particular, Vietnam promulgated new religion legislation in 2004 and 2005. To date this has led to the legal recognition of six church/denominational organizations, raising the total to eight out of about 70. Additionally, a few hundred of Vietnam’s thousands of house church congregations have been given interim permission to carry on religious activities, and large-scale government campaigns to force ethnic minority Christians to recant their faith have ceased.

High hopes for improvement following the new religion legislation led the U.S. Department of State to take Vietnam off its blacklist of the worst violators of religious freedom in late 2006, which enabled the U.S. government to endorse Vietnam’s accession to the World Trade Organization. And Christian support organization Open Doors this year dropped Vietnam to No. 23 on its World Watch List ranking of religion persecutors. In eight of the last 12 years, Vietnam had been placed among the organization’s top 10 worst religious persecutors.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), however, found exceptions to progress so widespread that it again recommended naming Vietnam a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) this year. The recommendation by USCIRF, responsible for monitoring state department compliance with the U.S. 1998 Law on International Religious Freedom, was announced on May 1.

The commission’s report recognizes progress but notes, “There continue to be far too many serious abuses and restrictions of religious freedom in the country. Individuals continue to be imprisoned or detained for reasons related to their religious activity or religious freedom advocacy; police and government officials are not held fully accountable for abuses; independent religious activity remains illegal; and legal protections for government-approved religious organizations are both vague and subject to arbitrary or discriminatory interpretations based on political factors.”

Given the uneven pace of religious freedom progress after removing Vietnam from the list of CPCs, continued detention of prisoners of conscience, and an overall deteriorating human rights situation, USCIRF recommended that Vietnam be re-designated as a CPC.

In Tra Vinh Province in the Mekong Delta Region of southern Vietnam, another Christian was murdered on April 5. Thugs ambushed Thach Thanh No, described as a young and enthusiastic church elder, on his way home from Sunday worship, according to local Christian sources. His family was unable to find him quickly, and he died from his injuries as he was transported to a hospital.

The congregation in Ngoc Bien Commune to which he belonged has long been harassed and threatened by local thugs supported by militant Buddhists, according to area Christians, who emphasized that authorities have done nothing to intervene.

Indeed, in Thach’s case, rather than prosecute the killers, the Ministry of Public Security’s World Security newspaper published an article on April 24 – concocted without any factual basis, according to area Christians – which portrayed him as dying from crashing his motorbike while drunk. His motorbike, however, was found entirely unmarked without any signs of a crash, and his body showed clear signs of a vicious beating, according to area Christians.

“In one case the law winks at the murder of a Christian and does nothing to punish the murderer – in another, authorities actively work to cover up a murder with elaborate lies,” said one long-time advocate for religious freedom in Vietnam. “Such behavior on the part of authorities convinces many Vietnamese Christians that their country’s top officials are still not sincere about improving religious freedom for all.”

Report from Compass Direct News

NEPAL: TERRORISTS TARGET INDIAN PRIESTS

Following murder of Fr. Moyalan, Christian leaders from India seeking protection.

KATHMANDU, Nepal, August 13 (Compass Direct News) – Father John Prakash Moyalan, the 62-year-old Catholic priest killed on July 1 by an underground militant Hindu organization in Nepal, might have been alive today – had he not been an Indian, according to the Himalayan republic’s Christian community.

With the law-and-order situation in the new republic plummeting since elections in April and relations with southern neighbor India becoming increasingly acrimonious, Christian leaders here said Indian Catholics in Nepal are facing a greater threat from Hindu extremists. The extremists blame New Delhi for the May 28 ouster of Nepal’s Hindu king Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev and the transformation of the world’s only Hindu kingdom into a secular state.

Father John Vianney, head of the Pastoral Animation Centre (PAC) in Lalitpur (located on the south side of the Bagmati River that separates it from Kathmandu), said PAC received five to six calls after the gunning down of Fr. Moyalan in Sirsiya town in south Nepal, the most volatile region in the country since the abolition of the monarchy.

“Fr. Prakash’s attackers took away his cellular phone,” Fr. Vianney told Compass. “Then they began calling the numbers stored in it, demanding money.”

Fr. Vianney himself took one of those calls.

“Are you a Nepali or Indian?” the caller asked the priest, who is from India’s Kerala state. “We are from the Nepal Defence Army [NDA], and we killed Fr. Prakash [Moyalan]. Our spies are everywhere. All of you are under surveillance. You better be on your guard.”

Nepal’s first bishop, Father Anthony Sharma, said he also received a similarly threatening call.

“Don’t engage in conversions,” the caller warned him. “Otherwise, we will chop you into little pieces.”

Most people who received the calls said the Nepali-speaking callers asserted that they were not against Christians. The jarring note came from their insistently as king if the recipients were Nepalese or Indian.

“The threats seem to have been directed towards Indians,” said Fr. Sharma. “Two more Indian priests, who had been working with Fr. Prakash in eastern Nepal on village development and education projects, also received warnings on the phone.”

Fr. Vianney estimated that there are about 40-45 Indian priests in Nepal. They are mostly from Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Goa and West Bengal. Indian priests, he said, are the softest targets.

“If a western priest comes under attack, his government will take it up immediately,” he said. “If a Nepalese priest is attacked, other Nepalese and the media will raise a hue and cry. But the Indian government doesn’t take up cudgels on behalf of its citizens in Nepal, and people feel they can be targeted with impunity.”

After Fr. Moyalan’s death, Christian leaders gave a report to the Indian Embassy in Nepal, but they said there has been no discernible official action.

“Police arrested five men, said to be members of the NDA,” said Fr. Sharma. “But we don’t know what happened after that.”

 

Threatening Calls

Fr. Moyalan’s murder marked a period of violence directed towards Christians and triggered growing fear in the community.

On July 18, 17 days after the attack at the Don Bosco School in Sirsiya in which Fr. Moyalan was killed, a bomb exploded inside the Protestant Jyoti Church in Banke district in southern Nepal.

Pamphlets left at the venue claimed the explosion to be the handiwork of the NDA.

Soon different Christian missions started receiving threatening calls. Alarmed Jesuits closed down the Don Bosco School and were on the verge of closing a second one, St. Mary’s School in Biratnagar, the home town of Nepal’s prime minister Girija Prasad Koirala.

Little is known about the NDA, a shadowy organization that hit the headlines last year when it claimed responsibility for a couple of minor explosions at the office of the former Maoist guerrillas in Kathmandu.

According to Nepalese weekly Ghatana R Bichar, it is run by a former policeman, who adopted the nom de guerre Parivartan, meaning “change.” The former policeman has claimed that NDA aims to re-establish Nepal as a Hindu kingdom and is training Hindu suicide bombers.

Parivartan also claims NDA has a large army of trained soldiers and has been putting together an arsenal of explosives, the ingredients for which are smuggled from India across the 1,800-kilometer open border.

Since the fall of the government headed by Gyanendra, the last king of Nepal, over two dozen armed gangs have been spreading terror in southern Nepal, the NDA among them. They are known to be involved in extortion, abduction and, at times, killings.

The NDA pamphlets left at the crime sites project a 21-point agenda, including restoration of Hinduism as the state religion, driving out all Muslims, putting an end to conversions, banning the slaughter of cows (considered a holy animal by Hindus) and a ban on having more than two children. The latter directive targets the Muslim population in southern Nepal, who consider family planning to be unlawful.

Anger grew among Nepal’s Christians over the government’s failure to provide security, and on July 28 Fr. Sharma held a meeting with home secretary Umesh Mainali in which he asked for police protection for Christian organizations.

“We received a letter from the Nepal Catholic Society,” said Home Ministry spokesman Modraj Dotel. “It was forwarded to the police headquarters for action.”

Now, the calls have stopped and people are rallying, said Fr. Sharma.

St. Mary’s reopened after students’ parents promised that they would provide security.

The Jesuits run 30 schools in Nepal and 40 social service centers. The beneficiaries are non-Christians from low-income households who have little or no access to education and health care. The projects are meant for mostly women and children.

About 2.5 percent of Nepal’s 25 million population are Christians. The majority – nearly 75 percent – are Hindus.

“Till parliament overwhelmingly declared Nepal a secular state, Christians, as non-Hindus, had been under some threat from the Hindu country,” said Fr. Sharma. “But threats don’t prevent us from carrying on.”

Fr. Vianney added a postscript. “Now we will be careful.”  

Report from Compass Direct News