Christian Arrested in Afghanistan Subjected to Abuse and Publicly Forced to Renounce Christ

“You mean I shouldn’t have eaten that Christian after Karzai threw him into the arena? Sarah and Glenn didn’t mind… hey, he was just an Afghan wog; he wasn’t a real person… he wasn’t an American Baptist from Texas, after all… give a poor little lion a break”.

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On 31 May, Said Musa, a 45-year-old Christian, was arrested in Afghanistan for professing Christianity; since then, he was subjected to constant harassment, and he was forced to renounce his faith publicly. In June, the government attempted to coerce Musa to recant his faith before the television cameras, but they didn’t release him from imprisonment, and he continued to confess Christianity, according to the website Christian Post.

In a letter addressed to Christian churches throughout the world and directly to President Barack Obama, as well as to NATO, Musa wrote that he’s constantly subjected to verbal abuse in prison, physical and even sexual violence, but despite it all, he’s willing to suffer for Christ and thus strengthen the faith of other Christians. “I’m living in very, very bad conditions in prison … I’m alone, like a sheep among 400 terrible wolves”, Musa wrote. “For the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ, please pray for me and save me … Otherwise they will kill me, because I know that they are very, very cruel, and have cold hearts”, he wrote in his letter to the world community. Musa described the injustice that prevails in prison, noting that the prosecutor read out false accusations in court, and demanded a bribe from him.

The Afghan authorities arrested Said Musa soon after a local television station broadcast the baptism of Christian converts. The next hearing in Said Musa’s case is expected to take place next Sunday. In Afghanistan, whose legal system is based on a strict interpretation of the Sharia, apostasy is punishable by death. In June, Deputy Abdul Sattar Havasu, the Speaker of the Lower House of Parliament, issued an appeal calling for the execution of all Christian converts.

18 November 2010

Interfax-Religion

http://www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=38281

Editor’s Note:

The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan isn’t a free country… it’s an Islamofascist dictatorship that’s corrupt to the bone and run on identical principles to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yet, the USA props it up with oodles of money and the blood of the poor sods deployed there. It’s nothing but a sordid little kleptocracy and a bloodthirsty theocracy… and the Republican Party defends this pathetic client state tooth-and-nail. The neocons and teabaggers support the persecution of Christians through their sponsorship of the Karzai junta. After all, didn’t Joe Miller’s goons handcuff a reporter and didn’t Glenn Beck’s toughs threaten a Russia Today crew? Why, that’s no different from the persecution of Said Musa, is it?

Britain couldn’t conquer Afghanistan… Russia couldn’t conquer Afghanistan… guess what? The USA won’t be able to do it either. This pointless colonial war has dragged on for nine years… why? The USA is paying for its support of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden in the 80s and early 90s to the uttermost farthing… this is our payback for backing the Islamic militants against the DRA. I’ll say this… the DRA wouldn’t have blown up American embassies or flown airplanes into the World Trade Center. It speaks volumes about the intelligence level of Republicans and Democratic Wilsonian interventionists, doesn’t it? Oh… I’m not a “commie zombie” for pointing that up…

BMD

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A Photo Essay. Patriarch Kirill Visits a Children’s Hospice in St Petersburg

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Today was His Holiness’ 64th birthday… and he chose to spend part of it with the ill children at this hospice in St Petersburg. How many of these young ones will be with us this time next year? The thought makes me weep…

You can say what you will about Kirill Mikhailovich… on every possible occasion, he finds time for sick, disabled, or orphaned children, much more than any other contemporary patriarch. He’s not like Bart Archontonis, who charges a hundred bucks a throw for people to get his blessing… I’ve seen this personally, so, I know that it’s true.

You can have Kirill Mikhailovich or you can have Jonas Paffhausen… you can have the Real Thing or you can have Slim Shady. I know who to back in the next race…. do you?

BMD

Patriarch Kirill Challenged the Church to “Reboot” the Consciousness of the Russian People

Patriarch Kirill Gundyaev of Moscow and all the Russias (1946- ), at the opening of the Fourth all-Church Diocesan Missionary Congress in Moscow on Tuesday

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Patriarch Kirill Gundyaev of Moscow and all the Russias challenged the Church to create a permanent and effective mechanism for internal mission, which would revolutionise the attitudes of all Russian people. “We could call our contemporary situation in the Church a ‘second Christianisation’. Our country had a thousand years of Christian tradition, which was incarnate in its many saints; it was rightly called Holy Russia. However, through a terrible cataclysm, it renounced its historical tradition and destroyed its time-honoured institutions”, the patriarch said at the opening of the Fourth all-Church Diocesan Missionary Congress in Moscow on Tuesday. In his opinion, “The Orthodox Church has languished in spiritual ruin for four generations; therefore, today, it’s simply impossible to appeal to tradition and the common memory; if we are to preach Christ, we need to carry through a calculated missionary endeavour”.

The patriarch, who has travelled around the country, sees much interest in faith, a spiritual thirst, but on the other hand, “the scale of spiritual destruction, especially in the Far East and the North, which, in a particularly heightened manner, portray the results of the persecution of the Church, is simply chilling”. He emphasised that, today, the task facing the Church is to influence people’s thinking, a task comparable to the one put forward by the the revolutionaries (only with the opposite intent), “to ‘reboot’ the Orthodox tradition”. His Holiness said, “What tremendous forces were exerted, and see how they were organised! Under the present conditions, we should deploy an even more substantial organisation with greater potential, boldness, courage, and self-sacrifice”.

At the same time, he continued, “It’s difficult to find a monk who’s willing to work in Chukotka for three years. Even a man who has taken monastic vows hems and haws, and claims that’s there’s not enough oxygen to breathe up there. However, why should you care where you labour, if there are souls to lead to God… what does more or less oxygen have to do with that? You took vows; your task is to win through to the Kingdom of Heaven”. Vladyki Kirill called his audience to realise that the mission of the Church is impossible if “its missionaries aren’t dedicated to the task”. He used the example of the missionary work over the vast Eurasian space of the Russian Empire, “which filled it with the Christian faith, people went out without maps and compasses, they took roads towards the unknown, yet, the risks inspired their divine calling”.

He put before the MP Synodal Missionary Department the challenge to create a “missionary infrastructure in the Church, a permanent mechanism to enable its mission”. It would monitor everything that goes on in the dioceses, which would enable it to know where to send the proper people to the places where they were needed. His Holiness said with some irony, “If the only missionary activists that we have are those who are now sitting in this hall, I have no idea how we can carry out the tasks facing us”, for the delegates to the Congress filled only about a quarter of the seats in the assembly hall of the Cathedral of Church of Christ the Saviour. He directed his appeal to all those who have a call to mission, bishops, priests, deacons, laity, the intelligentsia, and “all those who have responsibility in our country”. It is necessary that every parish operate educational, social, youth, and missionary programmes, and we need to enhance the training of missionaries, “every seminary should provide the knowledge and skills necessary for missionary work, and teach the history of our missions”.

16 November 2010

Interfax-Religion

http://www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=38246

Editor’s Note:

Oca.org has made much of a posting on patriarchia.ru regarding a supposed address by Paffhausen to the Mission Congress. I’m told it was no big deal… it was put in the official record, and that was that. To be blunt, Fathausen is a minor bishop of a minor archdiocese; the OCA is a Ruritanian entity that’s smaller than most MP dioceses. In short, oca.org was issuing more GIGO… the Boy Blunder put Syosset’s propaganda up on the official site… it didn’t show up on any of the usual Russian secular or religious sources. Behr is using smoke n’ mirrors again (is this a NEW story? I think not…)… but it will be sufficient to gull the konvertsy… they’re even more ignorant than they look and they believe the most ridiculous notions (Stokoe is a prime example of this).

(Kazoos playing “Pop Goes the Weasel”) Hey, kids! Guess what? It’s Big Green Weenie Award time again! The Interfax translator gave you 241 words in their version… there are 597 words in mine. Just remember, phonies such as Oliver Herbel, Patrick Reardon, Mark Stokoe, “Josephus Flavius”, and all the rest of the konvertsy rabble use the Interfax English versions… that tells you something about them, no? It’s never boring in the real world, is it?

BMD

20 November 2010. A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words… Vatican II is a Tad Different in Eastern Europe

A friend asked me if Roman Catholic churches in Russia had been as badly vandalised by Vatican II as American ones had been. I didn’t know, so I asked some Polish acquaintances of mine. Apparently, RC churches in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, the Ukraine, and Russia are of the same sort, as most of the faithful are ethnic Poles and Lithuanians. In Poland, some churches have altars that are versus populum, and some that are ad orientam. This is true throughout the Polish/Lithuanian diaspora on the post-Soviet space. The photo above of a chapel in Poland is not uncommon, Polish friends assure me.

So, the answer that I’ve come up with (albeit unscientifically) is that Vatican II didn’t result in such wholesale vandalisation and destruction as it did in the USA. My reaction? Let’s lift a glass and give three loud cheers to the Plucky Polacks. Anyone who sticks a finger in the eye of pedantic academic obscurantism has my vote.

BMD