The Scandal of Biblical Illiteracy; Burkina Faso Dead Include 7 Mission Workers...more

Albert Mohler: The Scandal of Biblical Illiteracy
...Fewer than half of all adults can name the four gospels. Many Christians cannot identify more than two or three of the disciples. According to data from the Barna Research Group, 60 percent of Americans can't name even five of the Ten Commandments. "No wonder people break the Ten Commandments all the time. They don't know what they are," said George Barna, president of the firm. The bottom line? "Increasingly, America is biblically illiterate."  [see Barna Group's web site]

Multiple surveys reveal the problem in stark terms. According to 82 percent of Americans, "God helps those who help themselves," is a Bible verse. Those identified as born-again Christians did better--by one percent. A majority of adults think the Bible teaches that the most important purpose in life is taking care of one's family.

Some of the statistics are enough to perplex even those aware of the problem. A Barna poll indicated that at least 12 percent of adults believe that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. Another survey of graduating high school seniors revealed that over 50 percent thought that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife. A considerable number of respondents to one poll indicated that the Sermon on the Mount was preached by Billy Graham. We are in big trouble...

ISIS Has 'Pulverized' Iraq's Oldest Christian Monastery   Satellite photos obtained by the Associated Press confirm what church leaders and Middle East preservationists had feared: The oldest Christian monastery in Iraq has been reduced to rubble, yet another victim of ISIS's relentless destruction of heritage sites.

St. Elijah's Monastery stood as a place of worship for 1,400 years, including most recently for U.S. troops. In earlier millennia, generations of monks tucked candles in the niches, prayed in the chapel, worshipped at the altar. The Greek letters chi and rho, representing the first two letters of Christ's name, were carved near the entrance...

Burkina Faso Dead Include 7 Mission Workers Six of the 29 people killed by Islamist militants in Burkina Faso on Friday were on a humanitarian trip prompted by their Christian faith, while a seventh was a US missionary who, with his wife, had been running an orphanage and women’s refuge in the West African country since 2011.

The dead included four Canadians from the same family who had gone there over their Christmas break to do aid work in schools and orphanages...

Pakistan university attack: Dozens of students and teachers killed by militants ...The latest terrorist attack against a Pakistani educational establishment was conducted just 30 miles from the scene of the Peshawar school massacre when 132 children were killed 13 months ago.

Police put the initial death toll at 21, but there were fears that the number would increase to as many as 40 as they scoured buildings Bacha Khan university in Charsadda where the gunmen conducted their killing spree...

Sweden's Afghan "Rapefugees"
...On New Year's Eve, the same kind of mass sexual assaults that happened to women in Cologne -- in Arabic called the "Taharrush" game -- also took place in Sweden, but the police and the media have chosen to bury the information. The men, it turned out, were mainly Afghan, and claiming to be "unaccompanied refugee children."

In reality, many of them are much older than 18, and are now commonly referred to with the recently coined name, "Rapefugees," rather than "refugee children."

It recently emerged that the Immigration Service urged its administrators to accept as a "child" everyone who looked under the age of 40 -- apparently without any thought as to how inappropriate it is to place grown men in elementary and secondary schools with teenage girls. As Sweden -- until December -- kept its doors wide open to the migrants of the world, the country has accepted vastly more asylum seekers than its Nordic neighbors...

Brazil Zika outbreak: More babies born with birth defects  New figures from Brazil show a further rise in the number of babies born with abnormally small heads to mothers infected with the Zika virus.

There have been 3,893 cases of microcephaly since October, when the authorities first noticed a surge, up from 3,500 in last week's report.

Zika is transmitted by the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which also spreads dengue and chikungunya...