Legion of Angels News Archive

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Alan Canon grew up in a fundamentalist household and was a Bible camp prize winner.

But his family also valued science, and he ultimately couldn’t reconcile the two and became an atheist.

“For people openly to say they’re atheist is similar to gay people coming out,” said Canon, of Louisville, who often wears a pin with a scarlet-letter “A” to prompt conversations about atheism. “It’s not popular at all for people to say they’re atheist, especially in these parts.”

He’s part of an increasingly vocal minority of atheists and other Americans who claim no religious affiliation. The percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans has doubled since 1990, rising to 16 percent. That growth represents one of the largest trends in American religion today, according to a poll published this year by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Some of the religiously unaffiliated say they want to combat conservative Christians’ political activities in areas such as embryonic stem-cell research, creationism and courthouse postings of the Ten Commandments.

Religious groups, meanwhile, are responding by trying to make churches more culturally relevant or by finding common ground with atheists.

Among the religiously unaffiliated, about 2 percent each describe themselves as “atheist” or “agnostic,” according to the Pew survey. Most of the rest say they’re nothing in particular - and half of that group actually has religious beliefs or practices.

Members of a Louisville group, Louisville Atheists and Freethinkers, reflect the complexities presented in the Pew survey. Some meditate or practice Wiccan spiritual rituals, tied to the rhythms of nature. Several belong to Unitarian Universalist churches, which have no theological creed but proclaim values of love, justice and truth-seeking.

“We do believe in spirituality,” said David Cooper, 59, who belongs to Thomas Jefferson Unitarian Church in Louisville. “It may not necessarily be a type of theistic spirituality.”

Religious affiliation matters in this election year because religious practice has been one of the leading indicators of voting patterns in recent years. The more frequently people attend church services, the more likely they are to vote Republican.

While Democrats are struggling to regain some of that voting share, they won the religiously unaffiliated vote by a 75-25 percent ratio nationwide in the 2006 congressional elections, according to exit polls.

A high-profile part of the “new atheism” is attacks on religious dogma mounted by such best-selling authors as Richard Dawkins (”The God Delusion”) and Christopher Hitchens (”God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”).

The Sept. 11 attacks by Muslim terrorists “brought a lot of people here,” said John Armstrong, one of the organizers of the Louisville atheist group. “But you really don’t even need to go to Sept. 11 for an example of why religious certainty about things nobody can be certain about is dangerous.”

Religious groups are responding in different ways.

The Kentucky Baptist Convention - alarmed by a 2004 report showing that one-third of Kentucky adults had little or no church connection - has seen many churches work to be more culturally relevant, said Larry Baker, director of new work and associational missions.

“We have to meet people exactly where they are, respect them as individuals and then share boldly and with clarity about what we believe about our relationship with Jesus Christ,” Baker said.

Other groups are finding common ground with atheists.

The Rev. David Emery, pastor of Middletown Christian Church in Louisville, recently led a sermon series on the best-selling atheist books. While he criticized them for ignoring religious people’s work to improve social justice, he applauded them for raising issues of religious violence and the problem of suffering.

Source — News-Press

KINGSTON, Jamaica - Plans to translate the Bible into patois — Jamaica’s unofficial language — have ignited a fiery debate that stretches beyond the shores of this island nation.

Some Jamaicans object to the project because they say patois is an obscure dialect that dilutes the sanctity of Scripture. Others view the translation as an empowering statement that affirms their heritage.

The debate continues as a Caribbean-based religious group searches for translators to help with the $1 million project.

Religious leaders say the audio translation would make the Bible accessible to average churchgoers and to those who might not read it otherwise.

It will take about 12 years to translate, said Rev. Courtney Stewart, who is overseeing the project as general secretary of the Bible Society of the West Indies.

He is lobbying other international Bible societies to help pay for the project and expects translators to start work by early July.

“Whenever the Scriptures are translated into the country’s language, it has a profound effect,” he said.

Patois is how many Jamaicans refer to the creole that emerged when Britain seized the island in 1655 and brought slaves from Western Africa. It historically has been viewed as broken English and was considered a “low-status” language long after Jamaica gained independence in 1962, said Hubert Devonish, a linguistics professor at the Kingston campus of the University of the West Indies.

Almost all Jamaicans know patois, but only recently have the middle and upper classes been speaking it in public, Devonish said.

“Jamaicans have become more and more comfortable with their national identity,” he said. “There’s been a general acceptance of the language bit by bit. It’s a process, and the Bible translation is another step.”

Ronald Dixon, a 47-year-old Seventh Day Adventist, said he’s open to the idea.

“We have to give it a try,” he said. “God doesn’t discriminate.”

The translation debate has spilled over the island’s borders and seeped into Jamaican communities in the U.S.

Much of the support for a patois Bible comes from Jamaicans living abroad because they have become more nationalistic, said Clive Forrester, a linguistics lecturer at the University of the West Indies.

“One of the ways they remain connected is through their creole, because it is a powerful tool of communication,” he said.

It’s the language that Anton Wilson, 28, plans on teaching his children. He left Jamaica at age 7 and still feels he expresses himself best when speaking patois.

Wilson supports the project, but doesn’t talk about it with relatives to avoid confrontation. His family lives in Jamaica and is considered upper class.

“It’s very hard to change ingrained opinions,” said Wilson, who lives in Lawrenceville, Georgia. “We still hate ourselves for speaking our mother language.”

Other Jamaicans, like 30-year-old Kevin Sangster, say patois is an obscure dialect that doesn’t deserve to be the focus of such an expensive project. It could dilute the Bible’s meaning because it’s not an established language, he said.

“Errors could be made, and essentially what is translated is not necessarily reflecting the true meaning of the Scriptures,” said Sangster, who left Jamaica in 1994 and lives in New Jersey.

Karl Johnson, president of the Jamaica Council of Churches, said anything that helps people understand the word of God is good. There is nothing wrong with translating the Bible into someone’s native tongue, he said.

“Sacredness is not in how the Bible is written,” he said. “It’s what it stands for.”

The Bible has been translated into other dialects, including Haitian Creole and Gullah, which is largely spoken by African-Americans in isolated coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia. It also has been translated into hundreds of languages, including Tagalog, spoken in the Philippines; Ga, spoken in Ghana; and Mi’kmaq, spoken mostly by Indians in eastern Canada.

Just because the Bible is now being translated into Jamaican creole doesn’t indicate a patois renaissance, Devonish said.

“I would say naissance,” he said. “It’s birth, rather than rebirth.”

Source — MSNBC

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE - It’s not every day that a man
writes a book instructing women on how to live. But then The New Eve
(B&H Publishing Group, February 2008) by best-selling author Robert Lewis is
not your garden-variety read.

See the “Biblical Barbie” video and learn the five bold moves at

NewEveBook.com.

Source — Religion News Service