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One Christmas when I was a local church pastor, I was giving the children’s sermon. I sat on the steps leading up to the altar and asked the children to gather around me. “What is the difference between Jesus and Santa Claus?” I asked.
Thomas Jefferson said it best. In his work “A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom” he wrote: “Almighty God hath created the mind free” and attempts by the state to coerce faith by making it law “tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion….”
It is the faith of Christians, and my own faith, that God became flesh in the child Jesus, born of Mary. It is an astonishing claim, often given lip-service, especially at this time of year, but very rarely known for the profound paradox it is.
An unvarnished look at the 20th century could make an atheist out of anybody: the trenches in France, the ovens of the Holocaust, the Killing Fields in Cambodia, 800,000 butchered in ninety days in Rwanda, Columbia, Angola, Guatemala, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and on and on…
What Islam Really Says About Violence, Rights and Other Religions
Gomaa, Fadlallah, Mubarak, Khan, Siddiqi, Ellison, others | On Faith
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