The American Atheists, which filed its lawsuit last week, said in its suit that the cross is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, and that atheists “are being subjected to and injured in consequence of having a religious tradition not their own imposed upon them.”

Atheist group sues over “World Trade Center Cross”

Dan Blair, communications director of AA, told the Wall Street Journal, “We can appreciate people’s emotional attachment to this [memorial] but that shouldn’t override the Constitution,”

On its website, the AA said that the cross is “an impermissible mingling of church and state.”

Small letter “t”

Blair Scott of AA said on Fox News, “It’s not the cross per se that’s an issue. It’s just a small letter ‘t’ among many junctions among thousands that were in the World Trade Center that many consider miraculous. It was blessed by clergy, they held church services at it, it was worshiped at, prayed at, it was turned into a religious idol.”

Martha McCallum, Fox newscaster told Scott, “All the more reason why you shouldn’t object to having it there if it was just a ‘t’ and there were many of them at the World Trade Center. It’s a ‘t’ that happens to have survived and they want to put this ‘t’ that has people’s names inscribed on it in the museum.”

Firefighter, first responder

Tim Brown, who was also in the Fox News program, said of Scott, “He’s stirring up so many difficult emotions again by doing this. We don’t need to be put through this.” A former NYC firefighter and first responder, Brown lost some 100 friends in 9/11.

Brown said on Fox News, “Just because Blair or others don’t like it, doesn’t mean that it can’t be in the museum. They can’t just come in and make rules for everybody in the museum. What if Ladder Three, the fire truck that was lowered into the museum last week was crushed into the shape of a cross? Would he then want that taken out of the museum also?”

Brown said on Fox News that the AA lawsuit is more of a publicity grab “on the backs of my friends who have died on 9/11, who were murdered by Islamic terrorists. It’s shameful what you are doing.”

Scott denied that the lawsuit against the cross is being done for publicity.

Brown is filing a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the cross through the American Center for Law and Justice.

“This is another pathetic attempt to rewrite the Constitution and rewrite history by removing a symbol that has deep meaning and serves as a powerful remembrance to that fateful attack nearly 10 years ago,” Jay Sekulow, chief counsel, ACLJ, said on its website.

“We will aggressively defend the placement of this cross. This memorial, a powerful part of the history of 9/11, serves as a constitutionally sound reminder of the horrors that occurred nearly a decade ago,” Sekulow said.

The World Trade Center Cross is a steel beam in the shape of a cross that stayed put after the collapse of the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001, and was discovered amid the rubble.

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A group of atheists at the University of Texas San Antonio Campus renewed their yearly “smut for smut” exchange campaign this month. Porn for porn? No….

The Atheist Agenda group, formed on campus in 2005, encouraged students to turn in their Bibles in exchange for pornographic material.

This year, it caused quite the stir at numerous media outlets as diverse as Huffington Post and Fox News.

The atheists claim the Bible is full of sexual stories with mistreatment of women—no different than your average book of porn—and that it is a parallel trade-off.

As a Jewish believer in Jesus, I believe they are pitifully off target. Yet I understand in some ways.

A young person may look at any story with sexual details and, after reading the most sensational part, rush to show the article to their friends. In fact, some adults might do the same thing.

But if they do this with the Bible, they will miss the part further along that tells the moral of the story.

In the Bible, there are always consequences for sexual acts outside of marriage, and plenty of rules against the sexual mistreatment of women. Even the heroes of the Bible got into trouble for such things.

Take Samson in the Old Testament, for example (Judges 14-16). He could have married any well-bred woman within his Hebrew community, but he lusted after prostitutes and got away with it for quite a while. Until Delilah, who took away his strength and turned him over to Philistine captors. Samson’s eyes were poked out, he was thrown in a hard labor prison, and only redeemed himself by dying to save his countrymen.

Abraham accepted his wife Sarah’s suggestion to sleep with her handmaiden because she herself was barren. This was an act of doubting God’s promise. As a result, when Sarah finally had a child, it began a nation-dividing strife between the two boys that continues in the Middle East today (Genesis 16-21).

David lost his first-born son by Bathsheba due to his taking her from another husband and having the man killed (2 Samuel 11-12).

In the New Testament, Jesus preached against men being able to throw women out of a marriage simply because society allowed it (Matthew 5). He would not allow the religious leaders of the day to cast a stone on an adulterous woman without looking at their own sin first (John 8).

And the apostle Paul never said for husbands to keep women “under foot” as many feminists believe. Just the opposite. He encouraged men to love women as much as they love themselves and God (Ephesians 5).

I could go on with a long list of verses telling people not to have sex outside of marriage for their own good.

Perhaps the best thing that could happen from this Texas University Bible-for-porn swap is that the atheists who take the Bibles begin to read them thoroughly, for full understanding of sex outside of marriage, adulterous sex and murderous sex.

Perhaps an atheist or two will discover Jesus in the process.

See my previous Underground article, Does the Bible Put Women Down? For more answers on this topic.

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Recent surveys find many Americans mingling their Christian faith with New Age precepts, including Astrology

According to a December 2009 poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, an increasing number of Americans claim to mingle their Christian faith with New Age teachings and Eastern religion precepts, including “reincarnation, astrology and the presence of spiritual energy in physical objects.”

This survey is of particular interests to U.S. religious demographic studies, considering that in 2008 76 percent of American adults claimed to adhere to traditional Christianity. This is down from 86 percent in 1990.

Pew Forum noted that “sizeable minorities of all major U.S. religious groups say they have experienced supernatural phenomena, such as being in touch with the dead or with ghosts.”

In March of 2009, Catholic League President William Donohue cited the nation’s move toward individualism as a key contributing factor to the decline in traditional religious practices. In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Lou Dobbs, Donohue said of this radical shift, “The three most dreaded words are thou shalt not. Notice they are not atheists – they are saying I don’t want to be told what to do with my life.”

Further research by Pew Forum found that 13 percent of “white evangelicals profess to believe in astrology and about 10 percent accepted the possibility of reincarnation.”

Pew Forum has been careful to note that “reincarnation” has been defined as being physically reborn again and again, as opposed to the resurrection of Christ, a common misnomer among many traditional Christians.

Despite the aforementioned, the American Religious Identification Survey conducted earlier this year by Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, found that “born again” and “evangelical” Christianity is on the rise, according to CNN.

The survey also found Americans less interested in other “mainline” denominations such as Lutheran, Episcopalian, Methodist and Presbyterian as national attendance at churches of these religious origins has fallen significantly, while mega church attendance is on the rise worldwide.

In fact, the survey found mega church attendance has leaped from 200,000 in 1990 to over 8 million today. Unfortunately, there is still a national rejection of religion taking place throughout America says Mark Silk of Trinity College.

Silk, citing sexual abuse scandals within the Catholic Church and religious affiliations mingled with political parties, told CNN, “The culture has changed in a way that makes it easier to say, ‘No I don’t have a religion.’ Even in the past year, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama feel obliged to talk about ‘those of no faith.’”

In fact, Obama’s mention of “those of no faith” within his January inaugural address marked the first time in history a U.S. president has done so.

Still, many scholars believe Americans will return to their traditional religious practices within the next five years for comfort in such economically unstable times.

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creation museum adam and eve

The Creation Museum is a museum dedicated to the Biblical creationism, and is an arm of Christian apologetics ministry Answers in Genesis.

The purpose of the trip according to the Secular Student Alliance, a network of more than 145 student groups atheist and agnostic student groups, was to explore “a worldview with which they largely disagree,” not to cause a disturbance or disrupt the museum’s usual operation.

“It should be great fun. I’ve got a long list of questions to ask,” said PZ Myers before going on the trip. “I’m going to have to prune it down a lot.”

When the 285-strong SSA arrived at the Creation Museum, they were indeed well-behaved though some members of the group mocked several of the museum’s displays and astrophysicist Dr. Jason Lisle’s lecture at the museum.

“We frequently come across blog comments from atheists and agnostics who visit the museum with

their minds already made up and prepared to mock,” said Creation Museum co-founder and chief communications officer Mark Looy.

“But we note that they scoff at anyone who believes in a god, whether that person accepts the historicity of the Bible or not,” he said.

“These are people who would probably not even think about attending church, and here, they got the Gospel message. We are grateful for the opportunity to share with them.”

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