Friday Church News Notes
Volume 20, Issue 1 - January 4, 2019
The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, though this does not imply an endorsement.
FACEBOOK TEMPORARILY BANS FRANKLIN GRAHAM FOR “HATE SPEECH” (Friday Church News Notes, January 4, 2019, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “After Facebook apologizes for ban,” Fox News, Dec. 31, 2018: “Evangelical leader Franklin Graham accepted Facebook’s apology and suggested the social network come up with a standard based on ‘God's word’ after the tech company mistakenly banned him for 24 hours last week over a 2016 post about HB2, North Carolina's controversial ‘bathroom bill.’ ‘I was defending our governor and the state on HB2. It was a good law. If you disagree with [Facebook’s] position on sexual orientation, you can be classified as hate speech,’ said Graham in an exclusive interview on Fox & Friends Sunday. In a post to his Facebook page, Graham said the social network is ‘trying to define truth. They’re making the rules and changing the rules. Truth is truth. God made the rules and His Word is truth. Actually, Facebook is censoring free speech. The free exchange of ideas is part of our country’s DNA.’ A Facebook spokesperson told Fox News the 2016 post was removed by mistake after one of its 15,000 content moderators decided that it violated the tech giant's ban on ‘dehumanizing language.’ The post and Graham’s page have since been restored. ‘I accept Facebook’s apology and I appreciate them stepping up and doing that,’ Graham said, but he questioned why the tech giant would censure such an old post. ‘I think it was just really a personal attack towards me.’ Facebook came under fire late last week after one of its employees leaked more than 1,000 pages of documents detailing its content moderation policies and how it polices speech on a global scale. Critics have said the company wields too much power and has made mistakes in determining whether something is hate speech or part of a country’s mainstream dialogue. ... In March 2016, North Carolina’s General Assembly passed HB2, which reversed a Charlotte ordinance that ... allowed transgender people to use public restrooms that correspond with their gender identity, but the HB2 eliminated local ordinances statewide that expanded protections for LGBT people.”
CNN JOURNALIST OF THE YEAR EXPOSED FOR FRAUD AGAINST CONSERVATIVE VOTERS (Friday Church News Notes, January 4, 2019, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Der Spiegel Reporter Fired after Fake News Story” by Mike Huckabee, The Stream, Dec. 22, 2018: “The major German newspaper Der Spiegel revealed that one of its most renowned reporters, Claas Relotius, has been making up news for years. In a case of journalistic fraud ‘on a grand scale,’ Relotius has reportedly confessed to fabricating parts of at least 14 stories over the years, including an interview with Colin Kaepernick’s parents and a story about a sign on the outskirts of a Minnesota town reading ‘Keep Mexicans out.’ ... Ironically, Relotius won awards for his investigative exposes, including CNN Journalist of the Year in 2014. ... After many years of making up ‘facts’ to fit his preconceived narratives, Rolotius finally tripped up when he--like so many arrogant liberal reporters--slandered and underestimated the intelligence of rural American Trump voters whom he had never really talked to ... In trying to ‘explain’ to European readers how those backward, knuckle-dragging, gun-toting, racist small town yahoos (a stereotype he could have lifted straight out of a 1960s drive-in movie) could have chosen the odious Trump over the resplendent Hillary, Rolotius wrote a profile of Fergus Falls, Minnesota, which voted for Trump by 62.6% ... The intent was obviously to confirm the negative biases held by urban liberal bubble dwellers. Rolotius put damning quotes into the mouths of people he’d never talked to; invented demeaning descriptions of locals that were wildly inaccurate; created residents who didn’t really exist; made up ‘facts’ out of thin air that a Google search could have debunked ... When residents saw to their shock what he had written about them, local blogger Michele Anderson posted a list of just his top 11 lies about Fergus ... Adding more layers to the irony, Anderson is actually a Hillary-voting liberal who works for a local arts group and moved there from Portland, Oregon--but she loves her small town and gets along fine with her neighbors, liberals and conservatives alike.”
APPLE PULLS CHRISTIAN MINISTRY’S APP AFTER PROTEST FROM GAY-RIGHTS ACTIVISTS (Friday Church News Notes, January 4, 2019, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Apple Pulls,” The Christian Post, Dec. 27, 2018: “Apple pulled a Christian ministry's app after LGBT advocates said it portrayed being gay as a ‘sickness,' a charge the ministry says is false. NBC News reported that the tech giant removed the app that was developed by Living Hope Ministries, a Texas-based organization, following a Change.org petition from gay rights group Truth Wins Out. The petition called the ‘ex-gay’ app ‘dangerous,’ ‘bigoted’ and ‘hateful.’ Living Hope Ministries is expressing disappointment over the move but says their work will continue. ‘We are saddened by Apple’s and Microsoft’s removal of our app because of a single person’s false accusations. Regardless of their decision we will continue to make the app and our services available to those who seek them,’ Ricky Chalette, executive director of the group, said in an email to The Christian Post Thursday. ‘We are a ministry that for nearly thirty years has helped individuals resolve their feelings they deem incongruent with their faith. We help people deepen their relationship with Jesus Christ through Bible study and accountability. We walk with them to align their lives with the teachings of Jesus Christ.’ ... In 2014, Apple CEO Tim Cook became the first Fortune 500 company leader to announce he was homosexual, and told CNN in an interview earlier this year that being gay was ‘God’s greatest gift to me.’”
CHINESE GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS TRACKING SCHOOL CHILDREN WITH ELECTRONIC UNIFORMS (Friday Church News Notes, January 4, 2019, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Chinese schools make pupils wear,” The Telegraph, Dec. 26, 2018: “Schools in southern China are forcing children to wear uniforms embedded with computer chips that track their movement and trigger an alarm if they skip class. More than 10 schools in Guizhou province and the neighboring autonomous region of Guangxi are now requiring students to wear ‘intelligent uniforms’, according to the state-run newspaper The Global Times. Two chips, sown into the shoulders of school jackets, can sustain around 500 wash cycles and temperatures of 150 degrees Celsius ... The uniforms allow teachers and parents to track students’ movement, sending out an alert if they are not present in a lesson. Facial-recognition scanners at school gates match the chips with the correct student, meaning that any who try to swap jackets in order to bunk off will be caught. ... In June 2016, China’s Ministry of Education touted the ‘digitalisation of education’ in its Five Year Plan, calling for the development of ‘smart campuses.’ Earlier this year, Chinese media reported that a school in Hangzhou was using facial scanners to track if students were paying attention in class, while another school in the same province uses a facial-recognition system when serving children lunch in the cafeteria.”
CUBA STILL STARVING POLITICAL PRISONERS TO DEATH (Friday Church News Notes, January 4, 2019, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Cuba Has Detailed Half a Million Dissidents,” Breitbart, Dec. 7, 2018: “Cuba continues to employ starvation and dehydration as a mechanism to break political prisoners physically and mentally, Breitbart News learned from a former political prisoner on Friday. The practice of starving detainees and limiting their access to water remains ‘a systematic and official practice,’ Luis Zúñiga, a former political prisoner, declared during an event on human rights in Cuba hosted by the Organization of American States (OAS). ... During the event, the Justice Cuba international commission presented testimony from former political prisoners who have witnessed the torture and atrocities at the hands of the Cuban government first-hand. ... It is likely that ‘political prisons in Cuba are responsible for the only cases in the world where there are prisoners who have died of malnutrition without going on a hunger strike, just by eating the food they gave them,’ Zúñiga proclaimed. He also noted that prisoners are subjected to ‘a permanent system of arbitrary beatings.’”
THE INTERNET - HISTORY’S GREATEST LIBRARY (Friday Church News Notes, January 4, 2019, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The Internet is, by far, history’s most magnificent library. I love libraries and have spent a lot of time in serious libraries, including many days in the British Library. But there is nothing in history to compare with the World Wide Web. Back in the 1970s, when I first started writing books, if I could have owned the British Library and the Library of Congress and transported them to one place and had the most efficient cataloging system available at the time, it would not have been as powerful and effective as the 21st century World Wide Web, especially since Google started scanning vast library holdings beginning in 2002. The old card cataloguing system was helpful, but it was nothing at all compared to a modern search Internet engine. Though many of the materials on deposit in great libraries aren’t available online, a massive amount are, and the digitization process grows daily. The last time I spent a day at the British Library, which was about five years ago, I knew that I would probably never go back. Several of the books I tried to order required longer than one day to deliver, and I only had a couple of days. Further, I realized that every book I was researching was already online (since I was doing research in older books). True, I can’t order up a 1527 Tyndale New Testament via the World Wide Web and have it delivered to my desk so that I can actually handle it, but I can read it online or download the text to read on my laptop or iPhone. And that is true for a vast amount of the material that has ever been published in English. Newer books that are still under copyright can’t be read for free online, but a great many of them can be purchased in eBook edition, which I prefer because transporting, searching, highlighting, copying and pasting are more efficient. The resources on the web and the power of the search engines puts information literally at the user’s fingertips. Finding facts that would have required hours or even days and weeks of digging through books just a few years go can be obtained at lightening speed today. The Internet is a researcher’s wildest dream come true. No doubt the Antichrist will use it to his advantage, but in the mean time I will use it for the glory of God.
CONCLUSION: The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this obviously does not imply an endorsement. We trust that our readers will not be discouraged. It is God’s will that we know the times (1 Ch. 12:32; Mat. 16:3) and that we be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves. The News Notes remind us that the hour is very late, and we need to be ready for the Lord’s coming. Are you sure that you are born again? Are you living for Christ? “And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Rom. 13:11-14).
CNN JOURNALIST OF THE YEAR EXPOSED FOR FRAUD AGAINST CONSERVATIVE VOTERS (Friday Church News Notes, January 4, 2019, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Der Spiegel Reporter Fired after Fake News Story” by Mike Huckabee, The Stream, Dec. 22, 2018: “The major German newspaper Der Spiegel revealed that one of its most renowned reporters, Claas Relotius, has been making up news for years. In a case of journalistic fraud ‘on a grand scale,’ Relotius has reportedly confessed to fabricating parts of at least 14 stories over the years, including an interview with Colin Kaepernick’s parents and a story about a sign on the outskirts of a Minnesota town reading ‘Keep Mexicans out.’ ... Ironically, Relotius won awards for his investigative exposes, including CNN Journalist of the Year in 2014. ... After many years of making up ‘facts’ to fit his preconceived narratives, Rolotius finally tripped up when he--like so many arrogant liberal reporters--slandered and underestimated the intelligence of rural American Trump voters whom he had never really talked to ... In trying to ‘explain’ to European readers how those backward, knuckle-dragging, gun-toting, racist small town yahoos (a stereotype he could have lifted straight out of a 1960s drive-in movie) could have chosen the odious Trump over the resplendent Hillary, Rolotius wrote a profile of Fergus Falls, Minnesota, which voted for Trump by 62.6% ... The intent was obviously to confirm the negative biases held by urban liberal bubble dwellers. Rolotius put damning quotes into the mouths of people he’d never talked to; invented demeaning descriptions of locals that were wildly inaccurate; created residents who didn’t really exist; made up ‘facts’ out of thin air that a Google search could have debunked ... When residents saw to their shock what he had written about them, local blogger Michele Anderson posted a list of just his top 11 lies about Fergus ... Adding more layers to the irony, Anderson is actually a Hillary-voting liberal who works for a local arts group and moved there from Portland, Oregon--but she loves her small town and gets along fine with her neighbors, liberals and conservatives alike.”
APPLE PULLS CHRISTIAN MINISTRY’S APP AFTER PROTEST FROM GAY-RIGHTS ACTIVISTS (Friday Church News Notes, January 4, 2019, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Apple Pulls,” The Christian Post, Dec. 27, 2018: “Apple pulled a Christian ministry's app after LGBT advocates said it portrayed being gay as a ‘sickness,' a charge the ministry says is false. NBC News reported that the tech giant removed the app that was developed by Living Hope Ministries, a Texas-based organization, following a Change.org petition from gay rights group Truth Wins Out. The petition called the ‘ex-gay’ app ‘dangerous,’ ‘bigoted’ and ‘hateful.’ Living Hope Ministries is expressing disappointment over the move but says their work will continue. ‘We are saddened by Apple’s and Microsoft’s removal of our app because of a single person’s false accusations. Regardless of their decision we will continue to make the app and our services available to those who seek them,’ Ricky Chalette, executive director of the group, said in an email to The Christian Post Thursday. ‘We are a ministry that for nearly thirty years has helped individuals resolve their feelings they deem incongruent with their faith. We help people deepen their relationship with Jesus Christ through Bible study and accountability. We walk with them to align their lives with the teachings of Jesus Christ.’ ... In 2014, Apple CEO Tim Cook became the first Fortune 500 company leader to announce he was homosexual, and told CNN in an interview earlier this year that being gay was ‘God’s greatest gift to me.’”
CHINESE GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS TRACKING SCHOOL CHILDREN WITH ELECTRONIC UNIFORMS (Friday Church News Notes, January 4, 2019, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Chinese schools make pupils wear,” The Telegraph, Dec. 26, 2018: “Schools in southern China are forcing children to wear uniforms embedded with computer chips that track their movement and trigger an alarm if they skip class. More than 10 schools in Guizhou province and the neighboring autonomous region of Guangxi are now requiring students to wear ‘intelligent uniforms’, according to the state-run newspaper The Global Times. Two chips, sown into the shoulders of school jackets, can sustain around 500 wash cycles and temperatures of 150 degrees Celsius ... The uniforms allow teachers and parents to track students’ movement, sending out an alert if they are not present in a lesson. Facial-recognition scanners at school gates match the chips with the correct student, meaning that any who try to swap jackets in order to bunk off will be caught. ... In June 2016, China’s Ministry of Education touted the ‘digitalisation of education’ in its Five Year Plan, calling for the development of ‘smart campuses.’ Earlier this year, Chinese media reported that a school in Hangzhou was using facial scanners to track if students were paying attention in class, while another school in the same province uses a facial-recognition system when serving children lunch in the cafeteria.”
CUBA STILL STARVING POLITICAL PRISONERS TO DEATH (Friday Church News Notes, January 4, 2019, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Cuba Has Detailed Half a Million Dissidents,” Breitbart, Dec. 7, 2018: “Cuba continues to employ starvation and dehydration as a mechanism to break political prisoners physically and mentally, Breitbart News learned from a former political prisoner on Friday. The practice of starving detainees and limiting their access to water remains ‘a systematic and official practice,’ Luis Zúñiga, a former political prisoner, declared during an event on human rights in Cuba hosted by the Organization of American States (OAS). ... During the event, the Justice Cuba international commission presented testimony from former political prisoners who have witnessed the torture and atrocities at the hands of the Cuban government first-hand. ... It is likely that ‘political prisons in Cuba are responsible for the only cases in the world where there are prisoners who have died of malnutrition without going on a hunger strike, just by eating the food they gave them,’ Zúñiga proclaimed. He also noted that prisoners are subjected to ‘a permanent system of arbitrary beatings.’”
THE INTERNET - HISTORY’S GREATEST LIBRARY (Friday Church News Notes, January 4, 2019, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The Internet is, by far, history’s most magnificent library. I love libraries and have spent a lot of time in serious libraries, including many days in the British Library. But there is nothing in history to compare with the World Wide Web. Back in the 1970s, when I first started writing books, if I could have owned the British Library and the Library of Congress and transported them to one place and had the most efficient cataloging system available at the time, it would not have been as powerful and effective as the 21st century World Wide Web, especially since Google started scanning vast library holdings beginning in 2002. The old card cataloguing system was helpful, but it was nothing at all compared to a modern search Internet engine. Though many of the materials on deposit in great libraries aren’t available online, a massive amount are, and the digitization process grows daily. The last time I spent a day at the British Library, which was about five years ago, I knew that I would probably never go back. Several of the books I tried to order required longer than one day to deliver, and I only had a couple of days. Further, I realized that every book I was researching was already online (since I was doing research in older books). True, I can’t order up a 1527 Tyndale New Testament via the World Wide Web and have it delivered to my desk so that I can actually handle it, but I can read it online or download the text to read on my laptop or iPhone. And that is true for a vast amount of the material that has ever been published in English. Newer books that are still under copyright can’t be read for free online, but a great many of them can be purchased in eBook edition, which I prefer because transporting, searching, highlighting, copying and pasting are more efficient. The resources on the web and the power of the search engines puts information literally at the user’s fingertips. Finding facts that would have required hours or even days and weeks of digging through books just a few years go can be obtained at lightening speed today. The Internet is a researcher’s wildest dream come true. No doubt the Antichrist will use it to his advantage, but in the mean time I will use it for the glory of God.
CONCLUSION: The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this obviously does not imply an endorsement. We trust that our readers will not be discouraged. It is God’s will that we know the times (1 Ch. 12:32; Mat. 16:3) and that we be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves. The News Notes remind us that the hour is very late, and we need to be ready for the Lord’s coming. Are you sure that you are born again? Are you living for Christ? “And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Rom. 13:11-14).
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Distributed by Way of Life Literature., publisher of Bible Study Materials and reports for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Established in 1974, Way of Life Literature is a fundamental Baptist preaching and publishing ministry based in Bethel Baptist Church, London, Ontario, of which Wilbert Unger is the founding Pastor. Brother Cloud lives in South Asia where he has been a church planting missionary since 1979. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY (REPORTS AND FRIDAY NEWS) IS NOT DEVOTIONAL. IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR.
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
The Way of Life Literature preaching and publishing ministry is based at Bethel Baptist Church, London, Ontario, of which Wilbert Unger is the founding Pastor. A mail stop is maintained in Port Huron, Michigan.
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