Firefighters Let House Burn In Tennessee Over An Unpaid $75 Dollar Fee

JMC Ministries Response
written by: Miranda Caverley

Do you think that if this $75.00 fee was in place in New York City on the day Sept. 11th happened that all those firefighters would have been told NOT To go and try and save as many lives as possible if the owners of the Twin Towers had accidentally forgotten to pay the 75 dollars? And be forced to just stand and watch thousands more die than what did that day? I don't think so.

The man offered to pay the fee. But he still got no help. So he watched as 3 dogs and 1 cat burned alive in this fire along with all his belongings. What if those pets would have been people do you think they would have helped then to save a life. It really makes me wonder especially how cold they were to even the news reporters and even calling on their radios for police back up to have news/media escorted away from this mans burning home.

What is the point of even having firefighters and paying taxes to them if they will just do nothing. Must be great to just stand around and get paid thousands of dollars a year to watch peoples homes burn. Even when the people offer to pay the 75 dollar yearly fee that they accidentally for got to pay.

Sadly my family was affected by something similar to this many years ago. My Great Aunt And Uncles home caught fire. They lived in a rural area in Ohio and when they called 911 they were told that the fire station was not in their jurisdiction and that they would not come put the fire out. Yes they let my aunt and uncles home burn down to the ground because they didn't have a fire station in their jurisdiction where they would come and help them.

Then I watch MSNBC Keith Olberman interview this man who lost his home today and the first words out of Keiths mouth to set up his interview was and I quote "A look now into the America envisioned by the Tea Party" Ok How in the world can you say that! I am not a tea party member but I do keep up on what the tea party is wanting to do to change America and it most definitely does not include letting fellow American's homes to burn and no body even care.

How is the tea party even involved with this town allowing this man's home to burn? I would say this is not a vision of the tea party but a vision of the twisted evil mayor and local officials of this town in Tennessee. It is most clear that the mayor by the interview that he does not even care about the people of his town if they forget or don't comply with this $75.oo fee. To see a publicly elected official to show no sympathy or empathy for this family is just disgusting even after knowing the family was willing to still pay the yearly fee and comply with their twisted rules. How can you be a mayor of a town if you don't show compassion towards the people that elected you?

All I can say is that election time is coming and I don't see this man staying in office for very long.

We pray for this family and for the others in this area who have also lost homes because of this fee. How can you put a price on peoples lives when they are already paying taxes? May God inspire people donate to this family and help them get back on their feet and supply what the insurance company doesn't. It is a sad day America when we see fellow citizens stand by and not help their fellow man. What have we become?

Marriage Poll: No Longer Just About Man or Woman Now Shows Bestiality As Category

Posted: September 23, 2010
9:15 pm Eastern

click to read original story from World Net Daily

A new WND/Wenzel Poll indicates that an overwhelming 70 percent of Americans want marriage limited to one man and one woman, but a subset, tiny though it may be, already is endorsing polygamy and bestiality.

The prospect that relationships abhorred both biblically and traditionally will be sanctioned already has been forecast by one of the California Supreme Court justices in 2008 who dissented from the majority opinion that "found" in the state constitution a provision for same-sex "marriage."

The decision later was rejected by voters through Proposition 8, which enshrined traditional marriage in the state constitution. The ballot measure was ruled unconstitutional in August, however, by homosexual Judge Vaughn Walker, who decided that the age in which gender mattered to marriage was over.

The new results come in a WND/Wenzel Poll conducted Sept. 13-14 with an automated technology calling a random sampling of listed telephone numbers nationwide. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.65 percentage points.

Fritz Wenzel, chief of Wenzel Strategies which conducts the WND poll, said there is a huge disparity between the political parties on how people feel about the question of marriage.

"While 92 percent of Republicans believe only in a one man-one woman marriage, just 52 percent of Democrats agreed," he reported. "Among Democrats, 44 percent said they believed a marriage could be any two people, regardless of gender.

"Independents were about halfway in-between Republicans and Democrats on the question, as 66 percent said they felt marriage should be just between one man and one woman," he said.

It was among those categories that the polygamous or polyamorous relationships – even bestiality – started appearing.

Among Democrats, 2.2 percent said "marriage" should be "many people-any gender." One-half of one percent of independents agreed. And a definition of marriage that would be "not limited to humans alone" was supported by 0.2 percent of Democrats and the same percentage of Independents.

The poll revealed that men and women felt about the same on the definition of marriage, with 71 percent of men and 69 percent of women saying marriage should be between just one man and one woman.

"However, younger respondents were much more likely to accept the idea of same-sex marriages – 45 percent said they believed in a one man-one woman union, but 39 percent said they felt same-sex marriages were acceptable. Interestingly, 16 percent of those under age 30 said they think marriage as an institution should be scrapped altogether," the Wenzel analysis of poll results said.

"Mirroring Wenzel Strategies polling conducted for WorldNetDaily.com last month, just 35 percent said they thought the federal judge's decision to vacate the California state constitutional amendment – which was passed by voters – was a courageous stroke of judicial magic. Another 34 percent said they believed it was the height of judicial arrogance, with the other third either somewhere in-between or undecided on the question," the Wenzel analysis said.

"On the question of whether respondents believed the nation would eventually come to accept same-sex marriage, two-thirds, or 63 percent said they did not believe it would ever be accepted. Another 14 percent said they thought same-sex marriages would be accepted, but that it would take a long time, perhaps decades, to occur. Twenty-one percent said they did believe that same-sex marriage would be accepted, and probably in the short-term," the analysis said.

The Alliance Defense Fund has noted some of Judge Walker's far-reaching conclusions in his court decision, now on appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals:

• "Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians."
  
  
• "Rather, the exclusion exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage. That time has passed."
  
  
• "The gender of a child's parent is not a factor in a child's adjustment."
  
  
• "The evidence shows beyond any doubt that parents' genders are irrelevant to children’s developmental outcomes."
  
  
• "Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals."
  
  
• "Many of the purported interests identified by proponents are nothing more than a fear or unarticulated dislike of same-sex couples."

Liberty Counsel has called the ruling "outrageous."

"This is a classic example of radical individualism and judicial activism. Judge Walker obviously has not learned the lesson of 2008, when the California Supreme Court refused to stay its decision on marriage. That decision was reversed in short order, but it caused a huge disruption," said chief Mathew Staver.

The American Family Association has launched an action alert to its several million supporters calling for the impeachment of Walker.

The alert asks supporters to contact their members of Congress and demand his removal.

"What you have here is a federal judge using the power of his position to legitimize what is sexually aberrant behavior," Bryan Fischer, an analyst for the organization, told WND. "He's trampling on the will of 7 million voters in California. It's just a gross breach of his judicial responsibility.

"We think of it as an expression of judicial tyranny, judicial activism on steroids," he said.

Tea Partiers Say America Is A Christian Nation

click to read original story from CNN

Members of the Tea Party movement tend to be Christian conservatives, not libertarians, and are more likely than even white evangelical Christians to say the United States is a Christian nation, a detailed new study has found.

More than half of self-identified Tea Party members say America is a Christian nation, while just over four out of 10 white evangelicals believe that - the same as the proportion of the general population that says so.

"We found actually that among the Tea Party, rather than being libertarians, at least on the issues of abortion and same-sex marriage, they're actually social conservatives," the survey's lead author, Robert Jones, said Tuesday.

Despite the headlines the Tea Party movement has generated with their candidates upsetting mainstream Republican candidates in primary races from Delaware to Nevada, it is only half the size of the Christian conservative movement, Jones said.

"We found that the Tea Party movement makes up a significant number. One in 10 Americans consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement, that's not insignificant," he said. "But it is half the size of those who consider themselves part of the Christian conservative movement or the religious right," he said.

The details come from the American Values Survey, released Tuesday by the Public Religion Research Institute.

Read an analysis of the results by the institute's CEO and research director

Some findings from the telephone survey of more than 3,000 Americans confirm the conventional wisdom.

Tea Party members are big fans of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and not so hot on President Barack Obama.

They're much more likely than the general population to trust Fox News most - almost six out of 10 say it's their most trusted source of news, more than twice as many who say that among Americans as a whole.

A former speechwriter for George W. Bush said the emergence of the Tea Party movement reflects the latest development in a long-running conflict.

"We used to have culture wars on abortion and the nature of family," said Michael Gerson, who is now a Washington Post columnist.

"I think we're in the middle of a culture war, just as vicious, on the role and size of government and I think these results are consistent with that," he told a packed house at the Brookings Institution in Washington, where the report was unveiled Tuesday.

The Tea Party is not simply a movement of white evangelicals, the survey found by digging deeper into the specific beliefs of both groups.

The religious beliefs of Tea Partiers tend to be more traditional than those of the general population, but less so than white evangelicals'.

Pollster Robert P. Jones releases the results of a new study at the Brookings Institution.

Nearly half of Tea Partiers believe the Bible is the literal word of God, for example. One in three Americans overall believes that, while nearly two in three white evangelicals do.

Tea Partiers are much more likely than white evangelicals or Americans in general to think that minorities get too much attention from the government.

Almost six in 10 Tea Partiers believe that, while fewer than four in 10 white evangelicals say so. Figures for white evangelicals and Americans in general on that question are statistically identical.

But Tea Party opinions of immigrants line up with those of white evangelicals, with just under two out of three in each group saying immigrants are a burden on the U.S. "because they take jobs, housing and health care."

Just under half of the population as a whole says that.

The head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary said he was not surprised that there's both agreement and disagreement between the Tea Party and white evangelicals.

"Opposition movements tend to draw very broadly. When it gets to the specifics of governance there's going to be some big contrast," Albert Mohler Jr. told CNN.

"I think those areas of natural overlap are understandable but the issues of contrast are going to be unavoidable," he said.

Libertarians - who oppose government intervention in people's personal lives - will not see eye to eye with evangelicals on abortion or same-sex marriage, he said.

"Very few evangelicals would say the government has no role in these issues," he said.

The Public Religion Research Institute report, "Religion and the Tea Party in the 2010 Election: An Analysis of the Third Biennial American Values Survey," is based on telephone polling of a national random survey of 3,013 adults between September 1 and 14.

CNN's Richard Allen Greene contributed to this report.

Top 12 Politician Constitutional Contempt Clips

South Sudan Is Below Third World Status

click to read full story from ChristianPost.com

Mon, Sep. 20, 2010

The standard of life in South Sudan is so far behind modern society that it dreams to one day reach Third World status, says the head of a missions group that works in the region.

So if South Sudan voted to secede from the North in the January referendum, it would need “a lot of external help,” warns Bill Deans, president of Mustard Seed International.

“For the past three generations they’ve been in war. Every family is touched by that,” reports Deans, whose organization ministers to the "least of these."

“There is a great number of orphans, the infrastructure in the South is non-existent, there are no pave roads, thus the ability for the South to sustain itself is not there,” he adds.

Deans also emphasizes how there are no education or medical infrastructures in the region.

“It is going to take a lot of external help for that to happen over a period of time,” Deans says. “They have been so isolated for the past 25 years.”

Sudan is just four months away from a critical referendum in which the South can vote to break away from the North.

For more than 21 years, the predominantly Muslim North and the animist and Christian South fought in a bloody civil war that left some 2 million civilians dead and more than 4 million people displaced. The war also destroyed an estimated 500 churches in Southern Sudan.

In 2005, however, the two sides signed the Sudan Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the war. The CPA called for a government of national unity to be formed for a transitional period of six years. After this time, the South could vote to be autonomous. Many analysts expect the south to vote for independence on January 9, 2011.

It is amid the desperate need for medical care after years of war that Mustard Seed International established the Akot Medical Mission in 2006. The clinic is literally in the middle of the brush – where there is not even a grocery store nearby – and provides the only medical care in the area.

“For us to build this facility was nothing short of a miracle,” says Deans, who noted the only building material on the site was the dirt. Every other material – from cement to nails – for the clinic was trucked or flown in from Kenya or Uganda.

“It is just a miracle that a facility like that can exist in the bush of South Sudan,” he remarks. “The people say it is the best facility in the whole country. But we have nothing to gauge that on because we have not been all over the country.”

In South Sudan, there is an average of one doctor per 100,000 people.

According to a report published by UNICEF in 2004, the infant mortality rate in South Sudan is 15 percent while the child mortality rate is 25 percent. About one in nine mothers die during pregnancy or childbirth and only five percent of births are attended by trained health care workers. The malnutrition rate, meanwhile, stands at 48 percent and severe malnutrition is over 21 percent. A U.N. official recently called South Sudan the hungriest place on earth.

Every year, the Akot Medical Mission provides direct medical attention to more than 30,000 people.

But Deans notes how very expensive it is to operate the clinic because of the transportation costs. He says it costs $10,000 to fly in $10,000-worth of medicine. MSI’s total budget for the South Sudan operation, however, is only $300,000. And for the past two years, the MSI board decided to shift funds to help the clinic stay open despite shortfall.

“We are a small organization,” says Deans, who became Mustard Seed International’s president in 2002 on the condition that all the staff work as volunteers. “We get it done. We don’t have the big publicity budget.”

Despite the constant financial struggle to keep the operation in “off-the-radar” South Sudan going, Deans says he finds his job “rewarding” and “good.”

“I’m working harder than I ever worked in my life running businesses,” he jokes.

Michelle A. Vu
Christian Post Reporter

Church of England Survey Finds Christianity For Young People a "Faded Memory'

click to read full story from ChristianPost.com

Tue, Oct. 05, 2010

Posted: 08:50 AM EDT

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LONDON – Most young people consider Christianity irrelevant to their lives but they are not as hostile towards religion as their parents’ generation, researchers in the Church of England have found.

The researchers surveyed 300 young people from Generation Y – those born after 1982 – who had attended a Christian youth or community project. The five-year study looked at their faith in relation to Christianity and the impact of Christian youth and community work on their faith development.

It found that young people were more likely to put their faith in friends, their family or themselves than in God.

Sylvia Collins-Mayo, a sociologist of religion and one of the researchers behind the study, said: “For the majority, religion and spirituality was irrelevant for day-to-day living; our young people were not looking for answers to ultimate questions and showed little sign of ‘pick and mix’ spirituality.”

She said that young people only sought a religious perspective on “rare occasions” and that when they did, they often "made do" with a “very faded, inherited cultural memory of Christianity in the absence of anything else.”

This tended to be in times of difficulty, for example, after suffering a bereavement or illness in the family.

“In this respect they would sometimes pray in their bedrooms,” she said. “What is salutary for the Church is that generally young people seemed quite content with this situation, happy to get by with what little they knew about the Christian faith.”

The findings suggested that while Christian youth projects were an important source of support for young Christians, they had little impact on the faith of the non-churchgoers who took part in them.

Among the infrequent churchgoers, 28 percent said belonging to a Christian youth group had made them think more about the purpose of life. Thirty per cent said it had made them think more about God, 26 percent about Jesus, and 54 percent about what was right and wrong.

Infrequent churchgoers tended to be uncertain about the nature of God, with 23 percent saying they believed God was someone they could know personally, 22 percent saying they believed in some sort of higher power or life force but not a personal God, and 12% saying that they did not think there was any sort of God, higher power or life force. Forty-three per cent said they did not know what to think about God.

“The Christian youth and community projects were an important source of Christian faith support for the minority of young people who were already actively involved in Church," Collins-Mayo said. “For the majority, however, the Christian dimension of the projects had little impact on them beyond keeping the plausibility of Christian belief and practices alive.”

The results of the study have been published in a new book, The Faith of Generation Y. Collins-Mayo said that while Generation Y is largely unfamiliar with formal religion, it still takes a keen interest in ethical issues.

“The young people drew moral guidance from family as friends, but they also recognized the potential of religion, including Christianity, to provide them with guidelines for living,” she said.

The researchers say that the common assumption that teenagers are alienated from their parents and hostile towards religion is a hangover from the Sixties and Seventies and no longer applicable to today’s young people.

The book states: “Generation Y have less cultural hang ups about the Church than did their predecessors … The challenge to the Church is to provide them with the opportunities to explore and to learn about a narrative of belief of which they know little.”

The Faith of Generation Y is joint authored by Sylvia Collins-Mayo, West London priest Bob Mayo, and the director of the Midlands Centre for Youth Ministry, Sally Nash.

Jenna Lyle
Christian Today Reporter

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