Buried Alive by Roy Hallums

On November 1, 2004 Roy Hallums ducked out of a dinner party hosted by his employer in the upscale Mansour district of Baghdad to finish some work in an adjacent office building of the Saudi Arabian Trading and Construction Company. At the same time a gang of ruthless thugs, later identified as members of the Jaish al-Mujahideen or Mujahideen Army, were finalizing their plans to storm the company’s compound. Little did Roy Hallums realize, as he crossed the secured and protected distance from the dinner party to his office, that he was also crossing over into a brutal 311 day nightmare during which time he would be virtually Buried Alive.

Warning: Buried Alive is a white-knuckle firsthand tale of terror, torture, and triumph that will leave the reader’s fingernails permanently imprinted on the book’s front and back covers. On the 241 pages between those two covers readers will glimpse, if only as from beneath a blindfold, a surreal world in which kidnapping and human traffic is considered a legitimate form of business and where the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, is accompanied by the sound of torture induced cries and screams. The book however is not without its lighter (if that is a word that can be used in such circumstances) moments. Case in point: upon being pistol whipped by a guard because President Bush had won reelection in the U.S. Roy Hallums quipped “I guess he was a Kerry supporter”.

This is a book that should be read by everyone who wishes to have greater insight into events in the Middle East. Be warned though, although it is not overly graphic and never sensational, the facts portrayed within leaves of this book are indelible.

Find it at Amazon.com

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze.com <http://BookSneeze.com> book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 <http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_03/16cfr255_03.html> : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Repudiate the Book Dan Barker

If you don’t want to defend it and if you “may” have changed your mind, repudiate the book Dan Barker.

Related: The Most Unusual Event in All of My Debates Took Place Today

Skeptics Love the New Book by Ray Comfort

If the “customer reviews” at amazon.com about Ray Comfort’s new book were written by people who actually read the book, it appears that Mr. Comfort’s biggest fans are primarily of the ‘angry skeptics’ variety. You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can’t Make Him Think: Answers to Questions from Angry Skeptics has been tagged by them (as of the writing of this post) with such terms as strawman (72 times), illogical (73 times), lies (66 times), and my personal favorite: breathtaking inanity (83 times).

 

 

Logically, one would reason that if the book is really filled with “tiresome” and “sad arguments and lies” as some of the angry skeptics have written in their comments, they wouldn’t be snapping it up en mass as they claim. Of course, Ray’s new book may not be as popular among the angry skeptics as their comments seem to suggest. If that’s the case, most of the ‘customer comments’ were actually posted by people who really didn’t read the book. A fact that, if true, would make them a bunch of narrow minded bigots who are evidently more threatened by what they perceive as a challenge to their faith than by the actual content of the book.

Either way I guess, as Ray Comfort’s new book aptly demonstrates, that You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can’t Make Him Think.

Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization Banned for Being Too Christian

The publishing company Wiley-Blackwell has decided to stop the publication of the now not soon to be released reference work titled Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization. Reasons cited for what may well be “the first instance of mass book-burning in the 21st century” included that the ECC contained words or passages about the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, Evangelism, a “tone” of uniqueness about Christ and Christianity, and historical references to the persecution and massacres of Christians by Muslims.

The four volume work about Christian civilization was also criticized because it used BC/AD date references instead of BCE/CE, it didn’t include articles favorable to Islam, and it failed to denigrate Christianity “in some form or fashion”. (Online Source).

The historical irony of Wiley-Blackwell’s decision is that the origins of the modern publishing business is descendent from Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press from which the very first ever published book was the Bible.

Welcome to the brave new world of editorial stupidity and censorship. Nazi armbands may be purchased in the Wiley-Blackwell gift shop.

Just in Time for Darwin Day Celebration

 

Learn more about Darwin Day and what it promotes through public education and the implication for Humanity in America and throughout the global community.

500th Anniversary of John Calvin’s First-Birth Day

July 10, 2009 marks the 500^th anniversary of John Calvin’s first birth. To commemorate the occasion, Princeton Seminary has published a public one year reading plan that also includes an audio/ podcast format designed to complete Calvin’s The Institutes of the Christian Religion over the course of the year (RSS link). A ‘Public is Welcome’ sign has been hung out at a discussion forum set up for those in the Presbytery of New Brunswick who will be reading the Institutes in ’09. That may be fun to check in on from time to time. Finally, Douglas Wilson at Blog and Mablog will be posting study/discussion questions in sync with the Princeton daily readings.

 

It seems that John Calvin was a bit reluctant to talk about himself in any detail and I couldn’t find a specific date he was born again. Several commentaries I have read places that event sometime between 1527 and (November 1) 1533 however about that event Calvin wrote this in his Preface to the Psalms:

 

“God in His secret providence finally curbed and turned me in another direction. At first, although I was so obstinately given to the superstitions of the papacy, that it was extremely difficult to drag me from the depths of the mire, yet be a sudden conversion He tamed my heart and made it teachable, this heart which for its age was excessively hardened in such matters.”

 

It is my prayer that the Lord uses the occasion of the celebration of John Calvin’s 500^th First-Birth day in 2009 to allow many others to experience that same taming which can only come from Above through the second birth.

An Unsafe God

 

Read An Unsafe God at SharperIron.

ESV Study Bible Free Giveaway

Monergism.com is giving away 5 copies of the ESV (English Standard Version) Study Bible.

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Giveaway ends October 16th. Enter Here.

A Bible Rob Bell Would Be Proud Of

A repackaged Vogue style New Testament by the “not particularly religious” Swedish ad man, Dag Soderberg, is set to be released in the U.S. later this month. According to this article, The Book will include, among other things, images of Angelina Jolie, a shirtless male model, Mahatma Gandhi, a close-up of a couple about to kiss, and Bono of U2 fame. These celebrities were chosen after a referendum of sorts in which the Swedish public voted on which famous figures in modern times represented goodness and compassion. I’m not sure how the shirtless male model made the cut, but hey, the people have spoken.

Apparently, “the usual Bible format”, you know- “lots of words but somewhat lacking in celebrity portraits”—is a real turn off for most people and Soderberg’s repackaging is just what’s needed to make it “more accessible”. It really doesn’t matter that Mahatma Gandhi* was not a Christian, nor that both Angelina’s** and Bono’s*** religion seems to be squishy at best—the insertion of their images and popularity will, no doubt, lend God some much needed credibility. No word yet about how the picture of the shirtless male model contributes to this, but a little soft porn, especially among the female and gay demographic, can only help create “a version of the Bible that people want to pick up”.

Yessiree, Woodrow Kroll’s lament about the Bible being the “best-loved, never-read book of all time” is about to be a thing of the past. Whew! I was worried there for a while.

——

*Mahatma Gandhi’s view of Jesus: “I regard Jesus as a great teacher of humanity, but I do not regard him as the only begotten son of God. That epithet in its material interpretation is quite unacceptable. Metaphorically we are all sons of God, but for each of us there may be different sons of God in a special sense. Thus for me Chaitanya may be the only begotten son of God … God cannot be the exclusive Father and I cannot ascribe exclusive divinity to Jesus.” (Harijan: June 3, 1937 emphasis added)

**Angelina Jolie’s view of God: “There doesn’t need to be a God for me. There’s something in people that’s spiritual, that’s godlike. I don’t feel like doing things just because people say things, but I also don’t really know if it’s better to just not believe in anything, either.” (AV Club, September 6, 2000, emphasis added).

***Bono’s view of Christianity: “Be wary of people who think theirs is the only way. Unilateralism before God is dangerous.”

Abiding Darkness

I had the opportunity this past weekend to reread Abiding Darkness by John Aubrey Anderson and found myself, like the first time I read it, unable to put it down until I reached the book’s back cover. This time around though, I found myself enthralled not so much by its fictional account of spiritual warfare as I was by the greater theme of redemption and personal evangelism woven throughout its pages. Someone (I wish I could remember who) once said that we enter into new worlds when we read well. True enough, but to this I would add that the capability of the reader to do this is directly proportional to the writer’s ability to craft words and ideas into a compelling narrative. Anderson does this, and the compelling narrative of Abiding Darkness, threaded throughout the novel, is best summed up by the often repeated phrase of his main characters about Jesus: “to know Him and make Him known”.

Most editorial reviews of Abiding Darkness (such as the one from Amazon quoting AudioFile–“Think born-again Stephen King and substitute devils for ghosts and monsters.”) utterly fail to convey the essence of this book and are a disservice to its author. If you are among those who have ever heard the compelling call of the Great Commission give this book a try. When you do you will find yourself slipping effortlessly into the fictional world created by John Aubrey Anderson and inhabited by those who want nothing less or more than “to know Him and make Him known”.