Washington Times: "Republican political strategists have estimated [that] in 2000, as many as 6 million frequent churchgoers did not show up to vote. 'Religious conservatives are a unique kind of "swing voter,"' [Colin] Hanna [the group's president] said. 'They don't swing between Bush and Kerry, but between Bush and not voting.' Evangelical Christians make up 7 percent of the population and 86 percent of them expect to vote for Bush this time, according to a survey last month of 1,260 registered voters by the independent California-based Barna Research Group."

Washington Times: ""Our platform is an acknow-ledgment that most of our nation's Founding Fathers had a deep faith in God. We believe that people of faith should be welcomed in the political process today as they were 200 years ago," [State Party Chairwoman Tina J.]. Benkiser said. She said the state party's plat-form is virtually identical to the one it has had for the past decade. Christians make up 82 percent of the U.S. population, Jews 1 percent and Muslims less than 1 percent, with athe-ists, agnostic and those citing no preference making up 13 percent, according to a Pew Research Council survey...."

Reuters: "'If [network executives are] looking for an untapped market, this is it,' [Jana Riess] said, noting polls that show most Americans profess a belief in God and nearly half counting themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. 'Americans are a very religious people, but our popular culture expressions have not always reflected that.... Those same people who read the "Left Behind" books would also like to see films and television shows that reflect their values and their spiritual principals.' ....Spirituality in series television also runs counter to decades of prime-time orthodoxy, which has generally consigned overtly religious themes to holiday specials."

D. Brooks in IHT: "Clinton made [a] faith-based con-nection.... He won the evangelical vote in 1992 [and] in 1996. He understood that if Democrats are not seen as religious, they will be seen as secular Ivy League liber-als, and will lose. John Kerry doesn't seem to get this. ...A recent Time magazine survey revealed that only 7 percent of Americans feel that Kerry is a man of strong religious faith. That's a catastrophic number...the first thing Kerry strategists [should] think about when they wake up in the morning and...the last thing...when they go to sleep at night....unless more Americans get a sense of Kerry's faith, they will feel no bond with him and they will be loath to trust him with their vote."

theBakersfieldchannel: "'Our Christian republic has declined into a pagan democracy,' said [Christian Exodus president] Cory Burnell. 'There are some issues people just can't take anymore, and [same-sex marriage] might finally wake up the complacent Christians.' Although the leadership of Christian Exodus is keeping a low profile for now, potential members are lighting up the group's Web site message board. And as might be expected, opinions on the future of the group and their influence on South Carolina span a wide range of expectations. Particularly when it comes to discussing those who may not agree with their philosophy."

Garry Wills, NYTimes: "The command not to kill is directed at the killing of persons, and the issue in abortion is this: When does the fetus become a per-son? The answer to that is not given by church teach-ing. Even St. Thomas Aquinas, who thought that a soul was infused into the body, could only guess when that infusion took place (and he did not guess 'at fertil-ization'). St. Augustine confessed an agnosticism about the human status of the fetus. Natural reason must use natural tools to deal with this question.... When is the fetus 'viable,' and viable as what? Does personality come only with responsibility, with personal communication?"  

SBC-sponsored web page: "Every candidate has his or her own set of values and positions on important issues. Shouldn't you vote for the candidates who believe like you do when it comes to your values and the important issues of our day? Think about it. Where a candidate stands on the issues is far more important than the party he or she belongs to and all the cam-paign promises and slogans. So here's the question: Does the candidate you plan to vote for share your values? Remember, you will vote someone’s values. Whose values will you vote? Yours or someone else's? How you vote really does matter. In fact, how you vote today impacts tomorrow."

iafrica.com "His family said Kim dreamed of conducting missionary work in Arab countries and planned to return to Seoul from Iraq to further his religious studies with the goal of being ordained as a minister. Kim (33) was due to return home next month to celebrate his father's 70th birthday, according to his family....In his last phone call in April this year to his father, Kim Jong-Kyu, Kim assured him that Iraq was safe. Kim was kidnapped last Thursday and intensive efforts to win his release failed after the South Korean government refused to bow to the kidnappers' main demand — to cancel the deployment of all South Korean troops to Iraq." 

USAToday: "...University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, who conducted the study...analyzed data from three large surveys conducted several times from 1972 to 1999 that examined behaviors and atti-tudes toward family and gender among different reli-gious groups, including Catholics and Protestant Christian denominations, Jews, Muslims and others. The results point to greater family involvement and less domestic violence among churchgoing Protes-tants, especially evangelicals, which he says include Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, and nonde-nominational evangelical churches."  

Albert Mohler on Crosswalk: "In his greeting to the participants, [sponsor] John Podesta warned, 'Of course, in the last 20 years we've seen the emergence of religious leaders who tried to dictate legislation, public policy from their particular set of religious beliefs. It's been a time when the religious leaders who attracted the widest attention were, quite frankly, often those with the narrowest minds.' Now, he seemed to argue, it's high time for broad-minded liberals to try to dictate legislation and public policy from 'their parti-cular set of religious beliefs.' The problem, of course, is those very beliefs. What in the world do these people believe?"

Washington Times: "The Rev. Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest who served in Congress during the 1970s, says he has advised the campaign to clamp down on religious rhetoric and 'keep cool on the Communion thing' after four Catholic bishops either barred Mr. Kerry by name from taking Communion in their dio-ceses or said prochoice Catholics should be denied the sacrament. ...[A] campaign source also said for-mer Clinton aides...have tutored campaign operatives on more aggressively using religion to appeal to voters. 'Why the campaign is not listening to any of them, I don't know,' the source said. 'Conservatives are about 20 years ahead of us on this stuff.'"

George Marlin, New York Post: "When an individual public figure is publicly criticized (i.e., New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey), it is because he has, in the church's eyes, created scandal by his professions to be a Cath-olic while dissenting from the church's core teachings. Yes, most politicians who have been publicly chastised are Democrats. That's because support for abortion is a litmus test for political advancement in that party. Plus, many Democratic Catholic politicians (like Kerry and Kennedy) have moved from being "personally opposed" to radical advocacy of abortion rights. But Republicans haven't been let off the hook. Tom Ridge," for example, was forbidden from speaking on church property....  

By CNN staffer Todd Leopold: "What God is not—
or what Walsch thinks of as 'yesterday's God'—is a bearded, demanding father figure on a throne. Walsch, an ingratiating—if intense—man who says he welcomes skepticism, knows that's a hard image to get past, but he says getting past it is necessary for humanity's survival. 'Humanity can evolve in one of two ways,' says Walsch. 'We can be spectators, tsk-tsking to annihilation. Or we can engage in a process in which we evolve ... aware of who we are and the role we are playing.'"

Toledo Blade: "Researchers, scholars, and anyone who likes to sort through numbers will find plenty of helpful and fascinating statistics about the world's religions on the authoritative Web site www.adher-ents.com. The site, not affiliated with any religious group, keeps track of data about the adherents to 42,667 religious groups around the world, with many of the statistics broken down by region and time period. If you're wondering, for example, how many members of the Christian and Missionary Alliance live in Ohio, the number is 25,334. Anyone searching for such obscure facts as how many Methodists lived in Ohio in 1816 will find that there were 18,150...."

Telegraph, UK: "According to the most recent poll, nearly half of all Americans, 48 per cent, believe in the Book of Genesis's version of our origins. The Creation-ists fervently hope that number may even be rising. Evolution is 'the dumbest and most dangerous idea in the history of humanity', said Kent Hovind, a vocal enthusiast for the cause.... Explaining his Creationist creed, he said: 'We think dinosaurs were part of the normal Creation and were just big lizards. Noah took some of them on the Ark, probably babies, when the floods came....Throughout history, there are stories of people killing the animals that survived but they called them dragons.'"

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