For broadcast on 2CH Sydney, Sunday 14 February 2010
9.00 am – Happy St Valentine’s Day
I wonder if the thought that today is Valentine’s Day has crossed your mind this morning. Perhaps you’re one of those happy individuals who has discovered they are the object of someone else’s previously undisclosed affection. Or you’ve declared your attachment to the one you love.
Apparently the tradition owes its origin to an event in AD 269 when a bloke named Valentine was executed for going against an imperial decree to suspend weddings because the emperor, Claudius II, needed more single men to serve in his armies. Valentine became patron saint of engaged couples, and bee keepers and a host of others.
Sending “Valentines” began in the mid-nineteenth century. Like Christmas and Easter, it’s awfully commercialised these days. But St Valentine’s Day reminds us of the importance of marriage, and the love between a woman and a man, and the joy of declaring that love in word and action.
I’m Rod Benson for nswchurches.com
12.00 pm – Atheists, churchgoers and ethics
According to new research, people who have no religion know right from wrong just as well as those who regularly attend churches and other places of worship. The research found that most religions had a particular moral code which helped to organise society, but atheists and agnostics appeared to make intuitive judgments between right and wrong in common with believers.
As one of my atheist friends quipped, “Did they really need to do research to show that?”
For Dr Hauser and his researchers, moral intuition seems hard-wired into our brains. They might be surprised to learn that the Bible agrees (e.g. Romans chapter 1). But it also teaches that we are imperfect and prone to immoral intuition.
Which is why Christians turn to God, and the Bible, as the first port of call in determining what is right and wrong, and why they rely on a power beyond themselves to shape the good life.
I’m Rod Benson for nswchurches.com
5.00 pm – Anti-Christian violence in India
One of the saddest things about the world today is the fighting that goes on between people of rival faiths. Some of the worst is occurring in India, where government authorities appear to be turning a blind eye to the suffering and injustice. There were 72 recorded attacks against Christians in India’s southern state of Karnataka in 2009. It looks like 2010 will be just as violent.
Indian Christians are attacked by Hindus in Karnataka “at rapid regularity” and “with near impunity.” The cause is Hindu nationalism, driven by high caste Hindus desperate and determined to perpetuate caste privilege.
Church property is attacked, vandalised and burned. Christians are threatened and violently persecuted for their faith. Virtually any act of witness or worship can lead to a charge of seeking to procure “forcible” conversions.
Yet God is at work. Please pray for the Church in Karnataka and in all India, and wherever religious persecution is on the rise.
I’m Rod Benson for nswchurches.com
