Partners of Benny Hinn Ministries please read this.

If you are a partner of Benny Hinn Ministries or giving money to Benny Hinn you need to see CBC's Fifth Estate investigation into his activities. The last 10 minute section shows how he spent your money during 2003.

Remember: this money came from you and people like you.



This video can also be viewed from the CBC Website.

A point to ponder andout Christmas

Christmas is a time when we should be telling our children that we love them unconditionally because God loves us unconditionally. We should be giving presents to our children because are their parents and we love them.

Instead, we tell our children that a stranger (Santa CLaus) will give them presents if they are good.Apart from being a lie, it is a complete perversion of the message of Christmas, that God gave his only son that we might have abundant life, not because we deserve it, but because God loves us.

Doctors and the closed shop

My Dad worked in the health service all his working life and always says that Doctors are a totally closed shop who will protect each other no matter how obvious an error has been.

This story is an example:

http://www.freedomforall.net/2006/11/why-not-simple-negligence.html

Regardless of whether there has been any negligence, the doctors involved ar ebehaving in a way which seems more to do with self preservation that getting to the truth and actually putting right any wrong.

How to get material removed from the Google Groups usenet archive.

I recently had to complain to Google about some Usenet posts which were archived as web pages on their Google Groups service. After a lot of running around I finally got this email from Google which explains exactly how to request the removal of posts.

I hope other people will find it useful and save some time trying to get material removed from the archive.


Thank you for your note.
To request that we remove information from our service because that information violates your rights under the laws of your country, you must provide a written communication (by fax or regular mail, not by email) that sets forth the items specified below. If you're not sure whether you have the right to request removal from our service, we suggest you seek the advice of an attorney.

Please use the following format (including section numbers):

1. Identify precisely the Google website where the information above appears (for instance, Google.fr). This is required because each website is governed by the specific laws of the country with which it is associated.

2. Identify your country or countries of residence and citizenship.

3. Identify precisely the information that you claim violates your rights under applicable law (the "Unlawful Material").

FOR WEB SEARCH, YOU MUST IDENTIFY EACH SEARCH RESULT THAT DIRECTLY LINKS TO A WEBPAGE THAT ALLEGEDLY CONTAINS UNLAWFUL MATERIAL. This requires you to provide (a) the search query that you used, and (b) the URL for each allegedly unlawful search result. (Note that the URL for each search result appears in green on the last line of the description for that search result.)

For example, suppose you conducted a search on Google.com using the query [ Google ], and believed that the third and fourth results directly linked to a webpage that violated your rights under applicable law. In such a case, you would provide the following information:

Search Query: Google
Allegedly Illegal Webpages:
http://www.illegalexample.com/illegal_stuff/illegal_page.html
http://www.illegalexample.com/illegal_stuff/illegal_page_2.html

FOR GOOGLE GROUPS, YOU MUST IDENTIFY THE MESSAGE ID OF EACH MESSAGE THAT ALLEGEDLY CONTAINS INFRINGING MATERIAL. When viewing the article you wish to have suppressed, click the "show options" link near the top, click the "Show original" link, and look for the information between two brackets <> next to Message ID. Copy and paste the content of that line (the information between brackets) into your complaint.

4. Identify in sufficient detail the reason that you believe the information indicated above violates your rights or is illegal under applicable law. For example, "Each of the search result URLs identified above contains child pornography that is not permitted under the laws of the country in which I reside or am a citizen."

5. Provide information reasonably sufficient to permit Google to contact you (email address is preferred).

6. Provide information sufficient to permit Google to notify the owner/administrator of the webpage that allegedly contains the Unlawful Material (webmaster or domain registrant name and email address).

7. Include the following statement: "I have a good faith belief that the information specified above is not permitted by applicable law."

8. Include the following statement: "I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in this notification is accurate."

9. Sign the paper.

10. Send the written communication to the following address:

Google Inc.
Attn: Google Legal Support
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
USA

Or fax to:

+1(650)963-3255, Attn: Google Legal Support

Please note that a copy of each legal notice we receive is sent to a third-party partner for publication and annotation. As such, your letter will be forwarded to Chilling Effects (http://www.chillingeffects.org ) for publication. You can see an example of such a publication at http://www.chillingeffects.org/international/notice.cgi?NoticeID=3155. A link to your published letter will be displayed in Google's search results in place of the removed content.

Regards,
The Google Team

Church Name Generator

Setting up an African led church in the UK?
Having problems thinking up a name?

This generator will make some suggestions for you:

Click Here

Mona Lisa looks like the Veil of Veronica

I was watching a documentary about relics of the crucifixion earlier today. I had never seen the original "veil of veronica" before but as soon as I did it looked rather familiar.

Have a look at the face on the veil and the face of the Mona Lisa, especially the long nose, position of the lips and the alignment of the eyes.


























I have no idea what this similarity means. It could be as simple as them both following the same artistic idea about what constitutes beautiful proportions for a face.

Feel free to leave a comment.

Is it possible to prove the non existence of God?

This is a bit like trying to argue that there are no snakes in the wild in Ireland.

This is a long held belief, but you would have to look under every stone and in every bit of undergrowth to be absolutely certain.
You would also have to be looking in all the possible places a snake could live at the same time in case it was moving around.
Any rational person would agree that you can't prove without doubt that there are no snakes in Ireland.
Therefore, you can't prove that there is no God.

Furthermore, because God is spirit its much more difficult to find God than a snake.
You need to have spiritual antennae to detect spiritual things just like you need a radio to detect radio signals even though they are around us all the time.

Its not possible to prove the non existence of God unless you can explore the spiritual realm fully.

How many people will die at the battle of Armageddon?

According to Revelation 14:19-20:

"The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God's wrath. They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses' bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia."

Perhaps we can use some maths to work out how many people would need to die to produce that amount of blood? My initial thoughts were millions but the maths proves otherwise.

Assumptions:
Assuming that 1600 stadia is the diameter of the circle of affected ground (we don't get any idea of length from the text).
Assuming a horses bridle is 4 feet from the ground.

4 feet = 1.22m
1,600 stadia = 300km = 300,000m

We can then calculate the volume of blood using the formula:
V = lPIr2
V = 86,271 cubic metres or 86,271 litres of blood

Average amount of blood in a human body = 5.6 litres

By dividing the two we can work out how many dead bodies would be needed to produce that amount of bloood:

86271/5.6 = 15,405 bodies.

This does not take account of the displacement of bodies in the blood which could reduce the amount of dead by 75% or more, or the possibility that half the blood might be retained in the body, which could double the number of dead required to produce that amount of blood.

Therefore we have a minimum number of dead of only 3,851 (fully drained with displacement of bodies in the blood) or a maximum of 30,810 (half drained of blodd with no bodies to displace the volume to a height of four feet).

Either way both are not impossible and its not millions.

(80,000 people were killed immediately by the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima so even 30,810 dead in one battle is not unprecedented.)

Paypal SSL Certificate Error

www.paypal.com is today showing an SSL warning when you enter their site. This has been caused by them referencing some images on the page via an incorect URL.

Livingston Elim Church

I have been going along to this church for a few weeks and found it to be very friendly and open to the move of the holy spirit. It has been so refreshing to be accepted into a church family without any real reservations. Its a real community too with midweek meetings and lots of things to help strengthen one anothers faith.

Update 15th October 2007
Well I went to the Livingston Elim church (also known as Oasis Christian Centre) regularly for a year and nearly became a member, but I have stopped going now.
To find out why click here.

Are Charismatics Gnostics?

My position on this has been hardening somewhat over the past month.

Charismatics are gnostics, because they believe that God gives special revelation to people at different points in their spiritual development. This then gives those people additional power (spiritual or temporal depending on the church). These points of progress involve initiations, central to which are church leaders. e.g. the initial public demonstration of receiving the holy spirit, or later receiving prophetic words which may act as the church's permission to undertake oa specific ministry.

Evangelicals believe that the bible is the whole of God's revelation and it is up to Christians to study the word and apply it in their lives. This is aided by the holy spirit who indwells every believer. There will be no further revelation other than the bible.

Thisis my honest assessment of the divide. I am not trying to get at anyone and you don't have to agree with me, its just how i see it.

These two sides are not reconcilable because charismatics, by their own definitions, view evangelicals as partial christians or lower level christians. Therefore, all that can be achieved by discussions like this is strife.

In practice its perfectly possible for charismatics and evangelicals to work together on a one to one basis if they know each other as friends. I have seen charismatics (especially young ones) question what they have been taught when they first come into contact with evangelicals in mission and evangelism. In my experience traditional pentecostal churches can also work well with evangelical churches. Its the shepherding/covenant type churches which practice greater separation (and of course the black led churches).

Christians who do not go to church.

This is a significant issue for many Christians and it’s what caused me to lose my faith after a 10 year gap of going to church.
It wasn't the gap that caused the problem, it was the going back to church and not getting any sort of fellowship or friendship over several months (I did not expect it to happen instantly but after a few months it really should have).

Here is how I have identified the problem and how I am overcoming it:

1. The church does not matter.
No one has ever been saved by going to church.

2. People are fallible and make mistakes. I allowed this to cloud my relationship with God. I truly know that God loves me and nothing anyone can do to me can take that away. This is the knowledge that kept me in my faith for 10 years during which I had limited contact with other Christians, and it’s what is keeping me going now.

3. Just because I don't have a live church connection does not mean that God will not use me to advance his kingdom.
I used to think I was "out of the ministry" because I did not go to church. I now know this is wrong. There are many ways in which you can minister to other people outside of church. In fact its easier to serve God outside of the church because that’s where all the unsaved people are (and all the jobs are spoken for in most churches anyway as they have limited opportunities to serve, they basically make 80% of the congregation impotent).

Now, it would be nice to find a church and have my faith strengthened by fellowship with other Christians but if you walk into a church the only thing you have in common with the people there is that you are born again. Yes, its a big thing but its not enough to base normal social relationships on, therefore I think I think anyone looking for a church needs to find one where the people have similar interests, aspirations and personality types to themselves.

BUT, like you I live somewhere where there is no real choice of church.
The church I attend has a warped sense of community. For years they have been trying to reach people who live round the place where the church happened to have been built.
However, if I look at the church its real sphere of influence is the families, friends and contacts of the members, who may live further a field. They just ignore that community and beat themselves up because they are not reaching people in the next street.

I am looking at two areas right now which I hope will address my feeling of not belonging:

1. My personal ministry. How I relate to other people both in conduct, and in sharing the gospel. As someone who is "powerful" by human standards I should have less fear of being open about my faith as I have less to lose, but I don't because I have not always been in the position of having status. I am what is known by marketers as an "opinion leader". I now need to start leading some opinions!

2. Para-church organisations. There may be opportunities to mix with other Christians in other organisations with specific ministries. I may do something musical in this area.


Another area I have been looking at again is money. I gave up everything financially to go into full time ministry and when that was taken from me by illness and other things I got the opportunity to serve others through charity work. This also did not pay well but I was happy. I believe that God has blessed that faithfulness and also the 10 years I had away from the church by making me financially secure and successful in business. My company already gives more percentage wise to charity than most other companies I know of but we could go further. I want to investigate that this year. My problem is that I really do not like blowing my own trumpet. I even conspired to conceal some of our giving in the company accounts so that it was not so obvious even if that meant paying tax on some of those donations.
It has also caused people to see the wealth and go on about camels and eyes of needles when they did not know me in the days when i would save up £5 a month until I had enough to buy a reconditioned Hoover Junior for £50, or when I lived in a house with peoples cast off furniture and sleeping in the pyjamas my grandfather died in.

So....... I think i need to just be more open and honest with people about the money issue. I enjoy life, I enjoy helping other people and I enjoy having nice things, (but I own them, they don't own me and I won't have them forever) and I am not going to let anyone steal my joy.

Fastest Mercedes Benz Cars

An interesting bit of research I have been doing, comparing the 0-60 times of different Mercedes Benz models and comparing them to the current list price. Clearly most expensive is not always fastest with the E55 appearing to be a bit of a bargain:

Model	Price	0-60
SLR	£330,000	3.8
SL65	£147,960	4.2
SL55	£97,267	4.7
E55	£64,455	4.7
S55	£89,748	4.8
CL600	£88,080	4.8
SLK55	£50,555	4.9
CLK55	£48,785	5.2
C55	£49,740	5.4
SLK350	£34,955	5.6
SL500	£74,125	6.3
C350	£34,225	6.5

A new way of charging for web hosting?

I am having some thoughts about charging models and doing some "free thinking".

In the past hosts charged based on disk and bandwidth usage.Because we now buy bandwidth by the mbit, the cost is pretty stable and the average use per customer is relatively low.Disk space is getting cheaper (but as we keep three backup copies of everything its 4x the cost you might thing).
So, this leaves three costs:

1. Processor usage
Processing power is a finite resource.I have strated using quad processor servers which have a lot more resilience to usage spikes and are less likley to crash but it still means that if we have a few heavy users on one machine we can put much fewer sites on that server.This increases the cost per account to us and this gets passd on evenly to all customers.It may be possible at some point to reilably measure processor usage and charge based on that.

2. Support costs
Customers who require a lot of support cost us so much money we donot make a profit from them and this has to be recovered from profit made from other customers.This is unfair to customers who are competent or who are willing to read the documentation.How about charging a low fee for hosting and a per ticket charge for support?That would mean that competent customers paid less and those who needed more support paid more.

3. Customer acquisition
In some cases we pay more to acquire a customer than we ever make from them, so is there a case for charging less for repeat business or word of mouth customers and substantially more for those who are recruited through advertising?
This would appear to be unfair, but so might charging per support ticket.

These sort of issues do need to be discussed in the industry as the current low level of pricing is leading to unreliablilty and corner cutting (when it gets to the £1.99/mo level), but the cvurrent pricing models just don't reflect the real costs.

Three things that were not in the Labour Party manifesto.

1. Reclassification of Cannabis to a class C drug.
2. Gay marriages.
3. Legalisation of "small" brothels.

Is there any point in them publishing a manifesto next time?

Is there a seperate Baptism of the Holy Spirit?

This is my understanding based on my reading of the book of Acts and the four gospels:

Prior to pentecost the holy spirit was given to believers on an individual basis for specific purposes and was not a permanent indwelling.

People who came to faith in Christ after pentecost received the holy spirit at the same time as they believed and accepted the promise of salvation.

People who believed prior to pentecost received the holy spirit either on the day of pentecost or when they had hands laid on them by someone with apostolic authority. They did not have to do anything to receive it, it was a gift and was just given in a straightforward fashion.

Therefore we (i.e. all people beyond 100 AD given the lifespans of the time) received the holy spirit indwelling us when we believed.
This does not preclude the command to be "filled with the spirit" which has nothing to do with the spirit indwelling us, but is more to do with "not quenching the spirit" and allowing God control of our lives via the work of the holy spirit.

You see, a doctrine of baptism of the holy spirit seperate from conversion can have only two possible practical implications.

Either:

1. Not all Christians have the holy spirit indwelling them and there are therefore two classes of Christian.

or

2. Only Christians who had a verifiable supernatural experience of the holy spirit are really christians, and the only way to get the verification is speaking in tongues.

Either way its pretty devisive and condemnatory.

The "new wave" Christians I have come across say that they don't believe in a baptism of the holy spirit but they believe in the gifts. However, every one of them I have asked to explain in details what they believe ends up expounding position #1: that there are two classes of Christian.