A copy of the Message translation of the Bible was more than a spiritual lifesaver for a Dayton, Ohio bus driver.
49-year-old Rickey Waggoner, a driver for the Dayton Regional Transit Authority, had been working on his bus when he was approached by three youths. The youths shot Waggoner in the chest at point blank range.
However, a copy of the Message Bible that Waggoner had in his pocket stopped both of the bullets. Police say the Bible saved Waggoner’s life.
While not specifically attributing the act to divine will, a Dayton police officer said there had to be something special that happened for the bus driver.
“There was obviously some kind of intervention involved in this incident because he should probably not be here,” Dayton Police Sergeant Michael Pauley told the Dayton Daily News.
Police believe the attack was a gang initiation because Waggoner reported one of the youths said “if you want to be all the way in the club” to the one who pulled the trigger.
The man who created the Message translation, Eugene Peterson, said that he had heard of similar incidents in World War II where Bibles stopped bullets.
“It’s good to be in the club,” Peterson told Fox News.
The anti-Christian Freedom From Religion Foundation is suing another municipality to try and remove any trace of Christianity from any public area.
The FFRF sent a letter to Pinellas Park officials saying that the existence of the Bible on a podium inside the city council chamber means the city is endorsing Christianity over every other religion. According to Fox News, their letter cites court cases that resulted in the removal of Bibles from public facilities.
“Not only is the city council sending a message of endorsement for Christianity over other religions and nonreligion,” the letter says, “but display of this King James Bible sends a message of endorsement of one particular Christian sect over all others.”
Incoming city manager Doug Lewis says they are reviewing the FFRF’s most recent letter but they believe because the Bible was given to the city during the dedication of the building by the city’s Kiwanis Club, it’s part of the history of the building.
A Texas city’s mayor is drawing fire after he declared 2014 the “Year of the Bible” in his city.
Tom Hayden, the mayor of Flower Mound, Texas, made the declaration at last month’s city council meeting. Hayden told reporters that he had been considering the declaration for two years because he wants his community to connect through the Bible.
“The morality that helped build our country is based on the values that are found in the Bible,” Hayden told Fox News. “And as we look at problems, maybe we’re getting away from those values. And in my little small way, I want to encourage people to get back into those values.”
Hayden hopes to encourage residents to join together in reading the Bible in its entirety in 2014.
While some residents are critical of the Mayor’s move, it is not without precedent. President Ronald Reagan made a similar declaration in 1983.
Costco released an apology yesterday for Bibles at a California store being labeled as fiction. Now, a woman in Missouri has discovered Bibles labeled as fiction in a store in Manchester, Missouri.
Not only were the Bibles labeled fiction, they were put in a display with Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
Mary-Margaret Meyers-Walker said she offered to move the Bibles to the correct section of the store. She called the regional office and was told that the store apparently never received the memo to move the Bibles.
Meyers-Walker said she visited the store because she had heard of the controversy in California.
The local management refused to talk to St. Louis area station KMOX about the incident.
Costco has released a statement apologizing for at least one of their stores selling Bibles with a label on them that read “fiction.”
“We deeply regret the mislabeling of the Bible and meant no offense to anyone,” read an e-mail statement. “The buyer has let us know that this was an error and the books are being pulled off the shelves to be re-marked.”
Fox News says Costco sent them a statement claiming their distributor made a mislabeling mistake on a small percentage of Bibles but that the company should have spotted and corrected the mistake before the books were placed on store shelves.
A pastor in Simi Valley, California who snapped a picture of the Bible and posted it on twitter first discovered the labeling. The photo of the Bible went viral and led to hundreds of complaints to Costco’s offices.
The government of North Korea has murdered Christians for possessing a Bible.
A South Korean newspaper reports that the people labeled criminals by the North Korean government for owning a Bible were killed in public execution events arranged by Kim Jong-un’s government.
A source said in the city of Wonsan, those being executed were tied to stakes in a local stadium and shot to death with machine guns while over 10,000 residents were forced by military forces to watch. He said the bodies were so riddled with machine gun bullets that identities could not be determined.
Relatives or accomplices of those murdered were taken to prison camps.
Some North Korean experts say the executions are an effort by the government to quell any possible opposition.
The American Bible Society has released their 2013 “State of the Bible” report and revealed that just over 4 in 10 Americans reads the Bible online.
The report says 29% of Americans search for Bible verses on smartphones while 17% use a Kindle or iPad. Continue reading →
Vanderbilt University, which has been aggressively taking steps to remove Christian student organizations from their campus, has a professor who says that the Bible played a “prominent” role in arguments for starting the American Revolution.
James P. Byrd writes in his new book Scared Scripture, Sacred War: The Bible and the American Revolution that the origins of the American Revolution are not purely secular as some modern day activists wish to claim. Continue reading →
