[note: for more recent news on Rick Warren, see Rick Warren's Dissertation Advisor Leads Network Promoting Uganda Anti-Gay Bill]

Video, below contains audio recording, photos, and transcript from Rick Warren's April 17, 2005 speech at California's Anaheim Angels Stadium, during 25th anniversary to celebrate the founding of Warren's  Saddleback Church.

below: partial transcript from Rick Warren's April 17, 2005 speech at California's Anaheim Angels Stadium, during 25th anniversary to celebration the founding of Warren's  Saddleback Church

Partial transcript of Rick Warren April 17, 2005 Anaheim sports stadium speech

[ ~minute 33:00 ]

"God is going to use you to change the world.

"We have a kingdom that nothing can destroy... it's indestructible, it's unshakable, going to last forever, it's going to cover the planet.

So the kingdom is multinational, it's powerful, it's eternal and, number four (this is the best news), it's inevitable because God is in control of history. History is his story.

And the Bible says this in Matthew 24 : 'The Good news about God's kingdom will be preached into all the world, in every nation, and then the end's going to come. '

And you can go argue about prophecy all you want but Jesus Christ is not going to conclude history until everybody he's wanted to hear the world has had a chance to hear the word. But one day God's going to bring everything to a culmination.

For the past 18 months we have been on a stealth, secret mission - project - around the world. We've been sending members out, actually over 4500 members somewhere overseas, over the period of time, the last few years, going out to do what we're gonna call the P.E.A.C.E. Plan.

You've been hearing little snippets about it, today we're going to unveil it publicly. But the first thing before I even talk about it in a minute is you need to understand that at the heart of the P.E.A.C.E. Plan is this theme - The Kingdom of God.

Saddleback and our Purpose Driven Network has now trained over 400,000 pastors in over 162 countries."

[ Minute ~43:00 ]

"What is the vision for the next 25 years ? I'll tell you what it is.

It is the global expansion of the kingdom of God.

It is the total mobilization of his church.

And the third part is the goal of a radical devotion of every believer.

Now, I choose that word 'radical' intentionally, because only radicals change the world.

Everything great done in this world is done by passionate people.

Moderate people get moderately nothing done. And moderation will never slay the global giants. . ."

[ minute 48:45 ]

"In 1939, in a stadium much like this, in Munich Germany, they packed it out with young men and women in brown shirts, for a fanatical man standing behind a podium named Adolf Hitler, the personification of evil.

And in that stadium, those in brown shirts formed with their bodies a sign that said, in the whole stadium, "Hitler, we are yours."

And they nearly took the world.

Lenin once said, "give me 100 committed, totally committed men and I'll change the world." And, he nearly did.

A few years ago, they took the sayings of Chairman Mao, in China, put them in a little red book, and a group of young people committed them to memory and put it in their minds and they took that nation, the largest nation in the world by storm because they committed to memory the sayings of the Chairman Mao.

When I hear those kinds of stories, I think 'what would happen if American Christians, if world Christians, if just the Christians in this stadium, followers of Christ, would say 'Jesus, we are yours' ?

What kind of spiritual awakening would we have ? "

[ minute 51:50 ]

"Jesus said, 'I want you to do this publicly.' So what I want you to do is take the card, and in just a minute, and if you say 'Rick, I am willing to serve God's purposes in my generation.'

I want you to open up to the sign that says 'Whatever it takes.'

Whatever it takes.

And I want you to just say, 'This is my commitment, before God and in front of everybody else. I'm in.' "

And I would invite you to just stand quietly and hold up 'Whatever it takes'. . .

I'm looking at a stadium full of people who are saying 'whatever it takes'.

Whatever it takes, God.  Time, talent, energy, money, effort, vision... God, whatever it takes.

Whatever it takes, that's what I'm going to do.

And I believe that today we are making history. We're making history that's going to start a movement that will bring a new Reformation in the church of God and a new spiritual awakening in our world. And, our world needs it.

And today, as you say 'whatever it takes,' you're saying publicly, "I'm in, God. I'm in...

...I'm in.' "

A new Talk To Action story identifies Apostle and bishop Julius Oyet as a major player in the recent effort in the Ugandan parliament to pass a draconian anti-gay bill. In this video [transcript posted below video] Ugandan Apostle Julius Oyet describes the recently launched 'College of Prayer,' which has played a significant role in organizing and rallying the Ugandan parliamentary MP's who have promoted the bill.

"Hello, I'm Apostle Julius Peter Oyet, I'm the President of College of Prayer in Uganda. I like College of Prayer because College of Prayer has been able to make us meet the needs of our nation. That Transformation is happening in Uganda right from the Parliament.

We launched College of Prayer in the Parliament of Uganda and we have a great team of the Uganda Government being part of the College of Prayer. We have four campuses of College of Prayer in the Parliament, in Kampala City with the VIP Pastors, in Aruah, in Gulu.

Why I like the College of Prayer - because it mentors leaders to, to, to revive the Body of Christ together. Now, another thing about College of Prayer is in the unity in diversity. Irrespective of our denominations and all our backgrounds, special prayer breaks through all these barriers and brings us together. College of Prayer has been able to bring the prayer life of our nation of the people of God very, very highly.

My vision for the College of Prayer is that we will have College of Prayer penetrate through the entire nation of Uganda. I've just returned from Rwanda and Burundi where I was talking to the members of parliament in Burundi and Rwanda and the VIP Pastors in ( ) Rwanda so that the next year we take College of Prayer into Rwanda and Burundi and, of course, into Tanzania and into Kenya where already people have been attending the College of Prayer.

College of Prayer is a place where, when we come together, we work together - that is great success. And, I want to thank you as pastors, as leaders in the marketplace. College of Prayer, that's not only mental leaders in the revived church but, also, it invites people from outside the church walls - the marketplace leaders. And that's why to this field we have come, we're with two members of Parliament. So we invite every leader, whether in the marketplace or in the pulpit - come with us, together, into College of Prayer.

To come together is the beginning. To work together is progress. But to serve together is success.

Thank you, for College of Prayer."

- Apostle Julius Oyet.

Mark Silk, at Spiritual Politics has picked up on my notice of the Hagee-Rodriguez embrace and zeroes in on what's certainly one of the most notable aspects:

"The key thing to understand about the Hagee trajectory is that his Cornerstone Church has made its way by evangelizing Mexican-American Catholics in San Antonio. That's why he was on the Catholic League's radar screen in the first place. NHCL is, of course, chock full of former Catholics too, and whatever the organization feels about Israel, Cornerstone Church belongs in it. The CUFI connection is ethno-religiously overdetermined."

Following the evolution of evangelical discourse as it re-defines homosexuality as evidence of "fallen creation", Terri Murray looks at how the Christian right have shifted their rhetoric to adapt to empirical research showing that homosexuality might just be 'natural' after all.  Evangelicals have morphed their own thinking into a form that resembles Catholicism's "love the sinner, hate the sin" formula... but do these arguments work?  

US News and World Report's Dan Gilgoff has charitably provided evangelist Ray Comfort a media platform in the form of a US News & World "exclusive" through which Comfort defends his efforts to distribute, on college campuses, up to 175,000 copies of Darwin's Origin of Species that include a creationist "special introduction" to the book.

How serious of a thinker is Ray Comfort ? Readers can decide for themselves. In the video on the right, Ray Comfort explains that bananas, which he suggests are divinely ordained, are optimally formed to fit the human hand, support creationist ideas, and rebut the Theory of Evolution. In the lefthand video short, evangelist Chuck Missler explains how Darwin's theory is disproved by a jar of peanut butter.

These video shorts have proved popular to both creationists and adherents to Evolutionary Theory, perhaps for different reasons. As a side note, peanut butter and banana sandwiches were one of Elvis Presley's favorite foods.

While Ray Comfort, in the the video below, suggests that the dominant banana of world commerce, the Cavendish banana, is the result of divine design, that's incorrect. Cavendish bananas are the product of human botanical tinkering. The Cavendish is a sterile hybrid developed several decades ago after the former banana of world commerce, the Gros Michel variety, fell to a ravening banana fungus. In the world of Comfort evangelism, there are layers of absurdity within layers of ignorance, like nested Russian dolls.

The organization "Atheists of Florida" sponsored a billboard promoting atheism in Lakeland, Florida.  I, however, have some concerns.

The following is my own transcript of a 20 minute phone conversation between Richard Nixon and Billy Graham, on February 23, 1973.
As far as I am aware this is the only publicly available, complete transcript of the conversation. An Mp3 recording of it can be listened to here. I have tried to reproduce the dynamics of the conversation as faithfully as possible.

Well, there's a change in this case.  After the judge gets immigration documents and so on from the parents, he will send her back.

The first day of Fall could be considered the official launch date for the annual war on the war on Christmas, which represents a significant part of the the American Family Association business model (see mailer, below). A new front in the ongoing war on the war on Christmas has just opened in Texas, and on conservative websites there's talk of boycotts against businesses that spurn the Christmas holiday. However, there's some evidence that over the decades the vigilance of right wing Christian watchdog groups such as the AFA has grown slack; in 1960, amidst the Red Scare and hyper-patriotism that characterized the burgeoning Cold War, the war on the war on Christmas started in July.

The two-decade shift in the launch date of the yearly war on the war on Christmas raises disturbing questions - are Christian watchdog groups such as the Rev. Tim Wildmon's AFA themselves infected by creeping secularism ? By 2060, will the yearly war on the war on Christmas not get going until November ? Curious minds want to know.

Today it is reported that the judge excused the school officials who violated the agreement they had over separation of Church and State.

Well, they're at it again in Florida.

The FDLE just completed an investigation and found "no credible reports of threats" against Rifqa Bary.