September 20, 2015:
Castro: Ready to go back to church after meeting with Pope Francis
| COMMENT: What an amazing statement for the head of a communist regime to make. Prophecy being fulfilled. The entire world is in admiration of this Pope. |
Cuban President Raúl Castro met with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Sunday and thanked the pontiff for his role in rekindling relations between the United States and his island nation.
The Communist leader also said he was so impressed with the pope that "I will go back to praying and go back to the church, and I'm not joking."
"When the pope goes to Cuba in September, I promise to go to all his Masses, and with satisfaction," Castro said at a news conference at the office of Italian Premier Matteo Renzi, whom he met with after the Vatican talks.
"I read all the speeches of the pope, his commentaries, and if the pope continues this way, I will go back to praying and go back to the church, and I'm not joking," he said, according to AP.
"I am from the Cuban Communist Party, that doesn't allow (religious) believers, but now we are allowing it, it's an important step," Castro said.
Castro, talking about Francis, said he was "very impressed by his wisdom, his modesty, and all his virtues that we know he has."
Click on Link:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/05/10/pope-francis-raul-castro/27079241/
Ben Carson’s Religion, Explained
By Jack Jenkins
Sep 16, 2015 4:27pm
When asked, Carson identifies as a Seventh-day Adventist (SDA), the same tradition claimed by his mother and his estranged father, who was a minister in the denomination. The enigmatic Protestant group emerged out of the Second Great Awakening — a 19th century American Christian revival movement — but has unusual origins. Its founder, Baptist preacher William Miller, was convinced he knew the exact date of Jesus Christ’s prophesied Second Coming, or return to earth. When several of Miller’s suggested dates passed without incident, however, swaths of his followers abandoned the tradition — including many who had given away all their possessions to be a part of the group. Still, a sizable portion kept the faith while fracturing into several subgroups, the largest of which is today’s Seventh-day Adventist Church, which now claims around 18 million members worldwide— but less than 7 percent reside in the United States.
“As a Christian, I am not the least bit offended by the beliefs of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Mormons and so forth,” Carson wrote. “In fact, I am delighted to know that they believe in something that is more likely to make them into a reasonable human being, as long as they don’t allow the religion to be distorted by those seeking power and wealth.”
When he was asked to speak at a Baptist pastor’s conference in April, a cadre of young ministers mostly affiliated with the group Baptist21 protested. They took particular umbrage with an Easter Facebook post (since deleted) in which Carson wrote, “Let us also remember that Jews, Christians and Muslims all believe in God, and while there are ideological differences in who Jesus was, we should find peace in the fact that we are all God’s children.” They insisted his tolerant perspective could imply a theological belief that allows for multiple pathways to God outside of Christianity — a position firmly rejected by most evangelicals on biblical grounds.
Click on Link:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2015/09/16/3702360/ben-carson-faith-profile/
Why Evangelicals Should Be Terrified Of Trump
By Jack Jenkins
Sep 1, 2015 8:00am
While speaking to reporters at a South Carolina campaign event last Thursday, businessman and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was asked a simple question: Could he explain his robust support among Protestant evangelicals — a religious group he has never claimed as his own, and which he has done relatively little to court?
Trump isn’t evangelical, but it would be wrong to call him irreligious. He claims Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan as his spiritual home, a congregation affiliated with the Reformed Church of America (RCA). But while he says he worships “as often as he can,” evidence suggests that is a rare occurrence: Officials at Marble Church issued a statement last Friday announcing that Trump is not an “active member” of the congregation, although sources tell Think Progress that his parents and ex-wife were very involved and his children were baptized in the sanctuary.
Yet when Trump was directly asked about religious liberty by a reporter from the Christian Broadcasting Network — specifically the impact of legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide — he declined to acknowledge the domestic debate. Instead, he pivoted to a discussion of Christians persecuted abroad, repeating the progressive axiom that true Christian persecution is happening in other parts of the world, not among evangelicals in the United States.
“If you’re from Syria and you’re a Christian, you cannot come into this country — and they’re the ones that are being persecuted,” he said. “If you’re Islamic and you come in, hard to believe, you can come in so easily. In fact, it’s one of our main groups of people that are coming in. Not that we should discriminate against one or the other. But if you’re Christian, you cannot get into the country … I thought that was unbelievable. We have to do something about it.”
Click on Link:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2015/09/01/3697159/donald-trump-evangelicals/
The NFL is dropping its tax-exempt status. Why that ends up helping them out.
The National Football League said Tuesday it will end its tax-exempt status, squashing one of America’s most baffling corporate tax breaks and granting the mega-business more secrecy about its inner financial workings.
The change will mean the NFL’s head office, which earned revenues of about $327 million in 2013, will have to pay taxes on its income. But the football juggernaut will no longer have to file yearly tax forms that publicly disclose details like executive pay, including for commissioner Roger Goodell, who made $44 million in 2012.
In a letter dated Tuesday to team owners and members of Congress, Goodell called the decades-old tax-exempt status a “distraction” that has “been mischaracterized repeatedly,” and whose end “will make no material difference to our business.”
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Is the NFL skirting the tax man?
Updated 8:45 AM ET, Tue September 23, 2014
Did the National Football League make $10.5 billion in 2013, pay its chief executive Roger Goodell $44.2 million, yet pay no taxes to Uncle Sam?
Well, yes and no.
The National Football League pays taxes through its various money-making offshoots such as NFL Properties and NFL Ventures, but the league office in midtown Manhattan, which paid Goodell his very handsome salary, doesn't.
The reason goes back to 1942 when the IRS ruled the NFL was a trade association for its now 32-member teams and therefore exempt from taxes as a nonprofit under section 501(c)6 of the tax code.
Click on Link:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/22/us/nfl-nonprofit-taxes/
Examining NFL's tax-exempt status
6/6/2013
Before you start comparing the NFL to the American Red Cross, it's important to know how and why the NFL is a tax-exempt organization. According to league spokesman Brian McCarthy, the NFL is organized as a trade or industry association that is exempt from taxation under Section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code, not Section 501(c)(3), which exempts charitable organizations. In no way is the NFL claiming to be a charity.
Instead, Section 501(c)(6) exempts from taxation "business leagues, chambers of commerce, real estate boards, boards of trade, or professional football leagues (whether or not administering a pension fund for football players), not organized for profit … ."
Jeffrey Tenenbaum, a Washington D.C. attorney who chairs the nonprofit organizations group at Venable LLP, says Section 501(c)(6) essentially exempts from taxation, "an organization whose primary purpose is to further the industry or profession it represents."