Donald Trump: I am a ‘Sunday church person’ and the Bible is ‘the thing’

Billionaire businessman and star of the reality TV show 'The Apprentice' Donald Trump has long been rumoured to have political ambitions, and as a potential GOP presidential contender he recently spoke freely about his faith saying he is a "Sunday church person."

“I believe in God. I am Christian. I think The Bible is certainly, it is THE book. It is the thing," Trump informed the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody.

In the interview Trump also said that he used to attend First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica Queens.

"I'm a Protestant, I'm a Presbyterian. And you know I've had a good relationship with the church over the years. I think religion is a wonderful thing. I think my religion is a wonderful religion.”

When asked about his actual church attendance at the moment, Trump seemed less sure of himself.

”Well, I go as much as I can. Always on Christmas. Always on Easter. Always when there's a major occasion. And during the Sundays. I'm a Sunday church person. I'll go when I can.”

Brody also asked Trump what he does with all the Bibles sent to him by the public.

"There's no way I would ever throw anything, to do anything negative to a Bible, so what we do is we keep all of the Bibles," said Trump. "I would have a fear of doing something other than very positive so actually I store them and keep them and sometimes give them away to other people."

The big business mogul has given a number of interviews since indicating interest in a 2012 presidential bid and this latest one with CBN could indicate an attempt to impress American evangelicals - a powerful voting bloc in the United States.

In other interviews, Trump has repeatedly taken conservative positions on social issues, saying he opposes single-sex marriage and civil unions and is pro-life.

Trump's has previously stated he will announce in June whether he will run for office or not.

He’s no caveman and he may not be gay, say archaeologists

A curiously buried 5,000 year-old skeleton has caused some researchers to speculate he could have been gay or transsexual.

The recently discovered male skeleton is believed to have belonged to the Corded Ware culture, which flourished in North Europe between 2500 and 2900 BCE. The Corded Ware culture is well-known for their meticulous burial practices, which included burying men with their heads facing west and with weapons of war. Yet, this skeleton was found facing east and with domestic items included in his grave, the exact same method used for the burial of women. This has led scholars to theorise he could have been homosexual or transsexual.

"From history and ethnology, we know that people from this period took funeral rites very seriously, so it is highly unlikely that this positioning was a mistake," Kamila Remisova Vesinova, a researcher with the Czech Archaeological Society said as she announced the discovery in a news conference.

"So we think, based on data, that it could be a member of a so-called third gender, which were people either with different sexual orientation or transsexuals or just people who identified themselves differently from the rest of the society."

However, other scholars have since criticised newspapers for trumpeting the finding of a “gay caveman,” because there is so much more research to do before this conclusion can be safely reached. Archaeologists point out that the “gay caveman” label is incorrect on two counts - firstly, because the term "cavemen" typically refers to Neanderthals who lived 30,000 years ago; and secondly because there are many other possible reasons for the strange burial method used in this instance.

Kristina Killgrove, an anthropologist and archaeologist at the University of North Carolina, made this clear when she wrote:
"Just because all the burials you've found to date are coded male and female based on grave goods doesn't mean there aren't alternate forms you haven't found and doesn't mean that the alternate form you have found has a lot of significance."

"If this burial represents a transgendered individual (as well it could), that doesn't necessarily mean the person had a 'different sexual orientation' and certainly doesn't mean that he would have considered himself (or that his culture would have considered him) 'homosexual'."

Rosemary Joyce, from the University of California, Berkeley, is an anthropologist who focuses on sex and gender in archaeology, agreed with this line of thinking as she stated there is not enough proof to yet prove the skeleton’s sexual identity either way. Joyce asserts that the only thing that can be proved at this stage is an “anomalous burial” and also suggested that a third-sexed individual would probably have received a third format of burial distinguishable from men and women altogether.

Teenager Suicide Bomber Recruited Outside Pakistani School

In a disturbing interview with a Pakistan TV news channel, a 14-year old suicide bomber, Umar Fidayee, testified how he was recruited outside the gates of his school in North Waziristan.

The teenager is recovering in hospital from the injuries he received after detonating a hand grenade in the April 4 attack that killed 50 people at the shrine of 13th-century Muslim Sufi saint Sakhi Sarwar in Dera Ghazi Khan. It was Pakistan's deadliest bomb attack since November.

Covered in tubes and bandages, Fidayee told how a man he identified as Qari Muhammad Zafar convinced him to begin a life of militancy.

"He told me that all this education is useless and said 'become a fighter and you will go to heaven,’" Fidayee said.

With chilling detail, Fidayee also told he was instructed to make his attack 30 minutes after two other men had detonated their bombs so as to cause maximum carnage among those rushing to aid casualties of the first two blasts.

The 14-year old boy also said that up to 400 suicide bombers were presently being trained in North Waziristan, the premier al-Qaeda and Taliban fortress in Pakistan's tribal belt.

"Three hundred and fifty to 400 would-be suicide bombers are getting training in Mir Ali in North Waziristan," the youngster said. "I was trained for two months and saw many boys being trained there."

The teenager also begged fellow Pakistanis to "please forgive me."

"God has given me a new life but I am sad that we killed innocent people, innocent children," he said.

Fidayi also sent a strong message to other potential suicide bombers: "Please refuse to carry suicide attacks. Such attacks are forbidden in Islam."

How The Kings of Leon Lost Their Faith

The Kings of Leon new documentary - or “rockumentary” - entitled “Talihina Sky: The Story of Kings of Leon” describes exactly how the group went from poor Pentecostals to hard-partying rock stars.

The documentary has still to be completed, but follows the group’s ultra-strict upbringing under their evangelist father and worship leader mother to detailing their present fallout with church and faith.

Included in the documentary are home videos of the Followill brothers (and cousin) depicting their youth spent traveling across various Bible belts of the American South with their ministering parents. It then contrasts this with their present lifestyles of hard rocking complete with lots of whiskey, sex and parties.

One particular scene has a voice over from one of the band members saying, “As soon as I knew we got a record deal, that whole night I never slept because I knew I was going to hell and I wasn’t going to be a preacher.”

Their father, Ivan Leon Followill, is understated when commentating on his boys’ new lives, “I don’t want to say my kids are going to hell you know, nothing like that, but as far as what I envisioned, it’s a little different.”

So what exacted happened to the Followills? How did children who grew up with their lives so immersed in Christianity lose faith? Well, it seems the answer to that question lies with their father.

In 1997, their father resigned from the church and divorced his wife, leaving his sons shattered and disillusioned. This came after Followill senior endured a long battle with alcoholism.

“Our parents’ divorce shattered the whole mirage of this perfect little existence the outside world couldn’t touch and couldn’t pollute,” the oldest Followill brother, Nathan, told Relevant Magazine.

“We realised that our dad, the greatest man we ever knew, in our eyes, was only human. And so are we … this whole new world was open to us.”

Caleb Followill, the lead vocals and guitarist, similarly once informed The Independent, “I’d put my faith in my dad and I wanted to follow in his footsteps. I’d always look up to ministers, but at about fifteen I started to see that they were just normal men and it broke my heart. I closed myself off to pretty much everyone and dropped out of school.”

Nathan and Caleb left home and went to Nashville, where after six months they were signed with a record company. The older brothers then asked their youngest sibling Jared and cousin Matthew to join their band.

However, it seems that not all connection with their roots was broken, as the boys named the band after their father and grandfather. Also, the brothers are clearly not quite ready to completely disassociate themselves from their faith.

“We realise now looking back on it that the way we were raised definitely shaped us into the guys that we are. There are definitely things from that time of life that I want to keep, especially being a good person and being thankful for everything that you have,” Nathan told Relevant Magazine.

Nathan also told the magazine that they still believed in God, gave money to churches, prayed every night and even attended church occasionally.

Caleb echoed Nathan’s hope when he confessed to The Independant that “To be a man means that you are born into sin, so you might as well be honest about it.

“Look at David in the Old Testament. He was a man after God’s own heart, yet he plotted the death of one of his generals so that he could marry the guy’s wife Bathsheba,” he added.

“So if he’s the man after God’s own heart, well, maybe when you’re at your roughest moment, that’s when He’s watching over you and smiling.”

Archbishop Asks the U.S. Government to Arrest Koran-burning Pastor

The Archbishop of Lahore, Lawrence Saldanha, has made an appeal to the U.S. government to detain the pastor responsible for allowing the burning of a Koran in his church, reports the Catholic News Agency.

“The U.S. government talks about religious freedom – but we call upon the U.S. government to prevent such actions by extremists and other fundamentalist Christians,” the president of the Pakistan bishops’ conference said.

“The U.S. government should detain the pastor for some time,” the archbishop added. “In view of the effects his actions have had all over the world, he should be controlled and understand the harm that has been done.”

On March 20, pastor Terry Jones of a Florida-based church called the Dove World Outreach Center supervised the burning of the Koran in front of about 50 people, after the Islamic holy book was put through a mock trial and sentenced.

While U.S. press tried to keep the story low-profile, a video was posted on the church’s website that went international and enraged Muslims all over the world. Violent protests in Afghanistan led to the deaths of at least 24 people, including seven U.N. staff.

Pastor Jones has refused to accept any responsibility for these deaths, in fact, he has justified them by saying the Koran deserved to be placed ‘on trial’ because if taken literally, the book can “lead to violence and terrorist activities, [do] promote racism or prejudice against minorities, against Christians, against women.”

Archbishop Saldanha feared that Christians in Muslim-dominated countries could be targeted for reprisals.

“Although there have not been any reactions against Christians, it could become ugly,” he lamented.

U.S. President Barack Obama responded to the Koran burning and the subsequent violence by saying:

“The desecration of any holy text, including the Quran, is an act of extreme intolerance and bigotry. However, to attack and kill innocent people in response is outrageous and an affront to human decency and dignity.”

John Piper: Burning the Koran is Comparable to Crucifying Christ

The author and speaker John Piper recently stated that burning the Koran to Muslims is comparable to what the crucifixion of Christ is to Christians.

To help him reflect on the Koran burning incident that occurred last week in a Florida church resulting in violent protests throughout Afghanistan killing 24 people, including seven United Nations employees, Piper read through a book by the British scholar Andrew Walls called “The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History.”

In this book, Walls makes the point that one major difference between Islam and Christianity is that one is readily translatable while the other resists translation.

“Islamic absolutes are fixed in a particular language, and in the conditions of a particular period of human history. The divine Word is the Koran, fixed in heaven forever in Arabic, the language of original revelation,” wrote Walls.

“For Christians, however, the divine Word is translatable, infinitely translatable.

“Much misunderstanding between Christians and Muslims has arisen from the assumption that the Koran is for Muslims what the Bible is for Christians,” Walls continued.

“It would be truer to say that the Koran is for Muslims what Christ is for Christians," he said.

This last line led Piper to write in his own blog that the parallel between Christianity and Islam is not of Christ to the Muslim prophet Muhammad and the Koran to the Bible. Rather, the Koran parallels Christ.

“The giving of the Koran is in Islam what the incarnation of Christ is to Christianity,” wrote Piper on his Desiring God website. “If this is so, then Koran-burning is parallel to Christ-crucifying.”

Piper insisted that the burning of a book should not be seen as the moral equivalent of taking another human’s life, but that rather this understanding would help explain why Muslims are so outraged over the incident.

The pastor then stressed it is important for leaders in the two religions to teach their followers how to react when their sensibilities are offended. Piper argued that forgiveness should be the major paradigm in this regard, and violent responses should never be an option.

“So the Koran has been burned and the Christ has been crucified – and continues to be crucified,” Piper concluded. “The test is in the response.”

Tutu calls for reconciliation not retaliation in Ivory Coast

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Elders group of global leaders have issued a statement condemning the violence and “grave violations of human rights” in the Ivory Coast.

The Elders said they were “deeply saddened” by the “tragic loss of life” in the violence stirred up by incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo’s refusal to hand over the presidential reins to Alassane Ouattara, who won last year’s presidential election and as such is the Ivory Coast’s internationally recognised President.

Gbagbo refuses to surrender despite being surrounding in the presidential palace in Abidjan by forces loyal to Ouattara.

The Elders said that while Gbagbo must bear “primary responsibility” for the violence, they added that Ouattara should also shoulder some responsibility for allowing the violence to escalate by forces under his control.

“They must demand an immediate end to the attacks on civilians and UN personnel,” the Elders insisted.

Archbishop Tutu called upon Ouattara to publicly become accountable to a process of peaceful transformation and takeover of power.

“His actions and words in the coming days are critical to the future of the Ivory Coast,” Tutu said.

“The people need reconciliation, not retaliation. They need a leader who can bring peace and put the country back on the path to prosperity.

“He can do this by demonstrating that he will govern for all Ivorians, and is worthy of the trust placed in him through the elections.”

Tutu’s fellow Elder and former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said: “The violence must stop and the atrocities and human rights abuses must be investigated.

“Those who perpetrated these terrible crimes, in Duekoue and elsewhere, must be held accountable.

“There is only one Ivory Coast and the leaders and the people must understand that. They have no option but to reconcile, heal and live together.

“This will be a difficult process, but the country needs to find a path to national unity.”

(Image from file).