Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
A 45 year old man identified as Alan Mason has been jailed for deliberately infecting his girlfriend with HIV, and “ruining her life”, a court heard on friday.Alan Mason, knew he had the virus but still had unprotected sex with his 39-year-old lover. She only learned the truth when she visited her doctor because she was feeling ill. Mason had known for five years that he had the virus.
He was sentenced to two years and eight months in jail after pleading guilty to grievous bodily harm.
The judge at Carlisle crown court told Mason, of Kendal, Cumbria, he had ruined the woman’s life and left her in “a perilous state”.
PC Damian West said:
“Modern medication means there should be no impact on life expectancy.
"However, the virus has a significant day-to-day impact on those who have to live with it.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
Nollywood Actor, Desmond Elliot has denied media reports that he was calling for prayers for Ini Edo to conceive before the year runs out.The report quoted Elliot as saying that Nigerians should say amen to the prayer that the Actress who puts smiles on a lot of faces in the country would have a reason to smile before the year runs out.
The message reads, “We all know Actress Ini Edo has been married for a while now without any issue. Many of us have laughed at her, insulted her, judged her without knowing the pains she goes through indoors. She has entertained us, made us laugh and has inspired many of us. Today, let us come together and pray for her. Ini Edo, this year, 2014 will not pass you by.
You will not only get pregnant, you will also give birth safe and sound. As you write AMEN to this, may God answer all your hidden prayers. Why not write amen? Your amen is so powerful, just type amen on her behalf. God bless you.”
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
The majority of America’s churches teach that God is the same yesterday, today and forever.
But considering our country’s near-400-year history, can we honestly say that our concepts and perceptions about God haven’t evolved?
Is our contemporary American God the same as in 1629, when the Puritans began organizing a mass exodus toward their “Promised Land”?
Is our modern God the same as in 1801, when Christians at a revival in Kentucky became so filled up with God’s spirit that they got down on all-fours and barked and howled like wild dogs?
More recently, is our God the same as in 2000, when born again Republican George W. Bush won (sort of) the presidential election by rallying America’s then thriving evangelical electorate with a Jesus-tinged GOP rhetoric he called “compassionate conservatism.”
The truth is, no. God is likely not exactly the same as God was yesterday, not here in the United States, not among America’s faithful. Here, God changes.
Our making God into our own image isn’t a new trend. We’ve been changing God since Anglo Saxons first stepped foot onto these shores. Here are five examples.
1. The Puritans’delusions.
Even before leaving England, the Puritans started reimagining God’s divine plan. And it just so happened that plan revolved around them.
Giving God’s narrative a Puritan focus may have been the only way that John Cotton, a priest in the Church of England and a somewhat closeted Puritan, was able to convince his fellow renegades that starting afresh in Boston was a good idea.
Despite the Puritans being disgusted, stifled and persecuted by England’s church, the majority of them weren’t all that excited at the thought of joining John Winthrop’s adventure to the New World.
That is, until Cotton refashioned Winthrop’s crazy idea for the Puritans into God’s ordained destiny for his new chosen people.
In a sermon called “God’s Promise To His Plantation,” Cotton used Old Testament story, imagery and prophesy and created a God narrative that put the Puritans squarely in the middle of heaven’s divine blueprint.
According to Cotton, God had not only prepared a place (America!) for his new people (the Puritans!), but God also was betting his entire future on the Puritan people becoming a religious, economic and social success in the New World.
No doubt Cotton’s holy foretelling was, at the very least, inspiration for Winthrop when he repurposed Jesus’ words as the unofficial Puritan tagline: “We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”
The Puritans arrived in Boston intoxicated by Manifest Destiny: the idea that God had chosen them and ordained their prosperity before the foundations of the Earth.
2. God creates evangelicals.
Within two generations, the American people – including many Puritans – had lost a good bit of their piety, which sparked revivalists to inspire a spiritual revival.
One of the biggest influences of the Great Awakening was how God altered the way he interacted with America’s people.
Rather than engaging humanity through communal covenants—holy connections usually reserved for large groups —according to the Anglican evangelist George Whitefield, God was now interested in making personal relationships with individuals.
Though Americans were a century or two away from asking Jesus into their hearts, Whitefield and others began preaching that God was ready and willing to bypass the church and interact with people one on one.
Whitefield became so popular—some historians suggest 80% of America’s population heard him preach—that his core message, one centering around a spiritual relationship that he called “new birth,” became popular, too, especially among Baptists and Presbyterians.
His revivals spearheaded a shift in how Americans would interact with the God of the universe, that the spiritual drama was happening inside us.
Moreover, Whitefield’s evangelical message of liberty—a spiritual liberty that many Americans equated to also mean a national liberty—became a unifying ideal that helped ready a much divided colonial population into becoming “one nation under God.”
3. America falls in love with Jesus.
Amid America’s campaign for independence, people began gravitating toward more evangelical churches, like Baptist and Methodist.
These congregations boasted a more laid-back approach to worship and faith as opposed to the stuffy religiosity of Congregational and Anglican gatherings.
Then, in 1801, that rather strange spiritual gathering of more than 20,000 happened in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, a revival that sparked, among many things, a spiritual revolt against Calvinism’s God.
In America, with the help of preachers like Charles Grandison Finney, Peter Cartwright and Barton Stone, the God that the people favored was one who let individuals choose their own spiritual destiny.
As Methodists and Baptists led America away from the reformed doctrine, they also directed worshipers’ focus away from God the Father and toward Jesus, eventually making God’s only son the “face” of Christian spirituality.
While America’s followers had always believed that Jesus paid the price for their sins, Jesus wasn’t the core topic of discussion, at least, nowhere close to how Christians uplift, debate, and theologize Jesus today.
In the early 1800s, Jesus was much easier to relate to among everyday Americans. Jesus seemed to offer a more practical spirituality, one that celebrated Jesus’ humanity—his “manliness,” his suffering, his flesh and blood, his father/son relationship with God, his ability to understand the human plight.
The simpler approach to Christianity that Methodists and Baptists offered would eventually be tested by the nation’s debate over slavery, a conflict that divided America’s churches long before it divided a nation.
4. America’s apocalyptic obsession
In the decades after the Civil War, America’s Jesus-focused Christianity led to John Nelson Darby’s apocalyptic-heavy theology, dispensationalism.
Darby’s thoughts about the End Times only garnered moderate attention in his home country of England. But here, thanks to Darby apologists like James Brookes, D.L. Moody and Cyrus I. Scofield, America fell in love with his Rapture-ready Jesus.
Dispensationalism changed everything about America’s faith, specifically how evangelicals applied their beliefs to a variety of areas of life, including supporting Prohibition, war, fighting against the teaching of evolution, and Christianizing new immigrants as well as other nations.
Among evangelicals, dispensationalism also cultivated a culture of fear, defensiveness and carelessness about helping a “doomed world.”
5. The Billy Graham effect
As the country sought healing after World War II, Americans began searching for hope in the God-smorgasbord that Christianity had laid out, from Bible-believing fundamentalism to Holy Ghost-inspired Pentecostalism, from education-minded Roman Catholicism to progressive-leaning high church spiritualism.
One man seemed capable of connecting across church and denominational lines: Billy Graham.
Unrestrained by the limitations of a home church, Graham’s God evolved into a deity that a variety of Americans wanted to know. Graham’s God wooed conservative and charismatic believers alike, and didn’t offend most Catholic and Episcopalian believers.
Amid the large and varied buffet, Graham’s God was like a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, a divine brand delivered using books, television, radio, magazine publishing and live events.
In many ways, Graham was the first to unleash the power of GOD®. And that changed everything.
Today, most Christians can’t distinguish between God and GOD®, which has made America’s deity into a superpower, an almighty deity that can be mixed with just about anything, from enterprise to politics, from hate campaigns to promises of prosperity.
Here in America, God is constantly changing. It’s a divine story that we edit and manipulate—sometimes innocently and sometimes intentionally—into our own narratives.
We create a most powerful God who serves our own agendas, whether they be cities built on hills or presidential elections.
Matthew Paul Turner is the author of "Our Great Big American God: A Short History of Our Ever-Growing Deity." The views expressed in this column belong to Turner.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
Founder of the Latter Rain Assembly, Pastor Tunde Bakare has explained what led to the standoff between him and General Overseer of Winner’s Chapel, Pastor David Oyedepo, some years back.In a recently published interview he granted the Punch, Bakare when asked his take on anointing oil, mainly used by Christians for prayer purposes, responded: “People like to create their own Tunde Bakare. I love God, I love people, I love the godly and the ungodly and I try within my God-given ability to teach the truth.
“The reason I fought with my friend, Bishop David Oyedepo, and tore his book, I remember when we resolved this problem in London, we came out of a plane, he took me aside and said he was angry with me because I tore his book. I said I didn’t tear your book, I tore my book. That is fine, you wrote it, I bought it, so it was my book I tore.“I saw errors in that book because he said the anointing oil is not a symbol of the Holy Spirit, that it is the life of God in a bottle. How can you write that and I would let it pass. No! If the anointing oil is the Holy Spirit, then Jesus is a lamb walking on four legs.“These are metaphors and when you have the real, you leave the shadow. Besides it is for the sick in the New Testament. So, you can anoint the entire church if they are sick and I would wonder how a sick church can bring healing to a dying world”.
On his description of Nigerian churches as being a theatre where one man performs and the others are just mere spectators, he said “If you quoted me correctly, I said the difference between the cinema and the church in Nigeria is that for the cinema you pay a gate fee before you enter, but in the church, they let you come in before they take from you.“When the youth pastor was ministering today (day of interview) I said wow, if I am out of here today, these people can continue”.
Explaining why his church has not established its own university like others have done, Bakare said he was not called to do that.“I do not judge those who are doing it, because they are contributing their quota to the system and they are helping the society in the area of infrastructure.“But I would have a question mark on the whole thing if part of what is going in there are the offerings of the people and their pastors’ children and members’ children cannot attend that university. Almost all the top universities in the world started from Christian organisations.“My daughter graduated from Emory University in Georgia, United States, which is owned by the Methodist Church. Oxford and Cambridge were established by churches.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
For attempting to brand former Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Azubuike Ihejirika, a Boko Haram sponsor, the apex Igbo socio-cultural organization, Ohanaeze youth wing on Sunday threatened to sanction the All Progressives Congress (APC) if it fails to apologize to the ex-army chief and Ndigbo within 48 hours.Ohanaeze youth warned that if APC failed to do so, they would label it an anti-Igbo party while other sanctions would follow.
The group issued the ultimatum to APC in a statement released from its National Secretariat titled, “Ongoing attempts to brand Gen. Ihejirika a Boko Haram sponsor,” and signed by its National Secretary, Emmanuel Okwu Nnabuike and Publicity Secretary, Obinna Adibe.According to the statement, Ohanaeze youth wing condemned the ongoing attempts to smear the hard earned reputation of Gen. Ihejirika-the immediate past Chief of Army Staff on spurious allegation of being a Boko Haram sponsor.The statement reads further: “It is on record that the same people trying to frame up Gen. Ihejirika are the same people who claimed they would make Nigeria ungovernable for President Jonathan, in the aftermath of the 2011 presidential election.“We view the call for Ihejirika’s trial by the All Peoples’ Congress (APC) through its spokesman-Alhaji Lai Mohammed, without bothering to confirm the authenticity of the statement as malicious and premeditated.“Now that the Director of State Security has officially absolved Ihejirika of any complicity in the matter, we ask the APC to issue an apology to Gen. Ihejirika and Ndigbo within 48 hours.“If they fail to do so, the APC shall be formally labeled an Anti-Igbo party and other sanctions shall follow..“Security is too weighty a matter to be politicized. Therefore it is unpatriotic for political leaders to embark on character assassination based on unsubstantiated and misguided rumours.“Dr Stephen Davies has shown himself to be a fraudulent character and a mercenary, whose stock in trade is the distortion of information in order to cause chaos, thereby creating more business for him”.Ohanaeze Ndigbo youth wing noted that he (Davies) employed a cheap propaganda tactics by naming former Governor Ali Modu Sheriff who has been consistently linked with the emergence and sponsorship of Boko Haram as the sect’s sponsor and therefore linking him with Ihejirika as a co-sponsor would lend credence to the story, in the eyes of gullible members of the public.The group added that unfortunately, he (Davies) did not proffer a single shred of evidence or motivation for Ihejirika, a Christian and an Igbo from the South East to sponsor Boko Haram, pointing out that his claim that the CBN official who handled the funding of Boko Haram “is an uncle to three of the Nyanya bombing suspects was equally disproved by the DSS thereby showing his story to be faulty.”Citing the DSS they said, “it is uncharitable for Nigerians to reward someone who laid down his life in defence of his country by associating him with the sponsorship of the sect.”The group, therefore, warned all those involved in the smear campaign to desist from such wicked and unpatriotic acts immediately and saluted Gen Ihejirika once more for the great job he did as a Chief of Army Staff, especially with regards to fighting the Boko Haram insurgency.
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
Last week, news going Viral on social media and other news platform claims that GEJ is losing lots of support from the Peoples Democratic Party due to recent happenings around Nigeria, and to support this claim was the creation of another faction of the party by Atiku who was not happy with the way Goodluck Jonathan ran the party creating confusion in the party.
News reaching FNN claims that President Goodluck Jonathan, has decided to join the Illuminati for the 2015 election.
This news came amid fears that the present PDP will not be enough to win the presidency for Goodluck Jonathan, so the president has decided to use the Illuminati help to win the election. Although FNN could not locate the main office of the Illuminati in Nigeria, however FNN received an anonymous mail from the group, which says that; ” we welcome a man with no shoes ..the first ever to join our society “… Would this move be enough to make GEJ still be president ,
Anthony-Claret is a software Engineer, entrepreneur and the founder of Codewit INC. Mr. Claret publishes and manages the content on Codewit Word News website and associated websites. He's a writer, IT Expert, great administrator, technology enthusiast, social media lover and all around digital guy.
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