Dr Paul Allen

While terrorists shout "death to the infidel", this morning people of goodwill will likely cry "Vive la France!" That Paris, the City of Light should again be threatened with darkness serves as a reminder that, in an age of globalisation, our way of life, for all its comforts, is never as secure nor as guaranteed as we think. Having already weathered the Charlie Hebdo attack and its related atrocities, Paris now has to deal with a collection of even more deadly outrages, which President Hollande has rightly labelled an "abomination". More than 120 people have been killed in the latest brutality, which led the authorities to immediately close France's borders and declare a state of emergency. This morning, thankfully, reports on the ground suggest that although shaken, Parisians are for the most part getting on with life. Perhaps they see normality as the best form of defiance in the face of barbarism. In Europe as in many other parts of the d...

Illustration from the Morgan Bible of the Israelites being repulsed from Ai. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Most people, Christians and non-believers alike, are horrified by the atrocities of the (IS) Islamic State. But for some Christians the current violence also raises uncomfortable comparisons with the Old Testament . How does this "holy war" perpetrated in the name of Islam differ from what God told Israel to do under Joshua ? I'd like to point to three aspects of the biblical accounts that can help us. What does the Bible actually say? First, we need to make sure we don't misrepresent what the Bible actually says. Here are Moses' instructions in Deuteronomy 7:1-6:  When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations - the Hittites , Girga Shites, Amorites, Canaanites , Penzzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven na...

Jesus said to love our enemies. Does that include ISIS? What does jesus mean?  That is what he said, as Matthew recounts his words from the Sermon on the Mount : “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’” (Matthew5:43–44, emphasis added) And when Jesus said “love,” we should be clear that he didn’t mean hollow good will, or some bland benevolence, or a flakey niceness that hopes our enemies stop being so cruel. Jesus never talks about love that way. A category for love like that — the anything-goes, pat-on-the-head, can’t-we-all-just-get-along kind of love — is a phenomenon peculiar to our own day. When Jesus says to love our enemies, he means that we love them with a lay-your-life-down type of love — the type that comes from the heart and desires the other’s good, and sacrifices for it, when no one else but God is watching. And it’s the type of ...

Map of Iraq, where Yahya ibn Umar conducted his revolt (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) When the world’s attention shifted to Ukraine and Israel last week, the Islamic leaders in Iraq capitalized on the distraction. For weeks the functional government in central Iraq ( ISIS ) had told Christians they had to make one of four choices by this past Saturday: forfeit thier property as a “Christian” tax, convert to Islam , leave, or die. But a week ago ISIS revised their list, and said paying the “tax” was no longer an option. When Friday came around, residents awoke to an Arabic “N” spray-painted on the houses, property, and farms of all suspected Christians. The government had come during the night to demonstrate that they knew who the Christians were, and the spray-painted N’s were a not-so-subtle reminder that the deadline to convert, flee, or die was only 24 hours away. Why the N? Because in Arabic Christians are often simply called Nazarenes . And when this week began, so did the fl...

In the last few tragic days, I received the following comment in my twitter feed from an Australian journalist. AIDS researchers and a Catholic nun among #MH17 victims. If you believe in a god, this would seriously be testing your faith. I replied, Well, most of all, and sadly, it tests your faith in humanity who do these things to each other. The journalist was kind enough to ‘favourite’ my tweet as her reply. I think she recognised that before we rush to blame God , we should direct our blame on those directly responsible for such evil: the terrorist who fired the rocket launcher; the persons who supplied the hardware and training to fire it. More broadly in recent days, it is not God who burned down Mosul ’s church, but the ISIS militants. It is not God who butchered a hundred villagers in Damboa , Nigeria, with RPGs and machine guns, but Boko Haram . That’s where the clear and immediate moral responsibility lies: with the human evildoers. However, once we’v...