by Lauren Jenkins A former pastor has been found guilty of three counts of aggravated sexual assault of a child. Victor Icenogle, known as “Apostle Alex” to his parishioners, now faces up to 99 years behind bars. Sentencing will be at a later date. During testimony this week, a 10 year old girl took the witness stand to describe where and when the 48 year old man assaulted her. Icenogle reportedly did not look at his victims as they testified. Icenogle was the self proclaimed pastor of the Promise Land Church here in San Antonio.

A pastor spent 2 hours in jail for failing to register as a sex offender in West Virginia Story by Kimberly Beary A man who refers to himself as Bishop faces one to five years in jail, if he is found guilty, for failing to register as a sex offender in West Virginia. West Virginia State Trooper Brian Morris investigated a tip that Ranson Parris, 63 years old, was living in the former town of Jefferson for the past two months. "He was running a church in Jefferson. He claimed to be a bishop, to be a pillar of the community. He is a sex offender," Morris said. By law, sex offenders must register within thirty days of moving to the Mountain State. The New Hope Metropolitan Community Church and Christian Center along MacCorkle Avenue posts signs of upcoming fundraisers for the homeless and gospel sings. Parris declined to comment when 13 News asked to speak with him regarding the charges. Neighbors never saw a Sunday service at the church. Fresh Seafood Company Market and Restau...

The former pastor of one of Bangor’s largest churches was arrested Monday morning in Savannah, Ga., on a warrant issued by Penobscot County Superior Court. The Rev. Ron Durham, 59, of Savannah, Ga., was indicted earlier this month by the Penobscot County grand jury in the theft of more than $100,000 from Abundant Life Church on Outer Broadway, where he served as pastor for 16 years. Durham, who is being held at the Chatham County Jail in Savannah, is expected to appear today in Chatham County Superior Court for an extradition hearing. He is scheduled to be arraigned on the theft charge Thursday in Penobscot County Superior Court in Bangor. Michael Roberts, the Penobscot County deputy district attorney who is prosecuting the case, said Tuesday that it is unlikely Durham will be returned to Maine in time for arraignment. If Durham waives extradition, local law enforcement officers would bring him back to Bangor for arraignment in a week to 10 days, Roberts said. If he fights extradition,...

By Peggy Kreimer Post staff reporter Rev. Larry Davis resigned from the First Baptist Church Wednesday for the second time this month, said church member Don Willig. This time, Davis made it clear there will be no vote to accept or reject his resignation - he's gone and the church is moving on, Willig said. Davis pleaded guilty on Oct. 6 to federal charges that he lied on a loan application and evaded paying taxes. It was part of a plea agreement in which five other charges were dismissed. According to the plea agreement that Davis signed, he stole $500,000 to $730,000 from 2000 and 2003 from church accounts he controlled. The investigation and revelations over more than 20 months split the powerful First Baptist Church of Cold Spring, that two years ago had 1,500 members and was acclaimed for helping bring the Billy Graham Crusade to Cincinnati in 2002. Davis continued as pastor during the investigation, while a large segment of the church membership left and formed another churc...

(ST. PAULS) - A former pastor and his stepson were charged in Robeson County with raping a 12-year-old girl after a DNA test showed that the pastor fathered the girl's baby. Ronald Lee Simpson of Parkton is former pastor of St. Matthews Missionary Baptist Church in Rennert. His stepson is 19-year-old Rodregous Wactor. Both were charged with raping the same girl. Simpson works part-time as a barber and he was arrested Thursday as he cut hair in St. Pauls. Simpson is also accused of molesting a 14-year-old Red Springs girl at the church in December, while he was still the pastor. He resigned after the allegations surfaced. The 41-year-old Simpson was charged with first-degree rape, first-degree sex offense of a child, statutory rape of a child, attempted statutory rape of a child and indecent liberties with a child. All five charges are felonies. He was jailed under a $210,000 bond. He and Wactor remained in the county jail Friday. link

American Association for the Advancement of Science – Alan I. Leshner With a landmark evolution trial underway in Harrisburg, Penn., AAAS CEO Alan I. Leshner has written in the nearby York Dispatch that scientists and mainstream religious leaders are largely united in their acceptance of the theory of natural selection. While some news accounts have described the federal court case as "the Scopes Monkey Trial II," Leshner cautioned that it would be a mistake to view the trial as a Super Bowl pitting science against religion. In fact, he said, evolution should not be seen as an attack on religion. Many scientists are guided by faith, and thousands of religious leaders in all faiths have expressed opposition to efforts by the leaders of the Intelligent Design movement to inject their views into public school science classrooms. In the commentary published 5 October, Leshner said religion typically does not distort the work of scientists. But "the leaders of the intelligen...

The contemporary theory of biological evolution is one of the most robust products of scientific inquiry. It is the foundation for research in many areas of biology as well as an essential element of science education. To become informed and responsible citizens in our contemporary technological world, students need to study the theories and empirical evidence central to current scientific understanding. Over the past several years proponents of so-called "intelligent design theory," also known as ID, have challenged the accepted scientific theory of biological evolution. As part of this effort they have sought to introduce the teaching of "intelligent design theory" into the science curricula of the public schools. The movement presents "intelligent design theory" to the public as a theoretical innovation, supported by scientific evidence, that offers a more adequate explanation for the origin of the diversity of living organisms than the current scientif...

By Journal Times staff RACINE - The Rev. John A. Oatis was sentenced to four years in prison Friday for raping a 15-year-old girl at his church 11 years ago. The victim said she went to Oatis for help in October 1994 at the Holy Jerusalem Church of God, formerly at 1330 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. He took her into the basement of the church and sexually assaulted her, according to the criminal complaint. Police used DNA evidence to tie Oatis, 69, to the assault. He was convicted in August of second-degree sexual assault of a child. Oatis insisted during his jury trial and at his sentencing that he was innocent. "Reverend Oatis is not a victim of anything," said Judge Dennis Barry said at the sentencing hearing. "The victim is a 15-year-old girl who came to talk to her pastor ... and was sexually assaulted by a 58-year-old man of the cloth." Since the crime was committed before the sentencing law changed in 1999, Oatis can petition for parole after serving 25 p...

Accepting 'intelligent design' in science classrooms would have disastrous consequences, warn Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne by Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne It sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Such a modest proposal. Why not teach "both sides" and let the children decide for themselves? As President Bush said, "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes." At first hearing, everything about the phrase "both sides" warms the hearts of educators like ourselves. One of us spent years as an Oxford tutor and it was his habit to choose controversial topics for the students' weekly essays. They were required to go to the library, read about both sides of an argument, give a fair account of both, and then come to a balanced judgment in their essay. The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, "When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensit...

The irreducibly complex teeters on the verge of reduction. None of these difficulties were mentioned. By James Curtsinger Good morning, class. As you know, the local school board has decided that we must include “Intelligent Design” in high school biology, so let’s start with the work of Dr. Michael Behe, ID’s leading scientist. Dr. Behe, a professor of biochemistry, visited the U last week as a guest of the MacLaurin Institute. I spoke with him at lunch, attended his public lecture and took notes for today’s class. Dr. Behe opened his public lecture by showing two images: a mountain range and Mount Rushmore. One had a designer; the other didn’t. In case anyone was uncertain which was which, Dr. Behe also showed a duck, and emphasized that if it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. Ergo if something in biology looks designed, it is designed. He reviewed “irreducible complexity,” the important notion that certain structures with intricately interacting parts...

By ROSA BROOKS IT'S OFFICIAL: Too much religion may be a dangerous thing. This is the implication of a study reported in the current issue of the Journal of Religion and Society, a publication of Creighton University's Center for the Study of Religion. The study, by evolutionary scientist Gregory S. Paul, looks at the correlation between levels of "popular religiosity" and various "quantifiable societal health" indicators in 18 prosperous democracies, including the United States. Paul ranked societies based on the percentage of their population expressing absolute belief in God, the frequency of prayer reported by their citizens and their frequency of attendance at religious services. He then correlated this with data on rates of homicide, sexually transmitted disease, teen pregnancy, abortion and child mortality. He found that the most religious democracies exhibited substantially higher degrees of social dysfunction than societies with larger percentages o...

In Our Time Wayne Brown It was Wordsworth who first delineated the interdependence of religiosity and the infantile ego. In his 'Immortality Ode' (1807), he affirmed famously that we come into the world 'trailing clouds of glory.from God, who is our home,' so that 'Heaven lies about us in our infancy!' And the necessary loss of the infantile illusion of centrality involved in maturing - a process, as this column remarked last week, marked by a growing grasp of the facts of differentiation and otherness, and a consequent diminution of the infantile ego - was one he lamented: 'Shades of the prison-house begin to close/ upon the growing boy'; until the adult perceives the divine light 'fade into the light of common day.' Nonetheless, Wordsworth was determined to celebrate not only 'those shadowy recollections' of our participation in the Godhead, but also what might be termed 'life after God': 'Though nothing can bring back the...

Witness: Book Replaced 'Creation' With 'Intelligent Design' Before Publication By MARTHA RAFFAELE The Associated Press HARRISBURG, Pa. - References to creationism in drafts of a student biology book were replaced with the term "intelligent design" by the time it was published, a witness testified Wednesday in a landmark trial over a school board's decision to include the concept in its curriculum. Drafts of the textbook, "Of Pandas and People," written in 1987 were revised after the Supreme Court ruled in June of that year that states could not require schools to balance evolution with creationism in the classroom, said Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. Forrest reviewed drafts of the textbook as a witness for eight families who are trying to have the intelligent design concept removed from the Dover Area School District's biology curriculum. The families contend that teaching intelligent design effe...

sent in by Carol Yesterday, October 5, 2005, I made a field trip to the Cabazon Dinosaurs, which were featured in an article the Webmaster posted on September 11 of this year and was titled " Did T-rex graze in the Garden of Eden ?" The two dinosaurs are a famous landmark on the I-10 freeway in So California, just west of the Palm Springs exit, and just east of Casino Morongo. They have been seen on TV and in movies, most notably a silly PeeWee Herman flick. For many years you couldn't miss them, as they stood out on the flat desert terrain. However, some years ago a controversial Burger King was built right in front of them and largely obscures their view, plus a cement divider on the freeway almost totally blocks them from the sight of east bound traffic. Anyhow, it somehow got into the news that fundies have purchased the dinos and intend to use them to promote the fairy tale of creationism. So after having lunch at Burger King, with a nice view of the dinos, I wandere...

Sent in by non-conformist: "Hello all! I came accross this article and felt the need to share it with you guys. I would love to know what your thoughts are...I have yet to form an opinion until I found out more about it (I know you Christians don't understand that concept!), but I feel it's important nevertheless." By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent THE hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true. The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible. “We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture. The document is timely, coming as it does amid the rise of the religious Right, in particular in the US. Some Christians...

from petoskeynews.com "Intelligent design" is not science and never will be. We don't know how we can make it any plainer than that. But once again, this tired old subject is making national news. The Christian model of the creation of the world does not belong in the science classroom, no matter how many Christian legislators or fundamentalist school board members think it does. Science is science. Religion is religion. By its very nature religion requires faith. Faith is an unquestioning belief that does not require proof or evidence. But science requires proof. Real proof. Repeatable proof. Testable proof. The two should not be mixed up in the same classroom, period. If the subject of "intelligent design" being debated around the nation today were a tenant of Islam or Buddhism, then we would not even be having this national discussion. It is only because this is a Christian doctrine - a fundamentalist doctrine at that- that the nation is even entertaining thi...

By R.J. VILLELLA A Ravenna area minister was arrested Friday for arranging to have sex with a 14-year-old girl, said Massillon Police Department Det. Bobby Grizzard. Nelson Lynn Wright, 42, a senior minister at the Lighthouse Community Chapel, 3011 Ohio 59, Ravenna, is facing two counts of importuning, fifth-degree felonies. Wright, of 763 Highland Ave., Ravenna, was taken by Ravenna officers to their station, Grizzard said, and Massillon police picked him up and transported him to Massillon. He was booked into Massillon City Jail and bail was set at $100,000. He will remain in jail over the weekend until appearing Monday in Massillon Municipal Court. Massillon Police acting with the FBI Internet Task Force began the investigation in May, Grizzard said, and an arrest warrant was issued Friday. That warrant was served by the Ravenna Police Department, he said. “This is an Internet case,” Grizzard said. “He was arranging to meet a young girl for sex. From what we understand, he was the s...