Category: Agama

The Gay Revival

I’m going to address some very controversial topics today. If you have trouble with God moving outside your comfort zone, you may not want to read this article. I’m serious: be careful! This may push your buttons.

We’re going to talk about homosexual Christians, LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender] Christians.

The Bible is clear, Old Testament and New: homosexual behavior is sinful behavior. Since we’re talking about Christians, we could go on about how there are loads of sins that we overlook in the church, while we call out certain others, but that hypocrisy is another topic for another day.

One day, years ago, I was with a small group, praying for some folks we knew that were stuck in homosexuality. It was one of those prayer gatherings where you just know that God is hearing your prayers, even as he’s helping to shape them and encourage us in them.

In the midst of that, I had a vision: tens of thousands of people in the homosexual community were encountering Jesus. It was a huge movement, and God was in their midst. They were worshiping powerfully, and God was delighting in their praise. There were signs and wonders. Many were in tears, some because of His love, some because of their sin, but it wasn’t always the sin I had my own eyes on that they were convicted of. It was a genuine revival.

I began to praise God for that revival, for the many sons and daughters that were coming back to their Father, and as I did, the vision became even more real: I was in their midst as they were worshiping God.

And then I realized: they weren’t – most of them weren’t – leaving their culture. Nearly all of them stayed in the homosexual community, and a very large number of them didn’t appear to repent of their homosexual ways.

I began to react to that: That’s not right, I said in my mind. Father began to gently instruct me in this vision:

1)         When he calls people to himself, he does not call them to leave their culture. American Church Culture is not our goal. Relationship with Jesus is the goal. Hmm. OK. That’s true enough.

2)         When he finally got ahold of my life (after a longer fight than it should have been), I was not sin-free. There were several sins that he took decades to put his finger on. In fact, He said, There are some things I haven’t pointed out to you even yet. Yikes.

But it’s true. If he didn’t point out– and by pointing out, give me grace to deal with – some of my sins for decades, why should I expect him to be less patient with other sons and daughters?

3)         And son, he said so very gently: these are my children, not yours. I am their Father, you are not. I am capable of raising My own children without your getting in their way.

Since that experience, I’ve received a few reports that it’s beginning to happen, that substantial numbers of people inside the LGBT community are discovering the Lover of their Souls!

I have received credible testimony from different people in different streams that tell me about the revival that is going on among the homosexual population. (At their request, and for their safety, I will not be releasing their identities. Some people do not respond well when God moves outside their box.)

These people have been among gatherings of gay believers – we might call them church meetings or conferences – where the worship is powerful, where the Holy Spirit is present, where signs and wonders are in abundance, where Jesus is lifted up high. They have recognized God’s favor on the gatherings, and experienced His delight in them.

I have met believers who are homosexuals. Some appear to be your basic, timid churchgoers, some flaming transsexuals proclaiming the gospel to their community. Some are content with their homosexuality; some want out but don’t know how; some are proud of their status, though these seem to be the ones who’ve taken the brunt of the church’s accusations.

I’ve said all this to arrive at this conclusion: God is moving powerfully in ways that we never expected. And hold on to your hats, because he has more than this that he’s going to do.

So how shall we respond to homosexuals that call themselves Christians? That’s simple: we love them. Just like we’re called to love self-righteous people who call themselves Christians.

We surely have no right to challenge the faith of either group, and nearly always, we lack the right to challenge either their behavior or their culture. But we have the right to love them.

Let’s love one another, as Jesus commanded us, shall we? And let’s trust our good Father to raise His children well.

Source: www.pilgrimgram.com

May 30, 2015
Asatizah Perlu Pertingkat Bimbingan Agar Belia Jauhi ISIS

Anak-anak muda Islam harus mengejar ‘jihad keamanan’ dengan mencari jalan terbaik untuk membentuk keamanan bagi manfaat masyarakat, negara dan penduduk Singapura amnya.

Jihad sebenar dalam konteks Singapura hari ini adalah membentuk suasana aman dan mempamerkan nilai-nilai murni Islam.

Mantan Mufti, yang kini Penasihat Pejabat Mufti, Shaikh Syed Isa Semai ketika diminta mengulas mengenai kes dua belia radikal sendiri – seorang diberkas dan seorang lagi ditahan – di bawah Akta Keselamatan Dalam Negeri (ISA) berkata:

“Anak-anak muda mempunyai kefahaman yang masih tipis terhadap agama. Apabila mereka bercakap tentang jihad, mereka terus memikirkan tentang perang. Mereka lupa sebenarnya Islam cintakan keamanan.”

Menurutnya remaja Islam di Singapura perlu memahami dengan lebih jelas konsep jihad dengan membuktikan kepada Singapura bahawa Islam bukan agama keganasan dan anak-anak Melayu sebenarnya juga menolak pengganasan, kata Shaikh Syed Isa.

Beliau berkata masyarakat Islam sendiri perlu berusaha keras untuk membanteras anak-anak muda meradikalkan diri sendiri menerusi Internet.

Beliau turut menyarankan agar pakar-pakar media sosial bergabung tenaga dengan ustazah bagi membolehkan setiap keraguan tentang Islam di kalangan anak dijawab di laman Internet.

“Kebanyakan ustaz mungkin tidak mendalam keupayaan tentang Internet. Kita boleh bergabung dengan pakar Internet di luar dengan tujuan mendidik anak-anak muda ke jalan Islam yang sebenar.

“Janganlah Islam dilihat selah-olah ia satu agama yang tiada keihsanan dan kebaikan. Kita mesti melawan arus kejahatan dan moga Unknown memberikan kita taufik dan hidayahnya dalam usaha kebaikan ini,” ujar Shaikh Syed Isa.

Seorang lagi pemimpin agama, Ustaz Sheik Hussain Sheik Ya’kub berkata usaha perlu dipertingkat untuk menyesuaikan pendidikan agama dengan keperluan golongan remaja.

Beliau yang juga presiden Persatuan Muhammadiyah berpendapat syarahan agama misalnya harus memberi perhatian khusus untuk remaja dan bukan diadakan secara umum.

“Berdasarkan maklum balas yang saya dengar, ada sebahagian anak muda yang tidak menghargai golongan asatizah dan sudah hilang rasa hormat.

“Saya juga rasa kurikulum agama kita perlu diubah. Teknik pengajaran juga kita perlu tukar. Kita tidak boleh lagi ikut pendekatan macam 50 tahun lalu. Yang penting, kita sendiri harus bersedia untuk berubah agar dapat lebih mendekati anak muda masa kini dengan isu semasa dan cabaran mereka,” kata beliau.

Naib Ketua Pusat Harmoni yang juga Pengerusi Masjid An-Nahdhah, Ustaz Muhammad Fazalee Ja’afar pula menambah: “Banyak usaha telah dilakukan oleh masyarakat Islam untuk mendidik masyarakat kita mengenai Islam yang sebenar iaitu Islam yang membawa kepada kesejahteraan dan keamanan buat semua.

“Bahkan di Pusat Harmoni, melalui program yang kami anjurkan telah dapat mendekati seramai 40,000 pengunjung ke pusat ini semenjak ia mula beroperasi pada tahun 2006.

“80 peratus dari pengunjung merupakan masyarakat bukan Islam yang mana melalui program ini, mereka diberikan pendedahan akan erti Islam yang sebenar.

“Melalui pendedahan ini juga mereka memahami bahawa pengganasan serta fahaman radikal sama sekali bukan merupakan sebahagian dari ajaran Islam.”

Menurutnya peristiwa penangkapan ini memberikan isyarat peri penting semua lapisan masyarakat berganding bahu untuk terus bersikap berwaspada dalam menangani isu pengganasan ini. Usaha mendekati dan mendidik lebih ramai anak serta belia mengenai Islam adalah penting dan harus dipergiatkan.

Sementara itu, Imam Masjid Ba’alwie, Habib Hassan Al-Attas, yang juga anggota majlis Pertubuhan Antara Agama (IRO), menambah:

“Sebuah pohon yang akarnya kuat jika tertiup angin kencang tetap tidak akan berganjak. Mereka yang ikhlas dan teguh imannya akan sentiasa di dalam jagaan Allah dan tidak akan terayun dengan tipu daya nafsu dan hasutan syaitan.”

Source: http://beritaharian.sg

May 29, 2015
Singapore Identified As Possible Target For Attack By Recent ISIS Social Media Post

Singapore has been identified as a possible target for attack by a recent Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) posting on social media, a report this week said.

ISIS supporters from the region have also cited the Philippines and the United States as targets, the report’s author, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies analyst Jasminder Singh, told The Straits Times.

This development comes as Malaysia last month nabbed a cell with explosives targeting Putrajaya and the federal Parliament, and as Singapore’s Home Affairs Ministry on Wednesday announced the detention of a 19-year-old student who made plans to join ISIS in Syria and carry out attacks here.

It is not the first time Singapore has been cited by radicals. Last year, extremist English-language magazine Resurgence cited the Phillip Channel and Sembawang Naval Base in a piece on how militants could attack at sea.

The threat to Singapore and the region is set to grow as ISIS’ Malay archipelago combat unit, Katibah Nusantara, formed in Syria last August for South-east Asian fighters who find it easier to communicate in Bahasa Indonesia and Malay rather than Arabic, gains ground.

There are now more than 700 fighters from Indonesia and over 200 fighters from Malaysia fighting in Iraq and Syria, Mr Singh noted in the report published this week. While they make up a small proportion of over 30,000 foreign fighters from 90 countries, the unit scored its first major combat success last month, seizing five Kurdish-held areas in Syria.

The unit is likely to gain importance in ISIS’ strategic goal of setting up a worldwide caliphate, with returning fighters mobilised to undertake attacks and even declare a new branch in this region.

“The downward slide of jihadist appeal and success since 2009 has been reversed by Katibah Nusantara’s success in Iraq and Syria,” Mr Singh wrote.

He said Malaysian fighters have also seized on local issues like the push for an Islamic penal code to win support. More recently, ISIS sympathisers online have called on Rohingya fleeing persecution in Myanmar to go to Syria.

Professor Rohan Gunaratna, who heads Singapore’s International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, says the unit poses a severe threat to Singapore and South-east Asia.

“It has multiple functions: to train people capable of carrying out attacks in Iraq and Syria, to instigate South-east Asians to mount attacks in their home countries, and to radicalise South-east Asians online, recruit them and physically facilitate their entry into Iraq and Syria,” he said.

Hence, the strategy to counter this influence has to be multi- pronged, from engaging the community to exposing ISIS’ evils online. Muslim leaders worldwide are also leading the effort to counter ISIS, he added.

They include Singapore’s Mufti, Dr Fatris Bakaram, who said it was a religious obligation for Muslims here to report to the authorities those who pose a threat.

Source: www.straitstimes.com

May 29, 2015
Zulfikar Shariff: Jangan Bandingkan Lee kuan Yew Dengan Nabi Muhammad

I received a message from a Tipah who is trying hard to promote LKY. According to this Tipah (who claims to study at UIA)

“i done my homework…and sy dapati beberapa perkataan LKY yg sama dgn cara Nabi awak….yg paling ketara ketika Nabi masuki Madinah Baginda menukarkan sistem ekonomi Madinah dari pertanian dan penternakkan kpd perniagaan…tidakkah itu ucapan LKY di city hall tahun 1965??”

Dah kena tipu gila.

LKY pun tukar sistem ekonomi Singapura dari pertanian/ penternakan ke perniagaan juga?

Wahai Tipah. Singapura sejak zaman nenek moyang memang pusat perniagaan.

Singapura’s location and harbour made it an ideal centre for sea trade.

And when the British came, they did not develop an agriculture based economy. They focused on trade.

There were gambier and pepper plantations prior to British colonization and there were attempts to promote a rubber industry but none of these industries stood close to the entrepôt trade that Singapore conducted.

The British developed the trade system that is still applied in Singapura today. Not LKY.

Will you now claim the British colonization of Singapura is based on Islam?

These Tipah keep insulting Rasulullah by saying a man who is known for his zalim model his governance after Rasulullah.

Sayang LKY sangat sampai boleh hina Rasulullah?

Source: Zulfikar Shariff

May 29, 2015
Alfian Sa’at: Calvin Cheng Getting Too Big For His Boots

Last one before I wash my hand of this tawdry ex-NMP, ex-price-fixer, ex-young-PAP and current has-been-yet-wannabe affair. Uh, yucks:

I have been off Facebook for almost two weeks, trying to find some quiet time. The grief comes in waves and the feelings are still raw.

Imagine then my shock at reading Calvin Cheng’s post, trying to link me and my writings with radicalised youths, calling me a ‘domestic agitator’ who deserves to be detained without trial once ‘red lines are crossed’ (of course with draconian instruments like the ISA the definition of this ‘red line’ is meant to be conveniently arbitrary).

Was this a response to something recent that I posted? No. It was a response to the recent ISA arrests of some Muslim youths. And somehow Calvin Cheng found it necessary to tar me with the same brush, perhaps in the hope of threatening me to keep silent, or not raise questions about certain issues that make him uncomfortable—or that he doesn’t have the capacity to rebut robustly and convincingly.

The suggestion that I might be linked to Muslim extremism would be hilarious if not for the fact that Calvin Cheng thinks that it is a valid charge. He probably has no idea about how I’ve been attacked by those from the Wear White campaign and accused of being a ‘secular fundamentalist’. He doesn’t know that my play, ‘Nadirah’, was about interfaith understanding, and that my play ‘Parah’ critiqued Malay-Muslim ethnocentricism in Malaysia. These details don’t bother him, because he probably thinks that when you want to get a Muslim person to shut up, then you go full on McCarthy and try to associate him with terrorism. Which is its own kind of racism.

I have at various times tried to record the experiences of being a Malay minority in Singapore. And they have all been above board–it’s there in my plays, my books. These works have been funded by government bodies, which have very strict guidelines on anything that might cause racial and religious discord. Online, I don’t join clandestine closed groups and polemicise in echo chambers. The very fact that my posts are set to public means that just about anyone is free to tell me whether I have indeed crossed a line, like for example if any of my points about Singapore not honouring the ideals of multiculturalism is seen as vile hate speech against the Chinese. Calvin Cheng would have ample opportunity to engage me on these matters. And if indeed he had reasonable arguments to offer, then I would most certainly temper my posts. But he has chosen not to, and instead snipes at me without specifying which of my writings fall into the category of ‘terrorist propaganda’—which is what those youths (in MHA’s account) had been exposed to.

I actually think that this Calvin Cheng has had me in his gunsights for a while now. I don’t write exclusively about race, and I’m sure my writings about Amos Yee or Lee Kuan Yew must have pissed him off in some way. So he seizes the opportunity to lambast me based on some current event and spectacularly misfires.

The online world is a strange one. For some reason some of the most articulate social commentators—Alex Au, Andrew Loh, Carlton Tan, Howard Lee, Vincent Wijeysingha, Kirsten Han, Lynn Lee, Joshua Chiang, Gwee Li Sui, Imran Mohd Taib, Sudhir Thomas, Loh Kah Seng, Thum Ping Tjin, Isrizal, Martyn See, Chris Ho, Donald Low (whose smackdown of Calvin Cheng really revealed what an intellectual pygmy the latter was) etc—tend to be critical of the establishment. And in the other corner, we have Jason Chua and Calvin Cheng. It must be terribly frustrating and lonely. Once I get past my annoyance, I realise that what I really feel for Calvin Cheng is pity. Pity that the sheer paucity of people in his corner has led him to think that he is bigger than he really is. Pity that his responses in the wake of his slander has run along the lines of yapping taunts like ‘come sue me’, ‘come slap me now…you don’t have the balls’, ‘take a queue number’, ‘make me take down the flag from my profile (if you think I dishonour it)’. Pity that in shooting his mouth off, he’s succeeded in shooting the messenger–oh, and his own foot.

Source: Alfian Sa’at

May 29, 2015