INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- Police can keep nearly 50 guns they seized from a man after he was found watching a Bloomington bar where an Indiana University student partied the night she went missing more than a year earlier, a state court ruled Tuesday.

The 2-1 ruling by the Indiana Court of Appeals upheld a local judge's ruling allowing Bloomington police to keep 48 weapons they confiscated from Robert Redington's Indianapolis home in August 2012, including more than a dozen tucked under the sheets and pillows of his bed. Redington's attorney, Guy Relford, said he would ask the Indiana Supreme Court to hear the case.

Bloomington police had found Redington on the third floor of a parking garage, where he was peering at the bar through a range finder. It was the same bar that Lauren Spierer visited on the night of her June 2011 disappearance. Redington told officers who approached him with their weapons drawn that he had a shotgun and another gun in his car.

Police confiscated two loaded semi-automatic handguns they found in Redington's pockets, as well as the shotgun and ammunition.

http://www.wane.com/dpp/news/indiana/police-can-keep-guns-seized-near-spierer-hangout

Several weeks ago, I wrote a post about how non-Christians perceive Christians. The article was based on an interchange with one non-Christian lady on this blog. I was surprised at the number of responses, including those from a number of non-Christians. I am grateful for all who responded.

A few Christians were concerned that I might be compromising my beliefs and convictions by writing the post. To the contrary, I still hold firmly to the exclusivity of the gospel and the mandate to evangelize. But, while I am convicted about the never-changing message of the gospel, I am concerned how we messengers sometimes treat others who don't believe as we do.

For now, I have provided four examples of what non-Christians are asking of Christians. They were all comments at different points on my blog. Each section represents a different non-Christian.

http://www.christianpost.com/news/four-thoughts-from-non-christians-about-christians-101439/

MURRIETA, Calif. – The criminal trial for three men who were arrested for reading the Bible aloud outside of a California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) office began on Monday.

The incident occurred in February 2011 when Pastor Brett Coronado, Mark Mackey and Edward Florez, Jr. went to the DMV in Hemet early one morning to evangelize those who were waiting for the facility to open. As they stood on the public sidewalk, Mackey began to read out loud from the Bible.

However, soon after, he was approached by a security officer at the DMV, who asked him to move elsewhere. The men then asserted that they had a First Amendment right to stand on the sidewalk, and Mackey continued to read from the Scriptures.

Approximately 10 minutes later, a California patrol officer arrived on the scene, grabbed Mackey’s Bible, and put him in handcuffs. He informed the men that they could not “preach to a captive audience.”

http://christiannews.net/2013/08/05/trial-begins-for-christians-arrested-for-reading-bible-outside-california-dmv/

Internal Security Minister Aharonovich announces reform to reduce number of available weapons in Israel from 290,000 amid wave of murders, suicides

This year, 11 individuals were murdered and five committed suicide in Israel using privately owned weapons, said Internal Security Minister Yizhak Aharonovich Wednesday.

At a meeting of the the Internal Affairs Committee on reducing weapons, headed by MK Miri Regev, Aharonovich stated that as part of the gun reform in Israel, anyone who wishes to receive a gun permit will be required to undergo a medical and psychological examination. "If they won't pass the psychologist's test, they'll have to see a psychiatrist," he said.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4412090,00.html

A new Cook County Sheriff’s team is crisscrossing the suburbs to seize guns from thousands of people whose Firearm Owner’s Identification Cards have been revoked.

More than 3,000 people in Cook County have failed to surrender their revoked FOID cards to the state. Sheriff Tom Dart said he thinks many of them continue to possess firearms.

The Chicago Police Department conducts regular missions to recover revoked FOID cards and seize guns from the holders, but there wasn’t a concerted effort to do that in Cook County’s suburbs, Dart said.

“The system is broken,” the sheriff said. “The system revokes cards, but the guns are of no consequence. . . . Our strong hope is that we will eliminate tragedies.”

http://www.suntimes.com/21526485-761/cook-county-sheriffs-team-taking-guns-if-foid-card-is-revoked.html

One of the most successful coaches in the state of Alabama is suddenly out of a job after he was dismissed for what initially seems to be a remarkably trivial reason: He attends the wrong church.

As reported by the Montgomery Advertiser, Prattville (Ala.) East Memorial Christian Academy super coach Scott Phillips, who led the school’s football program to its first state playoff berth in years and coached the boys basketball team to the first state title in any sport, was dismissed because he refused to force his family to attend East Memorial Baptist Church.

While Phillips had never been forced to attend the school’s affiliated church when he was only a coach, that changed when he became the school’s athletic director. As confirmed by the Advertiser, East Memorial Christian Academy’s athletic director was expected to attend the East Memorial Baptist Church, even though there was allegedly not an official clause in the contract requiring such attendance.

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/highschool-prep-rally/alabama-state-champion-coach-ad-fired-being-member-102348634.html

A secular group sent a letter to the U.S. State Department last week to oppose the printing of quotations that refer to God on U.S. passports.

The Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) has been protesting religious references on passports since 2007, a press release states.

"We've received so many complaints since the unnecessary intrusion of godly quotes in passports under the Bush Administration," FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor said in a statement. "The United States is governed under a secular and godless constitution, and our passports should be secular, too."

The letter, written by FFRF staff attorney Rebecca S. Markert, asks the State Department to provide FFRF with documents from when officials decided to add the quotations to the passports. Markert says the references to God are a violation of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause because the documents are issued by the government.

http://www.christianpost.com/news/secular-group-objects-to-quotes-about-god-on-u-s-passports-101313/

With roughly three-in-ten (31 percent) Millennials now identifying as religiously unaffiliated the debate over why this generation is abandoning religion at an unprecedented rate has mostly centered around two explanations: Millennials are leaving because they do not like churches, but will eventually return as the churches change or as they change. Or alternatively, Millennials are leaving because they have fundamental problems with religion and subsequently few will return. Not surprisingly, many religious leaders tend to embrace the first explanation, while nonreligious people see greater merit in the second. Yet, both accounts have overlooked an important shift in religious affiliation: more Americans are being raised in nonreligious homes.

Beginning in the early 1990s, surveys began registering a modest uptick in the number of Americans reporting no formal religious affiliation. Recent surveys put the number at around one-in-five. As the ranks of the unaffiliated have grown so too has the number of Americans who were raised in nonreligious households, albeit at somewhat lower rates. In 1991, four percent of Americans were raised unaffiliated compared to eight percent in 2012. However, the generational differences are much starker. Thirteen percent of Millennials report that they were raised in a nonreligious household. In contrast, among Baby Boomers only five percent report being raised religiously unaffiliated.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-cox/born-and-raised-more-amer_b_3682847.html

Josh Powell wanted to go to school so badly that he pleaded with local officials to let him enroll. He didn’t know exactly what students were learning at Buckingham County High School, in rural central Virginia, but he had the sense that he was missing something fundamental.

By the time he was 16, he had never written an essay. He didn’t know South Africa was a country. He couldn’t solve basic algebra problems.

“There were all these things that are part of this common collective of knowledge that 99?percent of people have that I didn’t have,” Powell said.

Powell was taught at home, his parents using a religious exemption that allows families to entirely opt out of public education, a Virginia law that is unlike any other in the country. That means that not only are their children excused from attending school — as those educated under the state’s home-school statute are — but they also are exempt from all government oversight.

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-28/local/40859230_1_josh-powell-virginia-law-education

Pity the poor Loch Ness Monster! Not only has he (or she) been reportedly stuck in that gloomy, cold lake for decades, now the beastie has been unceremoniously tossed out of a leading creationist biology book – at least in the European edition.

As reported by The Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, the newest editions of Biology 1099 textbooks published by Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) out of Madison, Tenn., are absent lessons that the Loch Ness Monster is not only a real creature, but is still living today.

A previous edition of the book, which is popular with Christian fundamentalist educators and home-schoolers, asked: “Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’ in Scotland? ‘Nessie’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.”

Lessons like that, and another since-removed claim that a Japanese whaling boat once caught a dinosaur, are intended to debunk evolution because they “prove” that various organisms didn’t go extinct as legitimate scientists have said.

https://blog.au.org/blogs/wall-of-separation/nessie-nixed-fundamentalist-biology-textbook-publisher-drops-claim-that