A Muslim group said it wants to see Ohio retain its state motto—"With God all things are possible"—even though a federal court has ruled it is an unconstitutional government endorse-ment of Christianity. The Council on American-Islamic Relations said the motto does not endorse only one religion, but advances a moral truth common to most.

The group noted the Koran teaches, "Know you not that God is able to do all things?" (Sura 2:106). The council said the US is facing a decline in moral values and respect for religion. "These problems will not be solved by eliminating references to God from public discourse."

Hong Kong is considered one of the least religious cities in the world—with 64 percent of more than 500 local people polled in an international survey saying they do not believe in any sort of religion, compared with the world’s average of 13 percent.

In Hong Kong, only 23 percent of the respondents said they regarded God as of "high importance," compared with 63 percent of those surveyed in other parts of the globe.

The survey said that more than half of the Hong Kong people interviewed did not think there is any God, or did not know what to answer when asked whether God was a kind of spirit or a person.

Worldwide, 87 percent of the respondents said they believed in some form of religion, be they Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists.

"This century is known as 'The martyrs' century' because more people have lost their lives for their Christianity since 1900 than in all the previous centuries together," writes the mission agency Open Doors, founded in 1955 by a Dutchman known as Brother Andrew, whose 1967 book God's Smuggler has sold 14 million copies around the globe.

Negotiations between 10 Downing Street (office of the prime minister), Lambeth Palace (office of the Archbishop of Canterbury) and the New Millennium Experience Company (responsible for the Millennium Dome going up in London) have broken down over … prayer. Before he died, the country's Roman Catholic primate, Cardinal Basil Hume, had suggested that Britain's third millennium be ushered in at the new Dome with a prayer led by his Anglican counterpart, Dr. George Carey. But Dome organizers and Blair officials disagree, saying a prayer at midnight would be too much of a downer in the midst of what they want to be a party atmosphere.

During Christianity's first four centuries, leaders of the faith collected the writings that would authoritatively describe Christ and His church while rejecting others written at the same time. The 27 chosen books, beginning with the Gospel of Matthew and concluding with Revelation, comprise the New Testament.

"In these alone is proclaimed the doctrine of godliness," declared Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria in 367, a man credited with first using the word canon to describe the Bible's contents.

But these days, mass market publishing is bringing to the public ancient texts that Athanasius and other early church leaders excluded. Some are works of popular piety (such as the Infancy Gospel of James, which relates a life of the Virgin Mary); others are books condemned as heretical (such as the gnostic Gospel of Thomas, containing 114 sayings attributed to Jesus).

Unlike the biblical gospels, The gospel of Thomas contains no narrative, only sayings attributed to Jesus, some familiar, others decidedly not. Its origins lie with second-century Christian gnostics, who taught that matter was evil, God utterly remote and salvation available only to the few who could attain hidden spiritual knowledge. The early church condemned these beliefs as heretical.

Most [British] adults have a copy of the Bible at home, but nearly all say they never read it. Research commissioned by the Bible Society indicates that more than 30 million [Britons] have a Bible in their home, and six out of ten adults claim personally to own one. The findings indicate that 3 percent of the adult population--1.3 million people--reads something from the Bible every day, with 2 percent reading it several times a week and 13 percent reading it once in the past year. More than 60 per cent of adults would seem not to have read anything from the Bible in the past year. "We are delighted that so many people own so many Bibles," Peter Kimber, the union's chief executive, said. "But what is the point of keeping it on the shelf when it is probably the most important book anyone should read?"