Are Christians being persecuted in America? Americans United for the Separation of Church and State says no.
I’ve seen this a lot lately: Fundamentalists try to use the government to promote their faith. Whenever anyone objects to their tactics or language, or even voices a different opinion, they respond with accusations of hate speech, or say that their right of free speech are being squashed, or that they’re being persecuted, and demand that the offending challenge be removed.
Christians make up 78% of the population in the United states, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s poll on religion in America. People who are unaffiliated with any religion comprise 16.1% of the population. Of those unaffiliated people, Atheists make up 1.6% and Agnostics make up 2.4%. Do they really think that it’s possible for a 1.6% minority to persecute or infringe on the free speech of a dominant majority? Really?
This kind of paranoia only serves to diminish the severity of people who are actually being persecuted for their beliefs, such as the Christians in India, who are being murdered and having acid thrown in their faces, or the Muslims in Guantanamo Bay, who are being tortured.
So to say that the religious in this country are having their rights trampled on is pathetic. What’s really going on is that they just don’t want anyone else to have equal time or challenge their beliefs.
on Dec 14th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Ya, ya, real persecuted they are. Have to go around drawing fish symbols in the sand for fear of being strung up, do they? Can’t get elected? Huckabee was considered somewhat viable, as I recall. What a joke. You are so right that the whining in this country obscures real oppression like in the Sudan or China. And yet the whining continues:
http://www.thenewstribune.com/opinion/letters/story/567231.html
God is real. Fine. Which one, then? Can I pick? It says I can in the Constitution-thingy.
Can we please mount a drive for a December Baal display? I really want the solstice season open to all takers now, until it becomes clear that there isn’t room for everybody- and hence, anybody.
Being cast out of the public square is what these folks are reacting against. It was part of the social revolution of the 60′s which dethroned anglo Christian male dominance, along with the notion that wars were a morally justified part of our manifest destiny, and the traditional family structure (oops! let’s get that one back). It must feel like oppression when the public schools you grew up with celebrated Christmas (but they were really nice to the Jew in the corner!) but now the very words are taboo in the classroom…just as it often feels like oppression when you used to have an empire (Ottoman, Austria-Hungarian, Pattani, pick one) but the tides of fortune change. I have a neighbor who, perhaps unaware that affirmative action was ended years ago, will tell you straight-faced that he is one of the most persecuted in our nation: a white male. This is what happens when you openly question what was an unspoken, unearned privilege: it’s the same thing that happens when you take a treasured toy away from a spoiled child: whining. Why don’t they just pray to their all-powerful God to strike the plaque in Olympia with lightning?
If prayer is so effective and God is so jealous, you’d expect some kind of divine response (putting the plaque in a ditch doesn’t count). Christopher Hitchens is still alive and well, I’m told. Must he wait for his judgement and hellfire? If everything happens for a reason (Providence), aside from ebola and tsunamis, for what reason is Richard Dawkins being preserved from a miraculous tornado dropping a truck on his head? If there is a reason for everything, and God loves the little children and has the power to answer prayers, why are so many children still enslaved as prostitutes? If God is real and 6 year old hookers are part of his mysterious plan, I think Christians had better pray for a change of plan, because this one kind of sucks for a lot of people. So again, I love the first sentence of the plaque- there is no God-andyone who takes offense with that has to know that the Nativity looks as credible to me as a Tooth Fairy display. But the last sentence about enslaving minds…over the top. Plenty of dogmatic atheists are slaves to ideology as well, and the unfortunate examples of Pol Pot and Russia stand alongside the Inquisition and the Puritans as reasons why no metphysical ideology or prohibition thereof should become the doctrine of the state. You want your virgin, your Baal, your tooth fairy? Fine. Just keep it out of the Capitol building, for God’s sake. Jeez.