Persecution & Other Tragedies Not Talked About

[Landlord]

Been meaning to post about this but the board has been giving me trouble. These are just a few links of which there are many more you can find from different sources and perspectives. I thought about throwing these in a different thread, but I think this deserves its own attention.

 

 

I am not, before anyone starts making accusations, claiming to be persecuted personally. I'm also not claiming persecution by association. I'm also not using this to justify any conspiracy theories about how every non-christian human being is a hateful heathen.

 

The one question I will ask though is where is the consistency in our outrage? I don't know in detail how they got the numbers they did, and I don't know how perfectly reliable all of these sites are, but people are getting seriously worked up about stuff like fighting for gay rights, which is great, but since hypocrite is one of the most popular terms to throw around to people that disagree with you, what isn't hypocritical about none of us caring about what is going on here? This is just one major and horrific example of many of tragedies going on around the world that none of us really seem to care much about. Why?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The world's most ancient Christian communities are being destroyed — and no one cares

 

http://theweek.com/article/index/255403/the-worlds-most-ancient-christian-communities-are-being-destroyed-mdash-and-no-one-cares

 

Quote

The persecution of Christians throughout the Middle East, as well as the silence with which it has been met in the West, are the subject of journalist Ed West's Kindle Single "The Silence of Our Friends." The booklet is a brisk and chilling litany of horrors: Discriminatory laws, mass graves, unofficial pogroms, and exile. The persecuted are not just Coptic and Nestorian Christians who have relatively few co-communicants in the West, but Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants as well.

Throughout the Middle East the pattern is the same. Christians are murdered in mob violence or by militant groups. Their churches are bombed, their shops destroyed, and their homes looted. Laws are passed making them second-class citizens, and the majority of them eventually leave.

Christian Persecution Doubled In 2013, Reports Annual Survey By Open Doors

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/09/christian-persecution_n_4568286.html

 

Quote

(Reuters) - Reported cases of Christians killed for their faith around the world doubled in 2013 from the year before, with Syria accounting for more than the whole global total in 2012, according to an annual survey.

Open Doors, a non-denominational group supporting persecuted Christians worldwide, said on Wednesday it had documented 2,123 "martyr" killings, compared with 1,201 in 2012. There were 1,213 such deaths in Syria alone last year, it said.

"This is a very minimal count based on what has been reported in the media and we can confirm," said Frans Veerman, head of research for Open Doors. Estimates by other Christian groups put the annual figure as high as 8,000.

The Open Doors report placed North Korea at the top of its list of 50 most dangerous countries for Christians, a position it has held since the annual survey began 12 years ago. Somalia, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan were the next four in line.

Christian Leaders Urge Support For Persecuted Communities In Syria And Egypt

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/08/christian-syria-egypt_n_5287517.html

 

Quote

The Rev. Andrew White, a chaplain at St. George’s Anglican Church in Baghdad, said the people he sees at a church-related clinic wonder if Christians in the West have forgotten them. He said the number of Christians in Iraq has dropped from a high of 1.5 million to about 200,000.

Members of his congregation are leaving, and he has personally been shot at and kidnapped and rebuilt his church after a bombing.

“So many have gone. All the time they leave and, I confess, I cry because my loved ones are leaving,” he said. “I used to say, ‘I’m not leaving you. Don’t you leave me.’ I can’t say that anymore because I know if my loved ones stay, they might be killed. I know that if my loved ones remain, the chance of them surviving is very little.”

Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl said that if people wonder how atrocities like this violence and persecution can be occurring, it is because others are silent.

“If history has any lesson to teach us about silence, it’s not a good one,” he said, urging both the churches and lawmakers to take action to protect the religious freedom of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East.

Archbishop Oshagan Choloyan of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America said that while there has been humanitarian aid from the West, there has not been enough attention to the growing discrimination and hardship facing Mideast Christians.

The World's War on Christianity

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-j-morgan/the-worlds-war-on-christian-persecution_b_4590933.html

 

Quote

In his new book, The Global War on Christians, John L. Allen, Jr., senior Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Report, called the massive worldwide wave of anti-Christian violence "the most dramatic religion story of the early 21st century."

He wrote, "Christians today indisputably are the most persecuted religious body on the face of the planet, and too often their new martyrs suffer in silence."

This is a human rights disaster of epic proportions, claimed Allen, and "the world's best-kept secret." While it's true attacks are mounting against adherents of other faiths, 80 percent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed at Christians.

The worst killings may be in Northern Nigeria. According to the watchdog agency Open Doors, more Christians were killed in Northern Nigeria last year than in the rest of the world combined. Christian women are forced at knifepoint to convert to Islam, and the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram is seeking to eradicate Christianity.

The war on Christians

 

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9041841/the-war-on-christians/

 

Quote

Imagine if correspondents in late 1944 had reported the Battle of the Bulge, but without explaining that it was a turning point in the second world war. Or what if finance reporters had told the story of the AIG meltdown in 2008 without adding that it raised questions about derivatives and sub-prime mortgages that could augur a vast financial implosion?

Most people would say that journalists had failed to provide the proper context to understand the news. Yet that’s routinely what media outlets do when it comes to outbreaks of anti-Christian persecution around the world, which is why the global war on Christians remains the greatest story never told of the early 21st century.

In recent days, people around the world have been appalled by images of attacks on churches in Pakistan, where 85 people died when two suicide bombers rushed the Anglican All Saints Church in Peshawar, and in Kenya, where an assault on a Catholic church in Wajir left one dead and two injured.

Those atrocities are indeed appalling, but they cannot truly be understood without being seen as small pieces of a much larger narrative. Consider three points about the landscape of anti-Christian persecution today, as shocking as they are generally unknown. According to the International Society for Human Rights, a secular observatory based in Frankfurt, Germany, 80 per cent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed at Christians. Statistically speaking, that makes Christians by far the most persecuted religious body on the planet.

David Cameron says Christianity is the most persecuted religion but fails to act

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2014/apr/11/david-cameron-christianity-most-persecuted-religion

 

Quote

Some statistics of Christian persecution are inflated, but the reliable ones are shocking enough. Around the world tens of thousands of people (at least) are in peril of their lives just for being Christians. In the last century hundreds of thousands were killed for it by regimes that wanted to extirpate religion altogether. This didn't work very well. In China, for example, queries about God and Christianity far outnumber those on Chairman Mao on their equivalent of Twitter. But it was profoundly wicked as well as ineffectual.

This persecution continues today. The question is what the British government can actually do about it. In the Middle East there is nothing we can do. The war in Syria and the turmoil in Iraq are completely out of our control. The oppressive peace in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and indeed all the Gulf states, entails monstrous injustices towards religious minorities, Shia as much as Christian. But there is little that any British government can do and it is reluctant to influence the policies of richer and friendly states.

 

[Excel]

lol

 

EDIT: I'm not endorsing the persecution of anyone. I just find the idea that there is a worldwide persecution of Christians laughable.

[ZRod]

Why don't we care about it? Because it's in a far away place. In this country being a Christian is probably one of the least persecuted things you could possibly be. I don't see too many people outraged over gay rights in other countries except when Evangelical Christians from the United States influence laws in Uganda to criminalize homosexuality.

 

If we're going to have a debate about people being persecuted for their religious views around the world I think this board would be in overwhelming agreement that it's not right.

[knapplc]

Everyone who thinks it's OK to persecute Christians, please +1 Excel's post HERE.

 

Everyone who thinks it is NOT OK to persecute Christians, please +1 ZRod's post HERE.

 

Not gonna lie, I'm expecting a couple of jokers to +1 Excel's post. But I'm also guessing the overwhelming majority will +1 ZRod's. Because nobody here is in favor of this, and nobody "doesn't care."

 

 

 

BIG TIME EDIT - Hey, whoops! +1ing Excel's post you are NOT saying or implying that he's OK with the persecution of Christians. Doing it this way is only a way to aggregate some votes since I didn't start this thread. If Landlord makes a poll I'll take this down....

Edited May 20, 2014 by knapplc
I'm a bonehead

[Excel]

Everyone who thinks it's OK to persecute Christians, please +1 Excel's post HERE.

 

Everyone who thinks it is NOT OK to persecute Christians, please +1 ZRod's post HERE.

 

Not gonna lie, I'm expecting a couple of jokers to +1 Excel's post. But I'm also guessing the overwhelming majority will +1 ZRod's. Because nobody here is in favor of this, and nobody "doesn't care."

 

Ok no. I'm not saying it's ok to "persecute" Chrisitans but I just find this whole idea laughable. The few isolated incidents Landlord is citing are just that, isolated incidents and they're being blown way out of proportion. There is no world wide persecution and Christians have no idea what that's really like but broadly speaking they're pretty good at doing it to other people.

 

I don't view it as religious based persecution because of the context of each incident:

 

North Korea: Political issue more than it is religious.

Nigeria: Most valid case there is but Boko Haram is terrorizing plenty of Muslims as well...basically anyone who isn't them and the nation has seen anti-Muslim violence as well.

Iraq/Syria: Waaaay too complicated to paint this as a religious persecution issue. If anything I'd say that most of violence there is rooted in ethnic conflicts. Some groups are applying a thin religious veneer to it but just like in Nigeria they're "persecuting" plenty of Muslims as well.

[Landlord]

 

Ok no. I'm not saying it's ok to "persecute" Chrisitans but I just find this whole idea laughable. The few isolated incidents Landlord is citing are just that, isolated incidents and they're being blown way out of proportion. There is no world wide persecution Christians have no idea what that's really like but broadly speaking they're pretty good at doing it.

 

 

Did you actually read the links or nah? Isolated incidents is hardly how I would describe what is being reported.

 

 

 

 

Not gonna lie, I'm expecting a couple of jokers to +1 Excel's post. But I'm also guessing the overwhelming majority will +1 ZRod's. Because nobody here is in favor of this, and nobody "doesn't care."

 

It's not really a matter of do you care or do you not care, but a matter of degrees. ZRod's answer seems pretty spot on to me, but also just confirms that we're all inconsistent, hypocritical and biased when it comes to what we really want to fight for.

[knapplc]

 

Everyone who thinks it's OK to persecute Christians, please +1 Excel's post HERE.

 

Everyone who thinks it is NOT OK to persecute Christians, please +1 ZRod's post HERE.

 

Not gonna lie, I'm expecting a couple of jokers to +1 Excel's post. But I'm also guessing the overwhelming majority will +1 ZRod's. Because nobody here is in favor of this, and nobody "doesn't care."

 

Ok no. I'm not saying it's ok to "persecute" Chrisitans but I just find this whole idea laughable. The few isolated incidents Landlord is citing are just that, isolated incidents and they're being blown way out of proportion. There is no world wide persecution and Christians have no idea what that's really like but broadly speaking they're pretty good at doing it to other people.

 

I don't view it as religious based persecution because of the context of each incident:

 

North Korea: Political issue more than it is religious.

Nigeria: Most valid case there is but Boko Haram is terrorizing plenty of Muslims as well...basically anyone who isn't them and the nation has seen anti-Muslim violence as well.

Iraq/Syria: Waaaay too complicated to paint this as a religious persecution issue. If anything I'd say that most of violence there is rooted in ethnic conflicts. Some groups are applying a thin religious veneer to it but just like in Nigeria they're "persecuting" plenty of Muslims as well.

 

 

I'm going to edit that, because it does kinda sound like I'm implying you're endorsing the persecution of Christians.

 

It's only a vote, nothing more. Sorry for the confusion.

[Excel]

 

 

Ok no. I'm not saying it's ok to "persecute" Chrisitans but I just find this whole idea laughable. The few isolated incidents Landlord is citing are just that, isolated incidents and they're being blown way out of proportion. There is no world wide persecution Christians have no idea what that's really like but broadly speaking they're pretty good at doing it.

 

 

Did you actually read the links or nah? Isolated incidents is hardly how I would describe what is being reported.

 

 

 

 

Not gonna lie, I'm expecting a couple of jokers to +1 Excel's post. But I'm also guessing the overwhelming majority will +1 ZRod's. Because nobody here is in favor of this, and nobody "doesn't care."

 

It's not really a matter of do you care or do you not care, but a matter of degrees. ZRod's answer seems pretty spot on to me, but also just confirms that we're all inconsistent, hypocritical and biased when it comes to what we really want to fight for.

 

 

Ugh no I didn't read all of them just like I didn't watch the two hours of youtube video some guy posted the other day. TL/DR them for me.

[knapplc]

 

Not gonna lie, I'm expecting a couple of jokers to +1 Excel's post. But I'm also guessing the overwhelming majority will +1 ZRod's. Because nobody here is in favor of this, and nobody "doesn't care."

It's not really a matter of do you care or do you not care, but a matter of degrees. ZRod's answer seems pretty spot on to me, but also just confirms that we're all inconsistent, hypocritical and biased when it comes to what we really want to fight for.

 

 

How are "we" biased? What biases are we showing, and how are we showing them?

[Landlord]

 

Ugh no I didn't read all of them just like I didn't watch the two hours of youtube video some guy posted the other day. TL/DR them for me.

 

 

 

 

 

Open Doors, a non-denominational group supporting persecuted Christians worldwide, said on Wednesday it had documented 2,123 "martyr" killings, compared with 1,201 in 2012. There were 1,213 such deaths in Syria alone last year, it said.

 

 

 

According to the International Society for Human Rights, a secular observatory based in Frankfurt, Germany, 80 per cent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed at Christians. Statistically speaking, that makes Christians by far the most persecuted religious body on the planet.

Some statistics of Christian persecution are inflated, but the reliable ones are shocking enough. Around the world tens of thousands of people (at least) are in peril of their lives just for being Christians.

[JJ Husker]

Everyone who thinks it's OK to persecute Christians, please +1 Excel's post HERE.

 

Everyone who thinks it is NOT OK to persecute Christians, please +1 ZRod's post HERE.

 

Not gonna lie, I'm expecting a couple of jokers to +1 Excel's post. But I'm also guessing the overwhelming majority will +1 ZRod's. Because nobody here is in favor of this, and nobody "doesn't care."

 

 

 

BIG TIME EDIT - Hey, whoops! +1ing Excel's post you are NOT saying or implying that he's OK with the persecution of Christians. Doing it this way is only a way to aggregate some votes since I didn't start this thread. If Landlord makes a poll I'll take this down....

Everyone who was confused by this post of Knapp's, +1 my post right here.

Better safe than sorry.

[Ulty]

If we are all only humoring these horrible, horrible religious deabte to bide time until opening kickoff but don't really give a $h!t, spread some more +1's over here too.

[Ulty]

Is all of this +1'ing a form of Internet tithing? Can we consider it a Christian charity?

[Excel]

Ok thanks. I'm going to have to respectfully say that I still don't buy the persecution idea.

 

2,123 killings in 2013 of which half were in Syria which I have already said I see as being as much ethnic as it is religious. There are ~2.1 billion Christians in the world so that's about 1,000 out of more than two billion and you call it widespread persecution? Nah.

 

Do people who identify as Christian have it rough in some areas of the world? Sure but its often due to many other factors that are only tangentially related to their religion. To call it persecution and start some big sob campaing is ridiculous especially given Christianity's history of actually persecuting people.

[NUance]

 

Everyone who thinks it's OK to persecute Christians, please +1 Excel's post HERE.

 

Everyone who thinks it is NOT OK to persecute Christians, please +1 ZRod's post HERE.

 

Not gonna lie, I'm expecting a couple of jokers to +1 Excel's post. But I'm also guessing the overwhelming majority will +1 ZRod's. Because nobody here is in favor of this, and nobody "doesn't care."

 

Ok no. I'm not saying it's ok to "persecute" Chrisitans but I just find this whole idea laughable. The few isolated incidents Landlord is citing are just that, isolated incidents and they're being blown way out of proportion. There is no world wide persecution and Christians have no idea what that's really like but broadly speaking they're pretty good at doing it to other people.

 

I don't view it as religious based persecution because of the context of each incident:

 

North Korea: Political issue more than it is religious.

Nigeria: Most valid case there is but Boko Haram is terrorizing plenty of Muslims as well...basically anyone who isn't them and the nation has seen anti-Muslim violence as well.

Iraq/Syria: Waaaay too complicated to paint this as a religious persecution issue. If anything I'd say that most of violence there is rooted in ethnic conflicts. Some groups are applying a thin religious veneer to it but just like in Nigeria they're "persecuting" plenty of Muslims as well.

 

 

Oh come on. It's laughable to list these countries and say it's not a religion issue. Of course it's about religion. It's not like the dictators, regimes and mobs in North Korea, Nigeria and Iraq/Syria are persecuting Christians because they hate the sound of Methodist hymns.

 

 

 

PS: So Bucky is in *favor* persecuting Christians? WHAT?? (/jk lol)