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Another Dispatch in the "War on Christmas"
Like Simon and Garfunkle threading Silent Night through war news reports, I cannot resist putting these google news links back to back:
This Christmas:
Christians in Iraq remember their last Christmas service being broken up by armed guards, with the priest being beaten at the altar. Muslims in Saudia Arabia have been threatened with death for wishing Christians "happy holidays" much less "Merry Christmas." The President of Iran has announced that he will drive Christianity out of his country and is shutting down house-churches. In China, a protestant minister has been sentenced to 3 years in prison for printing Bibles.
Meanwhile, in America, 50 members of church groups protested outside a Sacramento Wal-Mart over what they see as the company's exclusion of Christmas from its seasonal advertising.
Truely, as Pat Robertson says, "Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different... Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history."
Happy holiday of your choice, y'all.
This Christmas:
Christians in Iraq remember their last Christmas service being broken up by armed guards, with the priest being beaten at the altar. Muslims in Saudia Arabia have been threatened with death for wishing Christians "happy holidays" much less "Merry Christmas." The President of Iran has announced that he will drive Christianity out of his country and is shutting down house-churches. In China, a protestant minister has been sentenced to 3 years in prison for printing Bibles.
Meanwhile, in America, 50 members of church groups protested outside a Sacramento Wal-Mart over what they see as the company's exclusion of Christmas from its seasonal advertising.
Truely, as Pat Robertson says, "Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different... Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history."
Happy holiday of your choice, y'all.
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Just..::facepalms::
Goes back to sleep...
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I swear, I can't go through a day any more without a mental image of Jesus facepalming at some new inanity, and thinking "Dude, when I warned them they'd be persecuted, I didn't mean they should go INVENTING it..."
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Isn't it astonishing that suddenly the majority religion (as a practitioner of Wicca, I can certainly admit to Christianity being the majority) of this country is so oppressed? @@
I'd like to know how many Christians have been forbidden to instruct their children in their own religion, as the Wiccan couple in Indiana was. I'd like to know how many Christians have had their religion declared by the President to be "not really a religion" as Wiccans across the country have seen in this administration? I'd like to know how many Christians had to go to the US Supreme Court to *have* their religion declared legitimate ... or been suspended from school for wearing symbols of their religious faith ... or lost custody battles because of their religious faith and nothing else ... all things that have happened to Wiccans.
Don't even get me started on the religious intolerance toward Muslims, Native Americans, Jews ... the latter, according to the president of the Southern Baptist Convention (as quoted in Jimmy Carter's new book, "Our Endangered Values"), being ignored by their deity, as "God does not hear the prayers of a Jew."
Cry me a fucking river, Robertson.
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What I couldn't resist in the links above was the comparison of Christians who are being brutally oppressed vs people who have their knickers in a knot over an advertising campaign.
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And, to further make the point ... it's not an "advertising campaign." Stores are trying to be inclusive, by recognizing that there is more than one faith with a winter holiday.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, obviously. It's just that the whole "war on Christianity" thing is such bullshit, and it really irritates the crap out of me. I think that people everywhere should be able to worship as they choose ... I don't care if the object of their adoration is a padlock; it's their choice. I am just as annoyed at regimes like those you describe, which prevent people from choosing Christianity, as I am at our current administration, which obviously wants to prevent people from choosing anything *but* Christianity.
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Indeed. It may encourage you to know that I have, from time to time, been able to break thru to a few of the "Christians are persecuted in America" types by asking them exactly that. Once I point out some of the REAL persecution faced by non-Christians, they tend to be rather stunned. Most of them have lived such protected lives that they honestly have no idea what really goes on in this country; it may well be that I'm the first non-Christian they've ever known (not counting "nominal Christians", those who are really areligious but still self-identify as Christian). And at least one of those eventually broke with Christianity after being exposed to some Real People of other faiths. He couldn't reconcile what his church had been telling him with what he was finding out.
*sigh* Of course, that last is precisely the reason for things like the "War On Christmas" campaign -- the only way to prevent people from waking up and smelling the coffee is to get rid of the coffee.