| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Khartoum" |
| Date: |
10 Nov 2003 09:09:40 PM |
| Object: |
Great article |
Persecuting the Truth
Claims of Christian Victimization Ring Hollow
By TIM WISE
http://www.counterpunch.org/wise11082003.html
"Or consider the President, who said during the 2000 campaign that Jesus
Christ was his favorite philosopher. In a land where professing
Christianity was a one-way ticket to the gulag, such a person could
never get elected by the people, or even close to elected the way Bush
almost did.
On the other hand, if a candidate for any major office were to say that
his favorite philosopher was Mohammed, or Buddha, or some prominent
atheist, well, not even the Supreme Court and a rigged ballot recount
would be able to dig that candidate out of the hole in which they would
find themselves. Indeed, imagine what would happen if a Presidential
candidate were to announce that there was no God, or even that they were
agnostic and simply unsure as to the nature or existence of God.
Persecution of the faithful indeed."
***********************************************
Khartoum aa#2110
When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm;
they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of
science, they know that neither is infallible. But when two theologians
differ, since there is no criteria to which either can appeal, there is
nothing for it but mutual hatred and an open or covert appeal to force.
Bertrand Russell
Can Religion Cure our Troubles 1954
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| User: "johac" |
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| Title: Re: Great article |
11 Nov 2003 12:55:23 AM |
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In article <UpYrb.165010$HS4.1339993@attbi_s01>,
Khartoum <khartoumnospam@insightbb.com> wrote:
Persecuting the Truth
Claims of Christian Victimization Ring Hollow
By TIM WISE
http://www.counterpunch.org/wise11082003.html
"Or consider the President, who said during the 2000 campaign that Jesus
Christ was his favorite philosopher. In a land where professing
Christianity was a one-way ticket to the gulag, such a person could
never get elected by the people, or even close to elected the way Bush
almost did.
On the other hand, if a candidate for any major office were to say that
his favorite philosopher was Mohammed, or Buddha, or some prominent
atheist, well, not even the Supreme Court and a rigged ballot recount
would be able to dig that candidate out of the hole in which they would
find themselves. Indeed, imagine what would happen if a Presidential
candidate were to announce that there was no God, or even that they were
agnostic and simply unsure as to the nature or existence of God.
Persecution of the faithful indeed."
Good article. Thanks.
--
John Hachmann, aa #1782
- Question authority. Now more than ever. -
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: Great article |
11 Nov 2003 05:50:57 PM |
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On Tue, 11 Nov 2003 03:09:40 GMT, Khartoum
<khartoumnospam@insightbb.com>, Message ID:
<UpYrb.165010$HS4.1339993@attbi_s01> wrote in alt.atheism;
Persecuting the Truth
Claims of Christian Victimization Ring Hollow
By TIM WISE
http://www.counterpunch.org/wise11082003.html
November 8, 2003
Persecuting the Truth
Claims of Christian Victimization Ring Hollow
By TIM WISE
David Limbaugh, brother of Rush, has been making the rounds lately,
promoting his new book, Persecution: How Liberals are Waging War Against
Christianity. Therein, Limbaugh claims that the left, broadly defined,
is doing everything possible to eliminate all mention of the nation's
majority faith from the public square.
Limbaugh digs up hundreds of cases that ostensibly make clear the
systematic campaign of denigration aimed at Christians. Most of these
involve instances of so-called religious persecution in public schools,
from which, to hear Limbaugh tell it, God has been fully expunged and
where expressing one's faith is sure to result in suspension, a failing
grade, or having one's Bible thrown in the trash by a humanist teacher
who proclaims "this is garbage," as she slings the good book to the
paper receptacle like so much refuse.
How telling and appropriate then, that in the same month Limbaugh's book
became a best-seller, what with its hyperbolic claims of a leftist
putsch against followers of the man from Nazareth, we should also learn
of the comments of U.S. General William Boykin, who has announced a
jihad of his own against Muslims.
Boykin, for those who have been living under a rock for the last several
weeks, has claimed that God is on the side of the U.S. in its fight
against terrorism, and that Islam is essentially a "Satanic" faith, led
by idol worshipers whose God isn't as big or real as the God of
Christianity. That Allah, the name for God in Arabic, is actually the
exact same God as the one Boykin worships naturally escapes him. After
all, everyone knows the Lord only speaks English.
Boykin's comments, far from being attacked by those in positions of
power and authority, despite the supremacist mindset behind them, were
shrugged off by the Bush Administration. Boykin himself was praised by
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and isn't even being reprimanded, let along
persecuted for his nuttiness. That's what it means to be a member of the
majority faith: you can be a bigot, spew intolerant and ignorant
diatribes against those of other traditions and never get in trouble. On
the other hand, let a Muslim with any real position of authority go
around attacking Christianity, especially after 9/11, and see how
quickly they would end up on John Ashcroft's ***** list, investigated
under the Patriot Act.
Sorta like Ann Coulter, who said right after 9/11 that the U.S. should
invade Muslim nations, kill their leaders and convert everyone to
Christianity: a vacuous stream of putrid bombast that not only didn't
hurt her career but has helped it, making her more ubiquitous than ever.
Imagine for a second that an Arab writer, perhaps the late Edward Said,
had written that because of U.S. policy in the Middle East or because of
our support for Israel, a force of Muslim armies should invade this
country, kill its leaders and convert everyone to Islam. How long would
Said have remained a free man, let alone a free and employed man?
Or consider the President, who said during the 2000 campaign that Jesus
Christ was his favorite philosopher. In a land where professing
Christianity was a one-way ticket to the gulag, such a person could
never get elected by the people, or even close to elected the way Bush
almost did.
On the other hand, if a candidate for any major office were to say that
his favorite philosopher was Mohammed, or Buddha, or some prominent
atheist, well, not even the Supreme Court and a rigged ballot recount
would be able to dig that candidate out of the hole in which they would
find themselves. Indeed, imagine what would happen if a Presidential
candidate were to announce that there was no God, or even that they were
agnostic and simply unsure as to the nature or existence of God.
Persecution of the faithful indeed.
That Limbaugh's case for Christian victimization is weakened by these
kinds of examples, however, is hardly the full extent of his book's
deceptive and nonsensical claims.
Within weeks of Persecution's release, intrepid web bloggers had already
discovered the falsity of several of the most dramatic examples of
anti-religious oppression in the volume. Like the kid who was supposedly
"pounced on" by teachers when he dared to pray in his school's cafeteria
(actually he was punished for fighting, the prayer part was made up).
Although there are surely true examples of heavy-handed school
administrators, employers and others overstepping legitimate concerns
about church/state entanglement and unfairly limiting religious
expression, Limbaugh has hardly made a case that such a problem is
endemic to the culture as a whole. After all, with more than 30 million
kids in school in the U.S., even a thousand legitimate cases like this
would constitute nothing even remotely resembling a trend.
Indeed, if a few hundred examples out of 30 million kids amounts to a
conspiracy, then there must likewise be a conspiracy of food poisoning,
since at least that many will get sick eating lunchroom food each year.
There are plenty of things that school children have to worry about, and
being punished for expressing their religiosity is simply not among
them, especially if they are in the majority, that is to say, Christian.
On the other hand, to be of another faith, or purely secular is to
invite regular abuse from peers and authority figures alike.
Don't believe me?
Well then, you can go to hell.
Now tell me, how did that feel?
Probably not very good, right? Well keep reading, and try and put aside
how offended you may be, and should be, at the above epithet hurled your
way so as to make a point, for indeed there is a point to be made here.
You see, when a person says "Go to hell," as I just did, we all
recognize it as a personal attack, a slur of sorts, an ad hominem
invective that is wholly inappropriate to rational discourse. It is not
a comment that invites discussion or debate, rather it shuts down both.
It is a period at the end of the sentence, not a comma or colon leading
to something more prosaic.
Now try this one on for size: You are going to hell.
A little more abstract, a few extra letters on the end of the word go,
and stated as opinion rather than exclamation, but overall pretty
similar.
And to some of us, every bit as offensive.
Yet "you are going to hell" is what many of us hear day in and day out,
from the time we are children, if we fail to adhere to the "one true
faith" proclaimed by the likes of William Boykin and most every
evangelical Christian in the United States.
To we who are Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindu, Sufi, Sikh, some
combination of these or of no faith tradition at all, being told that we
are going to hell is no different than being commanded to go to said
place in a moment of anger. In fact, the former is more offensive than
the latter precisely because it comes from a place of judgment, it
involves casting aspersions not just upon our persons (which is also
implicit in telling someone to go to hell) but our souls. It is to say
that we are less than whole, less than precious in the eyes of the
Creator of the Universe. It is to say, in short, that we are inferior
peoples.
And it is something that no Christian has ever been told by a single one
of our number, so no, they cannot possibly relate. Christians may think
they are persecuted because the law won't allow them to read Christian
prayers over the school intercom, or because they can't plop a giant
monument of the Ten Commandments down in a public building, but trust
me, that is not persecution.
It is not persecution to be given a failing grade when your class paper
on Jesus as an historical figure uses only one source, the Bible, as a
reference, as happened to one student a few years ago. Such a paper
deserves an F, and the student who thinks a few lines from John or
Matthew constitute an acceptable bibliography should put down scripture,
pick up a dictionary and look up the meaning of the term research.
It is not persecution to be told that you can't send a stack of
Christian comic books to your son serving in the Middle East, as
happened to one family recently, and as Limbaugh laments in his book.
Such a prohibition owes to the admittedly repressive customs laws
existing in many Muslim countries, which restrict importation of large
quantities of non-Muslim religious literature, and has nothing to do
with political correctness in the United States, let alone its military
for goodness sake.
It is not persecution to be told that you can't pray out loud in a
classroom when such prayer would disrupt other students who for whatever
reason don't want to be subjected to your verbalized pronouncement of
faith.
It is not persecution when schools, seeking to be more inclusive of
non-majority students, change the annual Christmas pageant or
celebration to a generic holiday celebration. It may be silly, it may or
may not be Constitutionally-required, but it is certainly not a form of
anti-Christian repression.
Persecution is having a teacher tell you that the faith of your family
is illegitimate and that you are going to spend eternity in a lake of
fire surrounded by demons, and being told that all of your family who
have died heretofore are already there preparing a space for you. Been
there, done that.
Persecution is being corralled into an assembly in your public school
and being forced to listen to a proselytizing representative of a
Christian youth group call the students to proclaim their devotion to
Jesus, and to imply that those who won't do so are lost souls. Been
there, done that.
Persecution is writing an eighth grade term paper in that same public
school, in which you examine both sides of the school prayer issue
evenhandedly, but are graded down because the title you chose, "Our
Father Who Art in Homeroom?" is deemed sacrilegious by your
fundamentalist teacher. Been there, done that.
Persecution is having a teacher place anti-abortion pamphlets on every
desk in his room, which not only call for an end to the procedure but do
so in explicitly Christian terms, insisting that all who disagree are de
facto baby-killers and agents of Satan. Been there, done that too.
Persecution is, in short, being told that your personal relationship
with God is based on a lie, and that you should turn against the faith
of your family in order to be saved: an interesting variation on "honor
thy father and mother" if ever there was one.
Persecution is being told that you are cut off from the Creator; that
you are spiritually bankrupt. It is having to listen to the likes of
William Boykin and know that most Christians at least implicitly agree
with him and want nothing more than to see your faith eliminated from
the face of the Earth.
That those who adhere to the fundamentalist, evangelical line can't
possibly understand how terroristic their actions are to the rest of us
only serves as proof of just how privileged they are in this society,
how un-persecuted they have really been.
Having atheists make fun of you for being superstitious, as offensive as
that must be, simply doesn't compare to having someone tell you that you
are unholy. Especially when those atheists hold almost no power anywhere
in the culture, unlike fundamentalist Christians. The power of
Christians is what makes their absolutism so much more dangerous than
that of even the most militant non-believer. It is the power, plus the
prejudice towards other faiths, that amounts to religious persecution,
to faithism if you will.
Persecution of the dominant group in a society is an oxymoronic concept,
because only the dominant group can persecute by definition. Less
powerful folks might be able to offend, they might be able to mistreat
on an individual level, but they can not oppress. They can not
materially and substantively limit one's life choices and chances
because of their non-belief, or different beliefs.
Ultimately, if David Limbaugh thinks it's tough being a Christian in the
United States, he should try being anything else.
Tim Wise is an essayist, activist and father. He can be reached at
timjwise@msn.com
(c) 2003 Counterpunch
Stoney
"Designated Rascal and Rapscallion
and
SCAMPERMEISTER!"
When in doubt, SCAMPER about!
When things are fair, SCAMPER everywhere!
When things are rough, can't SCAMPER enough!
/end humour alert
alt.atheism military veteran #11
{so much for the 'no atheists in foxholes' rubbish}
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