The media, today, is very fond of reporting stories of one group of people who are being persecuted by another. Sadly, very little news is reported of the continuing persecution of Christians throughout the world.
Christians are being persectued? You don’t say? I’ve never heard that.
That’s because the press never reports it.
Special interest groups are quick to remember Christianity’s crimes but never the crimes committed against Christianity. From the beginning, Christians have faced persecution. First from the Jews who considered Christianity a dangerous sect then continuing with the Roman Empire in 64 AD when the Emperor Nero blamed the great fire which swept through his city on the Christians. Nero was among the worst persecutors as he had many of the early Christians murdered, crucified and used as fodder for gladiator or fed to wild animals in the Coliseum. History also ignores pagan persecution of Christians by other groups such as the Goths, the Vandals and the Persians. Almost all the Apostles suffered death at the hands of pagans including Andrew, Phillip, Peter, Bartholemew, Thomas, Matthew, Simon the Zealot and Jude. Remember this the next time a Wiccan mentions the burning times.
Christians, particularly Catholics, have suffered hard in such countries as Ireland and Kosovo under the Turks. Other than the Crusades, Christianity and Islam have actually gotten along well until the crisis in Cyprus between Christian Greeks and Muslim Turks and the Civil War in Lebanon between rival sects. Since then, the relations between Christians and Muslims have been more than touchy.
Today, Christians continue to face enormous persecution especially in such countries as Pakistan, India, China, Sudan, the Middle East and Southeast Asia (Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Sri Lanka).
Lately, Christians in the United States have weathered assaults upon both their right to practice their religion and attempts to silence them from protesting by such groups as the ACLU and other special interest groups. These groups, in particular, have been accused, with some merit, of the following:
- The ban on any religious expression by faculty in front of students.
- The increased usage of BCE/CE, not just limited to strictly non-Christian studies but also to more general historical terms, even including Christianity or societies which eventually lead to Christianity (such as Greece and Rome).
- The Christmas controversy. O’Reilly refers to “The War on Chistmas”, a phrase originated by journalist Peter Brimelow in 1999. Advocates of greetings such as “Happy Holidays” replacing “Merry Christmas” state that their goal is to be more inclusive of non-Christian faiths, but O’Reilly contends that such efforts are a veiled attack on Christianity.
- In 2000, when the Brooklyn Museum of Art displayed an image of the Virgin Mary crafted of dried elephant dung, among other media, and festooned with photographs of winged female breasts, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani decided to cut the city’s voluntary funding to the museum. The state court ordered him to resume the previous financial support with an added $5.8 million.
- In March of 2006, one of the University of Oregon’s campus newspapers, The Insurgent in their coverage of the Muhammed cartoon controversy, published 12 cartoons of Jesus, along with two editorials criticising Catholicism. Two of the cartoons depicted Jesus with an erection and one presented him engaged in homosexual activity. In response, the Catholic League wrote Oregon lawmakers in complaint of the newspaper. The president of the Catholic League characterized the issue as hate speech. The response to the edition offered by the president of the university was criticized as tepid.
You can find information on the persecution of Christians going on at such websites as Persecution.org, Voice of the Martyrs, and the American Center for Law and Justice.
I speak, of course, about current events which are widely ignored by the media who pick and chose those who they wish to be labled as victims. In February to March 70 churches were destroyed by radical Muslims in Europe, the Kosovo bishop was attacked by his Muslim neighbors, 3 Christian schoolgirls were beheaded in Indonesia, Sri Lankan rebels targeted Christian churches, China and India jailed Christian activists, Christian shops were burned in Egypt, three people were tortured and brutally murdered in Turkey and two Pakistan brothers were tortured to death for failing to reject their Christian conversion and return to Islam. Do you here these things on CNN or MSNBC? Never.
source: International Christian Concern www.persection.org
I thought about changing the title of this post but I have since changed my mind. This is my very first blog on Word Press and I hope that it will be the first of many.