Imagine the unspeakable fury that would erupt across the Islamic world if a Christian-led government in Khartoum had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese Muslims over the past 30 years. Or if Christian gunmen were firebombing mosques in Iraq during Friday prayers. Or if Muslim girls in Indonesia had been abducted and beheaded on their way to school, because of their faith.

Such horrors are barely thinkable, of course. But they have all occurred in reverse, with Christians falling victim to Islamist aggression. Only two days ago, a suicide bomber crashed a jeep laden with explosives into a packed Catholic church in Kaduna, northern Nigeria, killing at least eight people and injuring more than 100. The tragedy bore the imprint of numerous similar attacks by Boko Haram (which roughly translates as “Western education is sinful”), an exceptionally bloodthirsty militant group.

Other notable trouble spots include Egypt, where 600,000 Copts – more than the entire population of Manchester – have emigrated since the 1980s in the face of harassment or outright oppression.
Why is such a huge scourge chronically under-reported in the West? One result of this oversight is that the often inflated sense of victimhood felt by many Muslims has festered unchallenged. Take the fallout of last month’s protests around the world against the American film about the Prophet Mohammed. While most of the debate centred on the rule of law and the limits of free speech, almost nothing was said about how much more routinely Islamists insult Christians, almost always getting away with their provocations scot-free.

Innocence of Muslims, the production that spurred all the outrage, has been rightly dismissed as contemptible trash. What, though, of a website such as “Guardians of the Faith”, run by Salafist extremists in Cairo? Among many posts, it has carried an article entitled “Why Muslims are superior to Copts”. “Being a Muslim girl whose role models are the wives of the Prophet, who were required to wear the hijab, is better than being a Christian girl, whose role models are whores,” it declares. “Being a Muslim who fights to defend his honour and his faith is better than being a Christian who steals, rapes, and kills children.” Hateful messages breed hateful acts. Is it any surprise that mobs have set fire to one church after another across Egypt in recent years?

The deeper truth masked by all the ranting – and, it should be added, by the blinkers of many Western secularists – is that Christians are targeted in greater numbers than any other faith group on earth. About 200 million church members (10 per cent of the global total) face discrimination or persecution: it just isn’t fashionable to say so. In 2010, I set out to write a chronicle of anti-Christian persecution on several continents. Published in my book, Christianophobia, the results of my research are even more disquieting than I expected.

Abu Hamza, the 7/7 ringleader Mohammad Sidique Khan and other totemic figures were allowed to practise their religion openly in Britain, yet there is scarcely a single country from Morocco to Pakistan in which Christians are fully free to worship without restriction. Muslims who convert to Christianity or other faiths in most of these societies face harsh penalties. There is now a high risk that the Churches will all but vanish from their biblical heartlands in the Middle East.

The suffering is no less acute elsewhere. Before East Timor gained independence from Indonesia, 100,000 Catholic non-combatants were killed by agents of the Suharto government between the 1970s and the 1990s. And a few months ago, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, officially announced that “it is necessary to destroy all the churches” on the Arabian Peninsula.
One reason why Western audiences hear so little about faith-based victimisation in the Muslim world is straightforward: young Christians in Europe and America do not become “radicalised”, and persecuted Christians tend not to respond with terrorist violence. This forbearance should of course be a source of pride in many respects, and would be an unqualified good if properly acknowledged. But it counts for much less in a climate where most of what is considered newsworthy has to involve tub-thumping or outright violence.

The problems faced by Christians are not by any means restricted to the Muslim world. Take India, where minorities – Muslims included – are menaced by Hindu extremists who consider the monotheistic traditions to be unwelcome imports, and resent Christian opposition to the caste system.

Between August and October of 2008, Hindu hardliners in the eastern state of Orissa murdered at least 90 people, displaced 50,000, and attacked 170 churches and chapels. This disaster was not unexceptional. The past four years have seen scores of assaults on churches and congregations in other parts of the country.

Elsewhere, the culprits include not only Communists, but also Buddhist nationalists in countries such as Burma and Sri Lanka. The scale of Communist intolerance is a matter of record. Curbs on freedom of worship in countries including China, Vietnam and Cuba are draconian and sometimes exceptionally sadistic.

Why does all this matter? One obvious answer is that faith isn’t going to go away. Whatever one’s view of the coherence of religious belief, it has become clear that secularisation has gone into reverse, partly through the spread of democracy. Three quarters of humanity now profess a religious creed; this figure is predicted to reach 80 per cent by mid-century.

The prospect should not surprise us. Atheism feeds off bad religion, especially fundamentalism, whose easily disposable, dogmatic certainties now form one of atheism’s main assets. On the other hand, it is much harder for non-belief to replace the imaginative richness of a mature religious commitment, and the corresponding assurance that life is worth living responsibly, because it has ultimate meaning.

But faith is like fire, to cite an analogy used by the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. It warms; but it can also burn. Along or near the 10th parallel north of the equator, between Nigeria and Indonesia and the Philippines, religious fervour and political unrest are reinforcing each other. This point should be granted even if one accepts religion’s status as an immense – perhaps the preeminent – source of social capital in existence.

On the positive side, faith-based conviction has mobilised millions to oppose authoritarian regimes, inaugurate democratic transitions, support human rights and relieve human suffering. In the 20th century, religious movements helped end colonial rule and usher in democracy in Latin America, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
The challenge, then, at once simple and substantial, is to promote the peaceful messages at the heart of the world’s major faiths, while neutralising perversions of the core teachings.

Nothing I have said should be interpreted as encouraging a holier-than-thou attitude among Christians. Large parts of the Christian world were saturated with unsurpassed violence 70 or 100 years ago; and a British man, Thomas Aikenhead, was executed for blasphemy as recently as the turn of the 18th century. Innocence of Muslims was produced by a convicted criminal with a Coptic background.

Exceptions aside, however, Christians generally have become more tolerant and self-critical over the past half-century, reminting crucial aspects of Jesus’s message in the process. (For instance, it is worth noting that Pope John Paul II and the leaders of almost all other major Churches were vehemently opposed to the Iraq war.)

Given Christianity’s evolution, there are grounds for thinking that Islam may change, too. Points of contact between the two traditions are at least as significant as the differences. When they are true to their guiding principles, both faiths insist on the sanctity of the person as a seeker of God. From this should follow a recognition of religious liberty as the first of human rights. Self-interest need not be erased from an apparently high-minded equation. Freedom of belief is the canary in the coalmine for liberty in general, and thus for the flourishing of a society.
It is vital to pursue these medium- and longer-term ambitions. They are critical to world peace. But promoting inter-faith ties should not displace attempts to tell the truth about the current plight of Christians – and to take action against a major injustice.

this is really upsetting and it's just sort of swept under the rug. If anything can convince you that the West isn't actually Christian anymore it's the silence of the media and establishment about this violence.

What does the west stand for if it won't stand up for and protect members who adhere to it's founding principles, what sort of moral bankruptcy are we wallowing in?

thirdplace posted:

while i think it is important & entirely appropriate that it be supported in america and other settler nations (because who the fuck are we to claim a stolen land as reserved for a single culture) i am not so sure that freedom of religion is an important (global) human right. what do you think IWC???!?

it's like abortion. If you don't think it's an important right then the end result is jail or other retribution (perhaps death)

I don't really want to see people thrown in prison or a mass grave for having a termination or believing in one God or another. Are you cool with thaT?

Goethestein posted:

i dont understand why you wouldnt just convert to islam. oh noo this primitive system of ineffectual magic nonsense is slightly different to my own, better get killed over it

same but for atheists

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

thirdplace posted:

while i think it is important & entirely appropriate that it be supported in america and other settler nations (because who the fuck are we to claim a stolen land as reserved for a single culture) i am not so sure that freedom of religion is an important (global) human right. what do you think IWC???!?

I also think you should be more respectful to your christian heritage

the fact that it is my heritage is exactly the reason i do not need to be respectful towards it

how would you class the issue goldsmith?

thirdplace posted:

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

thirdplace posted:

while i think it is important & entirely appropriate that it be supported in america and other settler nations (because who the fuck are we to claim a stolen land as reserved for a single culture) i am not so sure that freedom of religion is an important (global) human right. what do you think IWC???!?

I also think you should be more respectful to your christian heritage

the fact that it is my heritage is exactly the reason i do not need to be respectful towards it

how would you class the issue goldsmith?

unless you have wddp levels of sadbrain chemicals coursing through your neuropathways causing you to engage in extreme self-loathing and filial impiety, i don't know how some petty rejection of your cultural heritage alleviates guilt over the world system. there's something stirring in the simplicity of the idea of your ancestors, who were probably just hardworking, honest, good people sharing your same beliefs throughout history. i love a picture i have of four generations of my family posed in a basilica following a wedding; divided as we might be by generation or nationality or even language, we are together amidst the grandeur of our common cultural tradition. in a world where you would otherwise have as much in common with a third worlder as you would a martian, do you not feel even the slightest sense that perhaps your dismissal is a misguided reaction? part of the genius of christianity was that it from the very beginning was not a civic religion as the greeks and pagans or even nationalist like the jews, but rather universalist.

thirdplace posted:

pretty sure a middle eastern christian's forebears diverged from my cultural line well before muhammad diverged from theirs, and i have no doubt that far more of my ancestors would have purged them as heretics than welcomed them as coreligionists.

i do have a lot of respect for christianity's historical contributions to morality and for the ways in which my own personal quasi-marxism is basically secularized sermon-on-the-mountism but ultimately i'm not a christian, never have been, and never intend to be. there is nothing there to create enough of a tribal bond to justify sticking my nose where it does not belong (with the obvious exception of being happy to see my own nation accept anyone who wishes to come to it)

this is missing the point

it's about tending the graves of our forefathers

Groulxsmith posted:

thirdplace posted:

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

thirdplace posted:

while i think it is important & entirely appropriate that it be supported in america and other settler nations (because who the fuck are we to claim a stolen land as reserved for a single culture) i am not so sure that freedom of religion is an important (global) human right. what do you think IWC???!?

I also think you should be more respectful to your christian heritage

the fact that it is my heritage is exactly the reason i do not need to be respectful towards it

how would you class the issue goldsmith?

unless you have wddp levels of sadbrain chemicals coursing through your neuropathways causing you to engage in extreme self-loathing and filial impiety, i don't know how some petty rejection of your cultural heritage alleviates guilt over the world system. there's something stirring in the simplicity of the idea of your ancestors, who were probably just hardworking, honest, good people sharing your same beliefs throughout history. i love a picture i have of four generations of my family posed in a basilica following a wedding; divided as we might be by generation or nationality or even language, we are together amidst the grandeur of our common cultural tradition. in a world where you would otherwise have as much in common with a third worlder as you would a martian, do you not feel even the slightest sense that perhaps your dismissal is a misguided reaction? part of the genius of christianity was that it from the very beginning was not a civic religion as the greeks and pagans or even nationalist like the jews, but rather universalist.

so instead of soulcrushing oppressive chinese authoritarian capitalism, america will be headed by TED-talking fascists

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

this is missing the point

it's about tending the graves of our forefathers

yeah except the op doesn't have any forefathers of mine, only forecousins-once-removed

To paraphrase Zizek, that's because it doesn't go nearly far enough. Cool we have a bunch of christian fascists here, even the NAZIs were more creative inventing arbitrary, mystical systems to glorify and submit to.

WORST POSTER EVER

babyhueypnewton posted:

Groulxsmith posted:
thirdplace posted:
Ironicwarcriminal posted:
thirdplace posted:
while i think it is important & entirely appropriate that it be supported in america and other settler nations (because who the fuck are we to claim a stolen land as reserved for a single culture) i am not so sure that freedom of religion is an important (global) human right. what do you think IWC???!?
I also think you should be more respectful to your christian heritage
the fact that it is my heritage is exactly the reason i do not need to be respectful towards it

how would you class the issue goldsmith?
unless you have wddp levels of sadbrain chemicals coursing through your neuropathways causing you to engage in extreme self-loathing and filial impiety, i don't know how some petty rejection of your cultural heritage alleviates guilt over the world system. there's something stirring in the simplicity of the idea of your ancestors, who were probably just hardworking, honest, good people sharing your same beliefs throughout history. i love a picture i have of four generations of my family posed in a basilica following a wedding; divided as we might be by generation or nationality or even language, we are together amidst the grandeur of our common cultural tradition. in a world where you would otherwise have as much in common with a third worlder as you would a martian, do you not feel even the slightest sense that perhaps your dismissal is a misguided reaction? part of the genius of christianity was that it from the very beginning was not a civic religion as the greeks and pagans or even nationalist like the jews, but rather universalist.


"My pride is, I have an origin...My ancestors Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe." Human, All Too Human

For myself I'll add Nietzsche and Marx. You, my friend, lack imagination.

thanks Grumblefish

Sanghla Hill, Punjab: October 31, 2012. (PCP) Pakistani Christian Pastor arrested under blasphemy in Sanghla Hill town in Punjab province of Pakistan on October 13, 2012, was denied bail in a court hearing on October 30, 2012.

Pastor Karama Patras was arrested on accusations of blasphemy by police after taking him in preventive custody when Muslim extremist Mob attacked his home. ...

On evening of October 13, 2012, at 4:00pm, when Pastor Patras was holding prayers in house of a Christian family where some Christian people raised questions about the feast of sacrifice (Eid --Ul- Adha) and the meat of this sacrifice in Christianity.

Pastor Karma explained according to the bible references and gave some references from bible to satisfy the people. While he was briefing on that topic some Muslim people from the neighbors were also listening. They gathered other Muslim people and informed them about that discussion which Pastor Karma did in prayer.

After end of Prayer meeting, when Pastor Patras reached home, he heard appeals on mosques loudspeakers by area Muslim clerics calling for Muslims to join hands to punish infidel Pastor to teach him lesson for prohibition of this feast in Christianity.

The Muslim Imams said in mosque loudspeakers "Pastor Karma Patras is blasphemer and infidel liable to be killed" on which hundreds of Muslims attacked on home of Pastor Karma Patras.

The area police rushed to scene of incident and saved Pastor from mob that were mercilessly beating and kicking him and destroying his household.

On pressure of Muslim mob, the police arrested Pastor Patras under Section 295-A of blasphemy laws.