May Minty Green’s Great Wombat in the Sky forgive me, but I am going to get involved in this thread.
May Gaudere’s Invisible Pink Unicorn forgive me, but I am going to state publicly that [gasp] I agree with Satan.
FoG, as evidently you are already beginning to realize (and a good thing, too, IMO ), “persecution” is not the same thing as “harassment” or “rudeness”. When you plop yourself down at a table in the cafeteria and ostentatiously open your Bible and sit there reading, and somebody at the next table makes a rude remark, that’s not persecution, or even harassment–that’s just rudeness.
“Persecution” is when the manager at Burger King won’t hire you because you refuse to work Sundays. “Harassment” is when you find printouts of aborted fetuses, with the words “you love them so much here are some more for you” scrawled across them, stuffed through your locker vents because you said something against abortion in class.
The reason you may feel that Christians are more persecuted than Wiccans or atheists is because Christians feel a much stronger urge to proselytize than Wiccans or atheists. Most Wiccans don’t go around spreading the Gospel of the Goddess. They don’t wear lapel pins with Goddess logos, they don’t have bumper stickers that say “HONK IF YOU LOVE THE GODDESS”, they don’t walk up to total strangers and ask them, “Do you have a personal relationship with the Goddess?” But Christians do tend to get “in your face” more than other religions, so people respond to this approach with rudeness. And so you end up feeling persecuted.
And am I correct in assuming that, like me, you have a pastor who occasionally preaches on the subject of the persecution of the Early Church, and who invariably says something like, “Ah, now, what we need today is some persecution! Back then, it was persecution that brought the Early Church together, made them stronger! Today we here in America have it soft. We can worship where and how we please–we don’t know how good we have it. And what do we have? We have declining church membership. Folks are getting lazy. They need to get back to basics! The best thing in the world for us would be some persecution!”
Ring a bell?
But you know, there’s nothing in the Bible that says we have to be persecuted. There’s nothing that says it’s wrong to live in a soft country that allows us to worship where and how we please. But sometimes people start feeling guilty about how easy we have it, so they manufacture some feelings of persecution, just so they can identify with the Early Church.
Let me know if I’m getting warm.
And P.S. What Cervaise said.