Actually I’ve beat them to the punch on that one. My argument has been that it’s almost impossible to tell the authenticity of Christianity, how anyone can ‘claim’ to be Christian and then get a pass on their actions because of the, “We’re all stumbling sinners”, double-standard. They’ve already claimed the ground opposed to the ‘No-True Scotsman’, angle.
I wouldn’t have thought it neccessary to define “hate crime”, but here goes:
A hate crime is a violent assault or serious vandalism targeting individuals who belong to a group towrds whom the perpetrator harbors serious antipathy or prejudice.
It’s not the same thing as extremist rhetoric. It’s not quite the same thing as terrorism, althoug the line can be blurry. Terrorism is usually an attack on a place that is associated with a social condition that the perp considers to be evil. Terrorism is less personal, more political than hate crime.
If a guy beats up a gay guy “because he’s a fag”, or vandalizes his house or car, that’s a hate crime. If he bombs a gay nightclub, that’s terrorism because he’s striking a blow against the “homosexual infrastructure” and seeking both to intimidate others from opening/patronizing gays nightclubs and to inspire compatriots to take up the “fight”. But you can still call it a hate crime.
Looks like Wikipedia calls it secular in one paragraph and Christian in another. I don’t know enough about it to have my own opinion. But if we’re going to call every bad guy out of the Middle East a Muslim terrorist, then I’d say calling the SPLA/M Christian is close enough.
I don’t think thats relevant. No one is going to deny that Christians have sufferred at the hands of Muslims in Lebanon (and Shiites at the hands of Sunnis, and Sunnis at the hands of Druze, and Druze at the hands of… etc. etc.ad nausem).
That doesn’t change the fact that the Christain militias have commited “hate crimes” against civilians of other religions on behalf of their religion.
Wikipedia has a page on Christian terrorism. I could link to individual stories, but it’s more convenient to have it in one place.
Upon further research I agree.
One more Christian who has committed hate crimes, genocide against Muslims, to be exact: Radovan Karadzic.
Recent riots by Christianswho were offended by the portrayal of Jesus with a cigarette and a beer.
It’s a terrorist group/political party that’s in the Christian part of the country, but it’s an explicitly secular group…they don’t want to create a Christian state or whatever.
Basically, the north of the Sudan is mostly religiously Muslim, and the south of Sudan is mostly religiously Christian and animist. Politically, the country is and has been controlled by northerners, and the government has discriminated against the south. This discrimination got worse when the Sudanese government was taken over by an Islamist group, who decided to replace Sudan’s law with Islamic law, and also declared a state of emergency, taking away civil rights.
So, a bunch of Southern Sudanese decided they couldn’t put up with it anymore and started the SPLA, which fought for independence for Southern Sudan.
It probably won’t convince them; their thought processes probably go like this: if you think that hate crimes are a sin, then no true Christian can commit a hate crime (at least, not without repenting for it, anyway).
That being said, I don’t have an example of a hate crime, but arguably something worse. My church’s male youth group mentor molested male teenagers in the youth group. The church found out. Their reaction?
They went to a lawyer to make sure that it was OK to not to report this to the police – and then told the molester to repent. That’s right. They specifically made sure they weren’t obligated to report him to anyone. They didn’t kick out the molester. They didn’t do anything except pray for him. And, yup, he did get caught again a few years later and this all came out in the public.
The worst part of this is that they were technically following the New Testament’s advice on this. 1 Corinthians 6:1 for one, and I believe Matthew talks about settling in private, then in church, and finally in public – no cite for that one.
I have never been in a physical confrontation
due to Christianity… but I have experienced
how it all starts.
In a Catholic grammar school 10 miles from my
mixed neighborhood, my catholic friends found out
that all my neighborhood friends were Jewish.
All of a suuden, I was cheap, a liar, and I had zero
chance of going to heaven. This continued until
I went to our priest principal. He entered the classroom
later shouting at my classmates, “You wanna make Jesus cry?
Then stop teasing!”
He gave no solution, no discussion, and that was the
very first day I renounced my Catholic/Christian faith.
People have shown me I should trust before I hate,
and always disregard class, background, etc.
This was grade four. Since then, these so-called
god-loving schoolmates have made me very afraid
of parents who send their kids to Catholic schools.
Please realize that segregation by faith is always
and will ever be part of the curriculum.
Best to all!