There are many Christians who are not whiny bitches. Bricker is not one of them.
Then there’s shodan. He’s not even Christian.
Well, yes, words do have meanings. “Persecute”, for example, has two: both equally valid. This distinguishes it very neatly from “niggardly” which has one correct meaning and one understandable but utterly false misapprehension. The weight attached to “niggardly” comes *solely *from a co-incidental similarity in sound to a gross racial insult; the weight attached to “persecute” comes from its correct sense - a sense which *you *have quoted, in the original thread, from the Oxford English Dictionary!
“Christians in are persecuted. They daily come under attack for their religious beliefs. Their traditional culture is threatened by people who believe differently than they do.”
Where X = Syria, this is true provided we use the correct sense of the word.
Where X = the USA, this is true provided we use the correct sense of the word.
If, in relation to Syria, anyone tried to claim that “Christians are persecuted” meant that they occasionally suffer mild annoyances, we’d be sceptical to say the least. The defence that they were using the word in what you claim above"its correct sense" (singular) would be laughable.
So given that persecute does have two correct senses I’m not sure how you reject the idea that Reverend Bob’s use of it has the *logical *sense of “mild, random harrassment” but can and does nevertheless convey the *rhetorical *impact of “sustained systematic oppression”. These two sentences mean the same thing, according to the “correct sense” of the word:
[quote-sentence 2]
“Christians in the US are persecuted”
[/quote]
but one has rhetorical impact and one does not. You seem to be claiming above that this isn’t true, or that if it is true it’s just a co-incidence: that the fact that Christians who make the above claim tend to prefer some variant of sentence 2 to a version of sentence 1 has nothing to do with rhetorical effectiveness. If that is your claim, I’m not sure what it’s based on.
Stanislaus, that was such an elegantly constructed argument that I think it deserves to be framed, coding errors and all. My compliments. 
I agree with kaylasdad99, that was basically a complete deconstruction of how wrong Bricker was. Unfortunately, I don’t think you’re likely to get anywhere with it, given that it’s pretty obvious he’s just trolling.
n/m, I see it was addressed.
but one has rhetorical impact and one does not. You seem to be claiming above that this isn’t true, or that if it is true it’s just a co-incidence: that the fact that Christians who make the above claim tend to prefer some variant of sentence 2 to a version of sentence 1 has nothing to do with rhetorical effectiveness. If that is your claim, I’m not sure what it’s based on.
[/QUOTE]
I’d say you’re conflating “correct sense” with “exact same sense”.
Tom Selleck is tall
Yao Ming is tall.
Both of these statements are true. The difference in the degree of tallness might be striking, but that doesn’t mean Tom Selleck isn’t tall.
I don’t think anyone would argue that the degree of persecution on Christians in the U.S. pales stupendously to persecution of Christians in some other countries, but that does not mean that there is no persecution here. I think one thing you need to take into account is what the baseline is. If you brought a Christian here from a country where Christians are routinely attacked and murdered, then that person’s reality is “Wow, there is zero persecution here”. Conversely, if you take someone living in a country founded on the concept of freedom of religion, PLUS they are of the religion that is 1) dominant and 2) woven into the founding of the the country, then systematic attempts to diminish the role of Christianity can also rightly be called persecution.
No, my point is *precisely *that “persecuted” has two correct senses which are not exactly the same. And that the rhetorical impact of “Christians are persecuted” relies entirely on using the strict meaning of the weaker version while borrowing the emotional weight of the stronger version.
It would be very easy for people who mean “the role of Christianity is being diminished” to say that in so many words: that would be clear and unambiguous. People who express the foregoing by using the word “persecution” are presumably doing so for a reason.
I know what you mean, and I think you make a good point. But the difference is one of degree. You seem to acknowledge that with your “emotional weight of the stronger version”, but try to hide that fact when you use the phrase “two correct senses”. Notice you didn’t right “two different meanings”.
Again, if the discussion is confined to the U.S., one might say that there is a mild form of persecution happening…meaning that one might fairly characterize the agenda of the activist secular left as “persecution”. But once the discussion includes the type of treatment Christians face in some countries in the Middle East or Africa, the U.S. claim becomes laughable. Going expand on my tall people:
Tom Selleck is tall
Yao Ming is tall.
Billy Smith is tall.
No Billy is only 5’7", but he’s also in the third grade. So it is perfectly accurate for someone in his classroom to call him “tall”.
It seems like people are bristling at anyone using “persecution”, when applied to Christianity, to refer to anything but the most extreme forms of it. You acknowledge as much in your second sentence above.
So, my take, is it accurate to say there is currently some persecution of Christianity in the U.S.? Sure. It’s also fair to say that if one is drawing a comparison between that persecution here and the persecution of Christians elsewhere on the globe, that the difference is gobsmacking.
In writing that, I just happened upon what I think is an important difference. It’s much harder to say that Christians—individuals—are being persecuted in the U.S. than it is to say that Christianity is being persecuted, albeit by a mild strain. In the worst countries, that persecution is applied directly to the individual.
In the end, context matters. I think we might agree on this: If the discussion is about the global persecution of Christians, then bringing up the very mild strain of persecution of Christianity in the U.S. is laughable and a cheap rhetorical trick. The only exception I can see is if the person’s point is something along the lines of “Well, that persecution maybe be happening soon in the U.S., as we can already see a hostility to Christianity. And when that happens, persecution of individual Christians may not be far behind.”
I’ll just note that the same cheap rhetorical trick is used with other very powerful words. “Racist”, “homophobe”, “bigot” come to mind. So, I mostly agree with your assessment, although I think you’re trying to not accept that the definition chafes by degree, while describing the same action.
There’s a big difference between different types of Christians.
It’s the more religious ones who are complaining about being “persecuted”, and these people are not a majority in this country or anything close to it.
Nobody thinks a basically secular person is going to face persecution for merely identifying as a Christian, and these are the ones who constitute a majority.
Well, if we back up a bit, I was actually jumping in on a conversation between MaxTheVool and Bricker. Max makes the point that I’m following up on here:
As you can see he also uses your example of “racism” as a weighty word that should be used carefully. But his main point is that the mood music of “Christians are persecuted” is a lot stronger than the literal meaning which Reverend Bob is using (in all good faith, no doubt).
Bricker responds here:
It’s his use of the phrase “correct sense” that I’m following up on when I say there are **two **correct senses. I think that it’s misleading to say there’s one correct sense of “persecuted” and especially that the subsequent comparison to “niggardly” doesn’t really stand up.
I’m not sure I agree - in the context of persectuion of Christians in the Middle East vs in the US - that it’s just a difference of degree. The distinction you make between “persecution of Christianity” vs “persecution of Christians” is a really good one - there’s a qualitative difference between an erosion of social standing and political influence on one hand and a very real prospect of mob violence - or even state-sanctioned violence - on the other.
Indeed. But I would go further and say that the use of the word “persecute” to describe both deliberately associates the mild with the pernicious and as such is always a laughable and cheap rhetorical trick.
Aside from being a slippery slope argument, this approach is even more explicit in its linking of mild and strong persecution in order to strengthen the audience’s reaction to the former.
I just don’t get why you people indulged him as long as you did (and continue to indulge him as long as you have), giving Bricker a nice hearty meal of your impotent outrage, collected with such minimal effort on his part.
Frankly, I blame you.
Thanks for eloquently responding to Bricker’s response to me, which I had not yet had the energy to dive into myself. But I think that there’s at least one difference in how I see it, which is that I don’t think that people who are publicly claiming that Christians are persecuted are consciously thinking about this duality-of-definition-of-persecution issue. Why should they be? They’re not under oath.
So, assuming that they honestly believe what they’re saying and are not purely trying to manipulate people, they’re saying “Christians are persecuted” because they honestly believe that various things that have happened in the US recently add up enough to be a version (albeit a weaker one) of the non-Bricker definition of persecution, the same one that really DOES apply to Christians in Syria, or whatever.
And to the most of us, that claim is false.
With the exception of Bricker, who ignores all the context and thinks that the claim is true because of the other definition of persecution.
My reason for believing this is that I am a literate and well-read 40-year-old native English speaker and I’ve never ever heard of Bricker’s definition of “persecution”, at least when it comes to the context of describing treatment of groups of people in larger society. So I assume that it is one which is rarely if ever used in that kind of context.
If anyone wants to disagree, and say “oh, yeah, I’ve heard that other definition used all the time, it’s one of those funny-haha vs funny-weird things where you often have to ask for clarification” I will stand corrected. Anyone?
That’s the question though… is treatment that Christians receive in the US comparable to, but a weaker form of, treatment that Christians receive in Syria?
Assuming that we’re talking about REAL persecution on the Syrian side… people living in fear of their lives, people being hounded out of their homes, people unable to find work and turned into refugees, then I’d argue that no, it is not.
The vast majority of the example of “bad things” happening to Christians in the US are not examples of non-Christians hurting Christians just for being Christian. You can imagine a society in which there was basically a rule of law and rights to be upheld and people didn’t actually get KILLED for being Christian but suffered some minor indignities and harassment, and I would imagine it would be fair to describe that as the-same-kind-of-persecution-but-milder. (For instance, look at blacks living in certain parts of the South today. I’d claim that they’re a persecuted minority, but the persecution is much milder than it was in 1950, and it was MUCH milder then than it was in 1850).
Instead what you have are the necessary push and pull of a pluralistic society with a government bound by documents which guarantee equal treatment to Christians and non-Christians, but a government made up overwhelmingly of Christians. In a situation like that there are always going to be skirmishes around the line of entanglement between religion and government. And because that line is a complicated one with lots of gray areas, there are always going to be times when Christians lose those skirmishes. Heck, every single court case or public prayer case that has been discussed in this thread could have been resolve in a pro-Christian fashion, and that would just mean that the line was 3 degrees to the right, and there would be a different set of court cases that would be happening and some of those would be lost by the Christians.
Comparing that kind of situation to “REAL” persecution, even if what you’re saying is that it’s a much weaker version of the same thing, is (to me) laughable.
I really didn’t want to continue this hijack but I feel I must. I need to apologize to BPC. He is correct. I found the older thread and reread it and she was 16, so not underage. He just thought she was 15 while they were boinking.
“and she isn’t 15 like she told you.”
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=15402043&postcount=44
And I’m done with this hijack. Have a good day and kiss a puppy. Puppies need love to. 
If only we could find a way that moderation and tolerance would inspire fanatical devotion to leaving other people alone.
“Live and let live - or I’ll fucking kill you!”
Followup: I’ve been thinking about it some more, and I think the reason there are two somewhat distinct definitions of “persecution” comes down to group-vs-individual. That is, I might say “Frank was a chubby and awkward young man, and when he walked to school each morning he stoically endured the persecution of some of the rowdy kids who lived in the neighborhood”. In a context like that, Bricker’s definition fits perfectly. There’s no implication that Frank feared for his life, nor that the persecution was systemic, nor that it was somehow imposed by an official or unofficial ruling minority.
On the other hand, in a sentence like “Frank’s parents, Hindus, fled their homeland to escape persecution” the implications are entirely different.
It’s a bit surprising to me, though, that you’re able to move from acknowledging “implications,” to a sort of blanket declaration that only one meaning should be considered possible.
It’s true that fleeing a country is a serious step, and not likely to be the result of minor annoyances. But “changed jobs to escape persecution,” might easily involve minor annoyance or major consequences.
“Ed quit his job to avoid the constant persecution.” Whose definition is implied there?
My current hypothesis is that when the word “persecution” is used to refer to large groups of people in socio-political contexts, it always or nearly always has the larger meaning, with the smaller meaning used for cases where it’s referring to individuals.
So without any other context, I’d say that the implication is that it’s the smaller definition. That is, Ed is being ill-treated by his coworkers, and possibly his boss, which could be a wide variety of different types of acts of a wide variety of different levels of seriousness.
But I’m not sure what you’re getting at. I’m honestly trying to explore this issue with an open mind… I came into the initial thread quite sure that I knew what the word “persecuted” meant, and then was provided with a dictionary definition almost comically at odds with what I was thinking of, and I’m trying to resolve that apparent contradiction.
So I’ll repeat an example I came up with earlier: there’s a message board which is 10% Yankees fans, 10% Red Sox fans, and 80% don’t-care. The Red Sox fans and Yankee fans hate each other and spew bile at each other constantly. The don’t-care majority ignore them entirely and stay out of those threads.
One of the Red Sox fans says that on that message board, Red Sox fans are a “persecuted minority”.
Is that an honest, accurate, and fair description of the situation which clearly communicates the situation to the listener?
Yeah, it’s not like he hasn’t been pulling this exact same trick of creating a pedantic semantics tarbaby that turns a previously productive discussion into 5 pages of “is not” “is too” for umpty billion years. If you’re still falling for that shit, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Me?
Bumper stickerrrrrrrr!