Actually, I did read the entire thread, quite carefully. And as I noted, some of what I said was a rehasing of what others had said, because it had never been clearly responded to, largely due to an (ongoing) failure of communication. In any case, despite this being the Pit, I appreciate your polite response to my post, and I will do my best to respond in kind.
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I’m not an authority on discrimination against Christians in the Middle East and China, but I believe that it occurs, probably quite horrifically, and I abhor it. I, personally, am attempting to discuss the situation in the US, as I believe was the intent of the OP, although it’s a bit vague. Certainly, when the OP said “Christians are being oppressed or discriminated against. No, idiots are being discriminated against. Oh, and those who break the laws of the land, too.” I don’t think that jailed Chinese Christians were being referred to.
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I believe you’re misinterpreting what I’m saying, in that I basically agree with what you just said. However, there are two key points I’m trying to make which your statement does not directly contradict. In particular, you have spend much of your post claiming that discrimination occurred, and claiming that I claimed discrimination didn’t occur. Whereas I basically conceded that discrimination occurred, but argued that it was “discrimination against religious people/organizations” rather than “discrimination against Christians”. Therefore, there’s no point in responding to me by saying “but look! discrimination! right there! discrimination! the courts say so!”
In addition, there’s some fairly vague language used by the OP, and by posters like gobear, which makes it a bit unclear whether anyone ever made a blanket statement along the lines of “no Christian in the US has ever been discriminated against, at all, for any reason”, which would clearly be overbroad. The point that the OP was trying to make, I think, which I agree with, is that it is horribly frustrating and insulting to hear Christians talk about the anti-Christian discrimination that they face, because (a) it’s so minor in nature that well-intentioned and intelligent people such as the participants in this thread can have long nit-picking arguments about whether or not it actually exists, is actually “against Christians”, etc. and (b) even if it does exist, it pales in comparison to the discrimination that other groups face, much of which is supported by some, though not all, Christians and Christian groups.
Another reason why people have reacted as hostilely as they have is that there is a history of situations, such as school prayer and the “under god”-in-the-pledge issue, in which some Christians have attempted to disingenuously portray their position as one of fighting-for-their-rights and opposing-anti-Christian-discrimination. So in vaguely comparable situations, it’s easy to be suspicious of claims of anti-Christian discrimination.
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I disagree with both parts of what you just said. I never said that it was offensive for the courts to use the word “discrimination” in these cases because, as mentioned earlier, I agree that there was discrimination in these cases. If I were in charge of the world, schools would allow chess clubs, gay clubs, Jewish clubs, and Christian clubs. To do otherwise would be discriminatory.
And, it is offensive, imho, to describe what occurred to me as discrimination. In fact, that’s specifically why I brought it up, to propose an example of something super-trivial.
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Actually, as I read it, the OP didn’t ask for anything, it just whined about Christian whining. Later posters asked for very specific instances of specifically anti-Christian discrimination. To the best of my knowledge, what we’re arguing about at this point is whether such examples have been provided.
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I don’t believe I did any such thing.
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And finally we come to the crux of it. The groups were banned because they were religious. Had there been a policy in place at one of these schools saying “Christian groups can not form clubs”, then there would have been inarguable discrimination against Christians. However, there was a policy saying “religious groups may not form clubs”. Which is not the same thing at all. To propose Yet Another Analogy, if there were a school policy against garage bands, and a group of students wanted to form a Christian-themed garage band, and were not allowed to do so, would that be anti-Christian discrimination? I mean, the students were Christian, and they were doing a Christian-oriented thing, and they were not allowed to do so, whereas other groups, like the Chess Club and the Koran-Haiku-Writing group, were allowed to exist, so there was discrimination, but was it, specifically, anti-Christian discrimination?
I say not.
What say you?
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Already answered. There was, imho, discrimination. It just wasn’t anti-Christian.
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Again, this is the crux of the matter. See my garage band analogy above. Yes, the students were Christian. And yes, they were attempting to do a Christian-oriented thing. But they were not stopped specifically because they believed that Christ was their savior.
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In the history of the world? No, of course not.
In contemporary US society? Well, let me turn that around on you… Do you believe that Christians face discrimination because of their religion, discrimination not faced by people of other faiths, in contemporary US society? And if so, on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is no discrimination at all and 10 is, say, the amount of discrimination that blacks faced in the pre-Civil-Rights-movement south, how much discrimination do you think they face?
Again, I appreciate the courtesy of your response, and I’ve attempted to answer your questions honestly and directly.