Yes.
While Der Trihs is not vilified nearly as much as they are, his opinions are not at all indicative of the tone of the board and that you would try to portray them as such is disappointing.
And are we persecuting Fox by criticizing it? I’d just like to know how deep the rabbit-hole of persecution goes.
For that matter, does being the subject of a Pit thread on this board mean one has been persecuted?
Are you saying that, if it is true, it is true because they are Christians?
I guess we set the persecution bar at different levels, then.
While Fox News is hostile to liberals, it doesn’t come close to persecution.
If that’s persecution, that means every person on the planet is persecuted in multiple ways every day. It’s a meaningless word at that point.
Every athlete, celebrity, or public figure is persecuted by all the nasty things people say on the internet about them. That’s a ridiculously low standard to set for it.
It’s a separate debate, but there are very good reasons it doesn’t rise to actual oppression.
It’s not all Christians who object, merely a subset. Other Christians don’t object, meaning this isn’t oppression of Christians in general.
And, they aren’t forced to pay for contraception but for insurance, which must cover contraception. What if a business owned by Christian Scientists didn’t want to pay for insurance that covered blood transfusions? Or for care dealing with an ectopic pregnancy? Where is the line drawn?
The business may have to pay penalties. Perhaps some would consider those penalties so injurious as to rise to the level of oppression, but many would not. They are not forced to change their beliefs. Their beliefs aren’t brought into question. You could argue it’s the beginning of some kind of slippery slope that prevents people from doing as they will, but that’s a hard argument to swallow.
Worse yet, the law in question doesn’t even target these people. It’s a blanket law that a small, yet vocal, minority believe violates their religious rights. It certainly wasn’t written with them in mind.
This is a particularly bad example. It’s definitely not Christians in general who are targeted by this. And if they aren’t being targeted or affected in general, how is it oppression against Christians in general?
Yes, actually, it is persecution, because it’s hostility and ill-treatment. That’s the exact definition of persecution.
On the SDMB, the persecution is very effective, because the large numbers of people that are ani-Christian overwhelm the few that are.
In real life, the reverse is true. Although Christians are still persecuted in the real world, their numerical dominance means the persecution is (usually) ineffective.
Ineffective is not a synonym for imaginary.
**IF **Fox news can rightly be described as persecuting liberals, then I’ll agree with you that the SDMB persecutes conservatives, Christians, woo-peddlers and truthers.
But I don’t agree that Fox News persecutes liberals, as much as I hate Fox News and everything they do.
So now what? Your definition differs from mine, and seemingly, from most others in this thread. It’s too broad.
Words have meanings. I don’t agree that the word “persecution” has some threshold level. It means “hostility and ill-treatment.” It doesn’t require blood or broken bones.
Really? Examples, please? **Bricker **tried and didn’t do so well, maybe you have better examples?
Yes. But if I was in fact hate-filled and intolerant, it would not be persecution any more than calling a pedophile a pedophile is persecution. And that’s the problem here. Very few people are calling all Christians hate-filled bigots. Certainly nobody in any position of power! The complaints come when Christians actually *act *like hate-filled bigots - when they try to impose their religious morality to strip rights from homosexuals or try to dehumanize them (a far more real persecution than anything Christians have suffered in this country since its inception). And it’s worth noting that these complaints come both from non-Christians and Christians. Hardly persecution.
Except that this never happens. Instead, religious folk violate clearly spelled-out anti-discrimination legislature and then complain that their religious freedom to be bigots is being trampled on. Much like someone whose religion forbade interaction with african-americans would have his freedom trampled on by the civil rights act. That’s not religious persecution, that’s society rightfully stepping up to the plate to counteract persecution by the religious.
Yes! Exactly! IT ISN’T!
And Google is missing things. I mean, christ, look at the list of synonyms!
synonyms: oppression, victimization, maltreatment, ill-treatment, mistreatment, abuse, ill-usage, discrimination, tyranny, tyrannization, punishment, torment, torture;
None of those even come close to being synonymous with persecution. It’s a watered-down, weakened version of the term. Yeah, by that definition, Christians get persecuted… but so does everybody else, and by comparisons, Christians don’t get persecuted that much at all.
Oh no, Christians definitely are subject to hostility and ill-treatment, to a degree. But to call that persecution is to miss the point so blatantly and utterly that you might as well say that 9/11 truthers are “persecut”-
…:smack::smack::smack::smack::smack::smack::smack::smack:
Congratulations! You’ve taken the dictionary definition of a word, removed any and all societal and historical context (a context which is absolutely necessary to understand what differentiates persecution from simply calling a group that believes stupid things stupid, such as the 9/11 conspiracy theorists mentioned earlier), and tried to apply it in a way which is obviously flawed to any impartial observer. You must be a great lawyer.
Seriously, if you can’t tell the difference between standard abuse and persecution, then persecution loses any and all meaning. There is no persecution of Christians on this forum, any more than there is persecution of republicans, persecution of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, or persecution of idiots. We can’t even reasonably be said to persecute Clothahump, and he gets more shit than a manure inspector working overtime! You’ve completely perverted the definition of “persecution”.
My kid screams at me she hates me and she wants a new family. Hostility? Ill treatment? You betcha. Persecution? Tell me, is it true? Am I being persecuted by a 7-year-old?
I am using a dictionary for my definition. What are you using, and how does it define the necessary threshold?
Are you equating what Fox does to liberals with how the SDMB treats Christians on this board? In your mind, are there degrees of “persecution”, or is debating whether or not a god exists equivalent to openly manipulating the national news to push an agenda?
Debating whether a God exist is certainly legitimate debate fodder.
But you know that the debates about Christianity here have been hostile and the Christians here have been the target of that hostility. You know that we’re not talking about polite debate in which opposing sides offer their views.
Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty, Bricker.
For there to be no persecution as you currently accept the word to mean, what rules would you have in place to stop the persecution of Christians on this message board?
I’m using my experience as a native English speaker. FWIW, Wikipedia, which was also presumably written by a native English speaker, agrees with me:
There’s a cite on that statement that points to a paper called “Defining Persecution” written by a real live law-talking-guy and published in the Utah Law Review last year. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t have access to the paper, so I’m left trusting some random wikipedia contributor, but there you go.
Doesn’t this invite “GHOTI” arguments, by which I mean parsing the individual words someone uses in an argument and substituting dictionary-acceptable but obviously unintended alternate meanings in order to render the argument meaningless?
You say persecution means “hostility and ill-treatment”. So you’re claiming persecution is taking a mathematical average of hostility and ill-treatment? I’m sure we all appreciate your command of basic statistical analysis, but is it really relevant?
Taking it from Wikipedia, which actually discusses the topic with the nuance it requires, rather than the black-and-white terms of a dictionary:
Seriously, dude, the idea that you can take a complex issue like this and boil it down to “well, that’s what the dictionary says” is patently absurd. Yes, let’s take something which has long been a subject of debate (“what constitutes persecution”), ignore any and all context for the discussion, and just take the definition from Google’s in-house dictionary. Yeah, that’s totally going to get us on the right line. It’s like trying to decide if something was murder, and saying “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.” is not only the definition of the term, but literally all we’ll ever have to know about what “murder” means.
Not only that, but you’re co-opting a word which, historically, implied things such as forcefully driving people from their homes, killing them, dehumanizing them, violating their human rights, et cetera, and trying to use the same term to describe people being mean to other people on a message board for saying stupid shit. Yeah, no. That’s not okay. At least the Westboro Baptist Church will know you’re standing up for them against the persecution of the mean ol’ people who can do nothing to harm them. Oh yeah, and that’s another thing. Ineffectual persecution? Not persecution. I can be mean and nasty and disgusting to the president all I want, I can try to start a pogrom against black presidents, but all of my huffing and hollering and “persecution” amounts to… well, about the same as your posts. A whole lot of fairly loony hot air.
Yeah, Bricker-We “persecute” him because he is a Christian. :dubious:
Actually, the word I would “parse” out here isn’t persecution.
The word I would parse out here is Christian.
I don’t think that Christians in general are persecuted here on the board or in the United States in general.
We “persecute” the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC), we’re not persecuting Christians, we’re persecuting a subset of Christians that hold extreme views which not even the majority of other Christians can support.
We “persecute” the subset of Christians who hold that evolution is a lie and that only creationism should be taught in schools (public, not just private) because public schools teach science, private schools and churches teach religion.
We “persecute” the subset of Christians who believe their secular beliefs should be pushed into the living rooms and wombs of those that do not share their Christian beliefs.
In the United States, the secular views on human rights, anti-discrimination and science education are pushed into the public schools and even private businesses that serve the public because regardless of the religion practiced by the teachers in those schools or owners of those businesses, they are still held to the same secular laws that everyone else is.
That’s not “persecuting” Christians in particular, that is treating everyone equally. Christians get to feel persecuted because of it, and so do Muslims, Hindu’s and those that follow any other religion who’s beliefs are not being given an exception in the public square (or private business serving that public square). There are just more Christians out there to feel persecuted and complain about it.
Meh
Two points:
The claim regarding “Christians” is too broad. There are a limited number of Christians, generally Fundamentalist and Evangelical, for whom the concept of being persecuted is a fairly common theme. The majority of Christians really don’t carry that thought around very much, although a few will raise it as a political argument for specific events.
The definition provided by Bricker is too broad for this discussion. Merriam-Webster says:
I doubt that most people equate persecution with “pestering” and I am sure that that is not the meaning intended by the OP.
If we limit the discussion to injure and aggrieve, we are closer to the meaning of the OP (and those Christians who actually do make the complaint) and we can stop squabbling over the SDMB and Fox News. (Your (collective) choice, of course.)
Now, among those Christian groups who do perceive themselves as persecuted, they probably do take some inspiration from biblical passages that refer to persecution as a mark of being Christian. Beyond that, they look on secular society as a threat to their way of life and any example of “excessive” tolerance is liable to be considered a threat. Since they define their Christianity much more narrowly than the posters in this thread–eliminating Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, most ELCA Lutherans, Presbyterians, Mormons, and several other groups–those limited groups do perceive themselves to be a minority subject to oppression by the majority of secular powers, (government or entertainment, typically), and “less” Christian groups.