ATHEISTS it is then.
Quote:
Originally Posted by doorhinge
Atheists have felt sufficiently persecuted to the point where they chose to file lawsuits in order to stop church bells from pealing and school children from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Are atheists sufficiently persecuted by ringing bells and pledge recital to consider themselves to be persecuted?
Or are they just pissed because the word atheist isn’t Capitalized?
I had hoped that the rolleyes emoticon would suggest I was kidding at that point.
Imagine a world where people can have an opinion without getting permission to have that opinion. Absolute chaos. :rolleyes:
I don’t feel persecuted by the pledge with the addition of under God or by In God We Trust on money or by prayer to open government meetings.
That being said, I do feel that it injects religion into the secular government which is not acceptable to me. So not persecution per se, but placing religious belief into places it shouldn’t be.
If the bricks are considered a part of government property and thus subject to all those restrictions, then they can be prohibited. It doesn’t matter that they are donated. If that is the case, the atheist message (if there had been one) should be prohibited also. The lack of foresight of the parks commission is of no consequence.
If these are constitutionally permissible, then both the Christian and atheist messages should be allowed.
My point is that while Christians are crying about Christian persecution when the actual restrictions are on religion in general, when Christian messages are allowed they often want to ban non-Christian messages. Or at the least get all bent out of shape about them.
But that didn’t happen here.
And if you are saying it’s OK to punish these Christians because of bans that other Christians attempt – that seems kinda persecution-y to me. 
Do you consider “you can not put that message on a brick” to be punishment?
Yes. Other people are permitted to put their messages on bricks; I can’t, because my message is religious. The law does not permit the government to do that. If the government illegally targets me by denying me a privilege granted to others, that’s fairly described as punishment.
Even though I don’t consider Christians to be systematically victimized, I think the brick thing is arguably punishment.
I would be livid if the government refused someone’s brick message because it was identifiably in reference to a gay relationship. “Jesus is the Cornerstone” tells me that a religious person donated money, BFD. It says nothing about the government endorsing a religion.
I’m getting at something different (although this is a pretty thin semantic line).
So Joe and Bob are high school seniors. Their yearbook allows each student to submit a quote to be put below their photo.
Joe submits the entire text of the US constitution. Bob submits “Fuck all you fuckers”.
Joe’s submitted quote is not put in the yearbook because it is too long. Bob’s submitted quote is not put in the yearbook because it is obscene.
In either case, is not allowing that quote to be in the yearbook rightfully termed a “punishment”?
If Bob submits the obscene quote and the principal is so horrified at his obscenity that he bans him from prom that year, that’s clearly a punishment. But “the thing you submitted violates the guidelines, and thus we reject your submission” doesn’t strike me as PUNISHMENT, just as, I guess, rejection.
(Of course if it turns out that the guidelines as established were in violation of the constitution, then the guidelines should be changed, and (if possible) the rejection should be reversed. But the initial rejection still wasn’t a PUNISHMENT, it was just a rejection, if that makes sense.)
So if someone says “I submitted my Christian brick and was punished for doing so”, that to me has an implication of “for the effrontery of daring to submit my Christian Brick, people came and did mean things to me. Oh, whoa is me, I wish I had not ever submitted my brick in the first place”. That is, the punishment was more than just the failure of the brick to be accepted.
I see the distinction you’re hinting at – I think.
But since I can’t imagine a realistic scenario in which a school administrator has some kind of animus against long text, I see the rejection of the Constitution submission as you say: simply a rejection, not a punishment.
I see the rejection of the “Fuck…” line as being a sanction that the legal system is prepared to support, so I don’t call it a punishment for that reason.
But the rejection of the religious message because it is religious is not something the law allows. It’s something that targets the religious, and required an expenditure of time, money, and effort to involve the court system to force the government to comply with the law. So I think “punishment,” is a fair description.
Alternate scenario for “brick” example: Let’s say some Christian group or groups get wind of this project and decide to spread their message by getting as many parishioners as possible to buy up as many bricks as possible, each with the same general Christian message. At what point does the public monument become a Christian monument, and would the wholesale rejection of bricks from this group be a punishment?
Well, it’s not really your message at that point, is it?
Sure, but law is complicated and not everyone understands it. It’s entirely possible that the person running the brick campaign, possibly a devout Christian himself, honestly believed that the law would not permit Christian messages on bricks in public, and therefore impartially and fairly enforced what he believed to be the actual law (and it was not a ridiculous interpretation, even if it ended up being wrong). I don’t see how whether-or-not-its-a-punishment can depend on whether the law allowed the rejection or not, when the person doing the rejecting honestly believed he was on the side of the law.
Heck, it certainly wouldn’t make sense for the brick to be rejected, a lower court to uphold the rejection, and then it makes it up to the supreme court, and two years later they rule that the brick should not have been rejected, and then hey, presto, suddenly the person who submitted the brick in the first place was, retroactively, two years ago, punished for being a Christian.
It’s as much mine as the other, permitted messages are theirs – that is, if it’s not mine, then the other messages suffer the same infirmity.
I grant you that when a case can go either way, “punishment,” doesn’t fairly describe the initial adverse ruling.
But here there was no lower court adverse ruling; the lower court agreed that the Park District was wrong.
And the court did not make new law: it applied long-standing and clear precedent.
The advisory council president did tell the Tongs, the brick purchasers, that the brick would be accepted if they changed “Jesus,” to “God.”
Can you offer an explanation for that that dodges antipathy towards Christianity?
Sure - if the advisory council president would also have made the same replacement offer for “Mohammed” instead of “Jesus”. That is to say, that the replacement suggestion is not made in the sense of “You cannot reference Christianity directly; a general religious tone is acceptable”, but “You cannot reference any religion so directly; a general religious tone is acceptable”. Antipathy seems like a weird word choice, though, so perhaps i’m misunderstanding your question.
If anything is being punished, it is religion in general. Not Christianity in particular. Since I rather suspect the vast majority of people getting speeding tickets are Christians, you might as well say Christians are getting persecuted by the police.
If Christian rocks were banned while Islamic, Jewish and atheist rocks were permitted you’d have a case. Otherwise you really should offer some evidence that this was persecution specifically directed at Christianity.
Because, as in the pledge case, the mention of God is not considered to be religious in the United States. Thus putting God on a brick meant it would not be a religious message which they incorrectly thought was prohibited.
Not really. I can see the personal sentiment in someone talking about their cat, but to simply parrot a bit of dogma one was indoctrinated with from childhood…
For sufficiently generous definitions of “original”, that’s not original.
No big deal.
Revenant Threshold basically beat me to it. Looking at something like the Pledge of Allegiance or “In God We Trust”, someone could easily believe that the general policy is that public references to God are legally acceptable and public references to Jesus aren’t. Heck, that’s probably not all THAT far from the truth.
But I also agree that “antipathy” is a weird choice of word, and I don’t see quite what it has to do with whether or not someone is being “punished” (which of course is not necessarily the same as being “persecuted”). So what is it you’re actually getting at?