Red StateTolerance for anything (except Christians)By: lifeofgrace (Diary) | March 31st, 2014 at 05:20 PM
A question for my non-Christian friends:
Why are some of you so offended at the name of Jesus, or the cross, or any of the symbols associated with Christians?
I wish I didn’t know the answer to this, but I believe I do.
There seems to be a rising element of anti-Christianity which can’t tolerate any expression of Christians, and wishes to remove symbols or artifacts of faith that Christians in the past had placed in their cities, on hilltops, or roadsides, or even graves.
On the surface, it doesn’t make any sense. If you don’t believe, then don’t believe. If you don’t want Christians to talk to you about Jesus, then be polite, and tell them you are not interested.
The non-Christian activists who wish to remove Christian symbols really are beyond offense at things Christian. They oppose, even hate those symbols and what they represent. For people who claim to follow rationality and reason, they are quite irrational and unreasonable in their emotional head exploding hysterical episodes.
Some even want to erect monuments alongside Christian symbols representing Atheism (as a religion?). What symbol would atheists use to represent their “religion”? I question that Atheism even qualifies as a religion, akin to a communist possessing a property deed, or an anarchist possessing a passport; it’s an oxymoron.
For the hypothetical religion of Atheism, let me suggest a few possible symbols: how about a hammer and sickle, or a red star? Here’s my favorite: a guillotine. These all accurately represent official Atheist organizations that ruled large swaths of humanity on this planet.
In fact, the only functional Atheist organization I can think of that doesn’t represent bloodshed, tyranny, and extreme intolerance is the United Federation of Planets.
In real life, adherence to a worldview absent of absolute morality that transcends human frailties leads to pure human nature. As Tennyson wrote, nature, red in tooth and claw. Humans have an almost unlimited capacity for cruelty and domination, restrained only by our sense of right and wrong. Eliminate the right and wrong, and we can justify any atrocity.
Why would some people rather listen to every filthiness, invective, and ugly curse instead of one name representing Christianity?In schools, when a student is asked who they admire most and they say “Jesus,” these people’s heads explode. At graduations, when a valedictorian makes a speech and mentions Jesus, kaboom. When a chaplain is invited to pray at a public or government event and ends his or her prayer in the name of Jesus, cerebral detonations galore.
Tell me, what other name would a Christian pastor pray in?
I can sympathize with the positions of those feeling battered under the pugilistic assaults of evangelical Christians. I was not always a Christian. But I always figured “that’s what Christians do” and never bothered to try to enforce my worldview on them.
Why do so many hold Christians in contempt for doing what the New Testament commands them to do: sharing their faith?I’ve been a Christian for 14 years. As a Christian speaking to non-Christians: I respect your time and your opinion. If you don’t want to hear mine, or hear about my faith, and you tell me so, politely, I will respect your time and your wishes. Maybe there are rude Christians who insist on you listening to them, but I have never thought that to be an effective method of sharing my faith.
Just because one Christian, or even a whole bunch of Christians, are rude, doesn’t mean that all of Christianity should be expunged and silenced.
Having a diverse population of ideas and viewpoints is healthy for society. Groupthink never works. It leads to self-deception, cults, and domination of the weak by the strong.
Why commit outrageous acts such as unplugging microphones, shouting down speakers, or repeatedly suing and suing and suing every organization imaginable to keep the name of Jesus out of the public realm, and to remove all historical Christian symbols from public land?I think I have the answer: they are anti-Christians and define themselves as such.
The argument goes like this inside the head of the anti-Christian: Christians have run this country for far too long, and placed their symbols all over it. It’s time to remove all those and go back to the original founders’ intention to keep this country out of the religion business.
The anti-Christians simply want this country to be empty of Christian religious symbols and speech, because they hate our Biblical morality—they could care less if the Bible is true or not, that argument is a red herring. Of course they use the “Bible isn’t true” and all kinds of arguments designed to show it is false; but that’s all a side show. They are not interested in proving the Bible false for the sake of truth. What they want is to impose their own morality on us, and they don’t want to be polite about it.
Of course, like all atheistic-imposed morality, this is outrageously tyrannical. As a Christian, I cannot be silent.
I can be your friend if you’re not a Christian. Really. I can. I can be polite, value your time, listen to your opinions.
But too many of you don’t want Christian friends. You don’t want to associate with anyone who doesn’t believe as you do, and think as you do. Not only that, you also don’t want those with whom you disagree to be able to express their values, because you have categorized those values as evil (if evil even exists without also good existing, and to a true atheist, neither good nor evil exist at all except in their own heads).
This is my main bone of contention with anti-Christians. You borrow from Biblical morality in order to frame good and evil in your own minds and worldview, but then label the source of that framework as evil. I have a similar bone with the other major anti-Christian element in the world: Islam, which systematizes Biblical errancy (corruption) while at the same time incorporating the Bible as its source of authority. You can’t build a foundation on something and at the same time claim the foundation is faulty—or non-existent.
Muslims in America are not (yet) seeking to remove all references to Christianity; activist anti-Christians are.
If feeding the poor, helping orphans, healing the sick, and showing love to prisoners, the helpless, and the most vulnerable among us is evil, then I must object to your definition of the word. You can’t throw away the baby with the bathwater. If Christianity is evil, then all of it must be. You can’t pick and choose those things you like about it and discard the bits you don’t.
Christianity and the Bible are a package deal. Not every Christian is polite, and none of us is perfect. We are all sinners in need of a savior: in fact that’s the defining belief of Christianity. If you don’t see the evidence of forgiveness, gentleness and grace in a Christian’s life, they are probably not a Christian.
Examine your own worldview toward Christians and see if that position leads to a tyranny of the powerful dominating the weak, or does it lead to some kind of utopia which occurs only after ridding the earth of the religious?
There’s a third option: that religion will just fade out on its own by the force of reason and scientific evidence against it. That has never happened, and you will die waiting for it to happen—there is zero evidence that it will happen, in fact there’s plenty of evidence that supports the opposite: religion continues to grow (Google it, I won’t cite the numerous studies).
Eliminate the third option from your thinking, it’s delusional and inconsistent with rational thought.
If you believe either of the first two outcomes and you are truly okay with that: right now, I want you to stop reading this and pick up the phone and call the nearest mental health facility and schedule an examination, because you may be a sociopath. I can’t help you, but there’s medicine that might.
For the sane and non-delusional, I ask you to see the anti-Christian movement for what it is: a power grab. Oppose it. Whether you believe in God or not, oppose it for the sake of opposing tyranny and oppression.
