I used to be an atheist. My understanding of "atheism" was simply that it is the belief that there is no God. I was an empiricist: I believed in what could be seen – the material world and nothing more. I did not hate Christians. At worst, I thought they were naïve and foolish for their religious beliefs, but I knew many Christians I respected, including for their insight and intelligence.
Today, "atheism" means something entirely different from a simple lack of belief in God. What atheism has become can be more accurately described as "the anti-Christian movement." It is a movement that assumes that Christianity isn't merely naïve and false, but a major cause of social ills, something worth the effort to actively ferret out and purge from our society. This anti-Christian crusade has been both supported by, and a natural outgrowth of, the much larger program of cultural Marxism.
Anti-clericalism is nothing new, but many atheists of the past were at least coherent. They believed that the complex triune God of Christianity was silly, but they didn't think Shiva, Allah, or Zeus was any better. Like me, they simply believed in the here and now and not in the unseen and scientifically unverifiable.
The new atheists are different. They are not really bound by cold, materialist, scientific facts. Although they claim that science and reason are on their side, they often are not very knowledgeable about either. More often, they are interested only in co-opting the human authority science has acquired. Science is a brand for today's atheists, not a discipline. The new atheism is generally forgiving toward Hinduism and can be almost reverent regarding Buddhism. While I grant that Buddhism is essentially godless, it's a long way from being a collection of empirical facts. Buddha's claims are certainly no more objectively verifiable than Christ's. Nirvana is no easier to find on a star chart than the Christian Heaven.
Uninterested in hard materialism, today's atheists believe in an emotional narrative invented and reinvented at the whim of politically motivated human beings. Today's atheism is not a philosophical position, but a political one. Superficially, the anti-Christian movement espouses the view that Christianity is uniquely evil in its intolerance – their word for the fact that we have standards.
Christianity, like Western civilization, is squeezed into the usual Marxist mold as just another instrument of oppression. But without batting an eye, many of today's atheists manage to believe that Islam, an objectively more intolerant, more misogynistic, and far more bloodthirsty system of beliefs than Christianity – is somehow forgivable, or even a net social boon. In truth, the new atheism isn't about helping the "oppressed" – any more than it is about the non-belief in God or the exclusive belief in the world we can grasp with our senses. It is about being a vocal part of the identity group of avid Christian-haters. A political entity. It is about inventing yet another substitute sense of identity and purpose to replace the Christian sense of identity and purpose that it struggles to destroy.
The anti-Christian movement of today, like all other Marxist or neo-Marxist splinter groups, draws its strength from a simple, if unstated, promise: All the world's aggrieved can acquire social acceptance and the unholy grail of victim status by denouncing someone else as an oppressor and working for his destruction.
The anti-Christian movement of today, like all other Marxist or neo-Marxist splinter groups, draws its strength from a simple, if unstated, promise: All the world's aggrieved can acquire social acceptance and the unholy grail of victim status by denouncing someone else as an oppressor and working for his destruction.
NBC’s Chuck Todd has been slammed online after he took to Twitter last week to offer his thoughts about Good Friday.
The “Meet the Press” host said that he was a “a bit hokey” about the religious occasion.
“I don’t mean disrespect to the religious aspect of the day, but I love the idea of reminding folks that any day can become “good,” all it takes is a little selflessness on our own part,” he wrote. “Works EVERY time.”
I’m a bit hokey when it comes to “Good Friday.” I don’t mean disrespect to the religious aspect of the day, but I love the idea of reminding folks that any day can become “good,” all it takes is a little selflessness on our own part. Works EVERY time.
Todd’s words drew ire online from some.
“The day of Jesus’ crucifixion is considered a victory of Good over Evil, Chuck,” one critic responded. “Your ignorant and insensitive comment should get you fired.”
“Chuck, you just don't get it, another example of Media snobbery and dis'ing Christians in your own subtle way,” a different account tweeted.
Persecution of Christians is worse today "than at any time in history", a recent report by the organization Aid to the Church in Need revealed. Iraq happens to be "ground zero" for the "elimination" of Christians from the pages of history.
Iraqi Christian clergymen recently wore a black sign as a symbol of national mourning for the last victims of the anti-Christian violence: a young worker and a whole family of three. "This means that there is no place for Christians," saidFather Biyos Qasha of the Church of Maryos in Baghdad. "We are seen as a lamb to be killed at any time".
A few days earlier, Shiite militiamen discovered a mass grave with the bodies of 40 Christians near Mosul, the former stronghold of the Islamic State and the capital of Iraqi Christianity. The bodies, including those of women and children, seemed to belong to Christians kidnapped and killed by ISIS. Many had crosses with them in the mass grave. Not a single article in the Western mainstream media wrote about this ethnic cleansing.
French Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia made an urgent plea to Europe and the West to defend non-Muslims in the Middle East, whom he likened to Holocaust victims. "As our parents wore the yellow star, Christians are made to wear the scarlet letter of nun" Korsia said. The Hebrew letter "nun" is the same sound as the beginning of Nazareen, an Arabic term signifying people from Nazareth, or Christians, and used by the Islamic State to mark the Christian houses in Mosul.
Now a new report by the Iraqi Human Rights Society also just revealed that Iraqi minorities, such as Christians, Yazidis and Shabaks, are now victims of a "slow genocide", which is shattering those ancient communities to the point of their disappearance. The numbers are significant.
According to the report, 81% of Iraq's Christians have disappeared from Iraq. The remaining number of Sabeans, an ancient community devoted to St. John the Baptist, is even smaller: 94% have disappeared from Iraq. Even 18% of Yazidis have left the country or been killed. Another human rights organization, Hammurabi, said that Baghdad had 600,000 Christians in the recent past; today there are only 150,000.
These numbers may be the reason Charles de Meyer, president of SOS Chrétiens d'Orient, has just spoken of the "extinction of Christians". Father Salar Kajo of the Churches' Nineveh Reconstruction Committee just spoke of the real possibility that "Christianity will disappear from Iraq".
Many ancient Christian churches and sites have been destroyed by Islamic extremists, such as Saint George Church in Mosul; the Virgin Mary Chaldean Church, attacked by car bomb, and the burned Armenian Church in Mosul. Hundreds of Christian homes have been razed in Mosul, where jihadists also toppled bell towers and crosses. The Iraqi clergy recently warned, "The churches are in danger".
Tragically, Christians living in lands formerly under the control of the "Caliphate" have been betrayed by many actors in the West. Governments ignored their tragic fate. Bishops were often too aloof to denounce their persecution. The media acted as if they considered these Christians to be agents of colonialism who deserved to be purged from the Middle East. And the so-called "human rights" organizations abandoned them.
European public opinion, supposedly always ready to rally against the discrimination of minorities, did not say a word about what Ayaan Hirsi Ali called "a war against Christians".
Some communities, such as the small Christian enclaves of Mosul, are now lost forever. Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Aphrem II said there is a "real danger" Christianity could just become a "museum" in the Middle East. He noted that Iraq has lost 80-90% of its Christian population.
Among European governments, only Hungary took a principled position and openly committed itself to save Iraqi Christianity from genocide. Recently, the Hungarian government opened a school for displaced Christians in Erbil; Hungary's Minister of Human Resources, Zoltan Balog, attended the event.
Imagine if all the other European countries, such as France and Germany, had done the same. The suffering of Christians in Iraq would today be much less and their numbers much higher.
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