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Joined: Mar 2008
Posts: 1,315
Master Elite Member
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http://www.faithnews.cc/2009/04/09/christian-bashing-is-alive-and-well/The tragic church shooting and death of Rev. Fred Winters, pastor of First Baptist Church, Maryville Ill., has once again raised one of the most under-reported issues within the media today: violence directed at Christians and churches. While the recent church shooting in Illinois this past March did receive some coverage, the full extent of violence against the church has not been adequately discussed. If this kind of event had happened at a Mosque or Synagogue there would have been non-stop media coverage and a cry for “hate crime” prosecution. Because it only happened to a Christian there is little outcry. Your use of the words "violence against the church" indicate that the following examples are of violence against Christians because they are Christians. The Christian Anti-Defamation Commission has compiled a partial list of recent church shootings:
- Feb. 18, 2009: A man committed suicide in front of a cross at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif. The man killed himself. How is this to be considered violence against Christians? The man was later shown to be mentally ill (here). - August 12, 2007: A lone gunman opened fire in a Missouri Micronesian church, killing a pastor and two other churchgoers. This was a dispute between the gunman and some individuals in the congregation There are no indications that it was motivated by their being Christians. - May 20, 2007: A standoff between police and a suspect at a Moscow, Idaho church ended with three dead, including one police officer. The man was in the church shooting at the Moscow courthouse. Doesn't look like violence against the church to me. Maybe you could show me how it is? - Oct. 2, 2006: A man in Lancaster County, Pa., killed five girls and then himself at an Amish school. The gunman targeted the girls because they were girls not because they were Christians. - May 20, 2006: Four were killed by a man at Jesus Christ Church in Louisiana. This was an estranged husband who killed his wife's relatives and abducted her from the church where her mother was the pastor. Not a hate crime against Christians. - Feb. 26, 2006: Two people were killed at Zion Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Michigan by a man who later killed himself. Another Domestic dispute, not a hate crime against Christians. - April 9, 2005: A 27-year-old died after being shot at a church in College Park, Ga. Couldn't find anything on the internet about this one except repeats of this same line. Do you have a reference with details about this case? - March 12, 2005: A man walked into the Living Church of God in Milwaukee and opened fire, killing seven people. The man was a member of the church who had many problems and may have been set off by a sermon he didn't like. How is this a hate crime against Christians? - Oct. 5, 2003: A woman opened fire in Turner Monumental A.M.E. church in Kirkwood, Ga., killing the pastor, her mother, and herself. The woman killed her mother. Although I couldn't find any details regarding this, I am not inclined to call this a hate crime against Christians because of the relationship between the victim and the killer. Maybe you could point me to some detailed reference that shows it to be different than what it appears. - March 12, 2002: During Sunday Mass, Peter J. Troy fatally shot the Rev. Lawrence M. Penzes and parishioner Eileen Tosner. This one is a maybe. Peter Troy had been treated for mental illness before this but refused to use insanity plea, supposedly. His lawyer is the only witness to that refusal. No substantive motive has been provided by the killer. This one could be labeled as an anti-Christian hate crime. - Sept. 16, 1999: Seven young people were killed when a man opened fire during a prayer service for teenagers at the Wedgewood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas. Although the man was a troubled, unemployed individual, he did attack for unknown reasons and apparently shouted something bad about Baptists. This is probably a hate crime. Anti-Christian hostility is reaching a new, more violent level. 2 maybe 3 anti-Christian killings in 10 years does not seem like a major increase unless there were none in the 10 years before that. Maybe you should actually investigate what you copy from the internet. I did not compile the list myself. Clearly it's a just list of shootings that happened at churches. I never asserted that they all were motivated by this or that. And I wasn't anticipating a whitewash job. That move took me by surprise. A good deal of that which you'd write off for one excuse or another just can't be written off. The Joplin story, for example. The man killed three church leaders, and wounded four other people. He's supposed to be "upset with his family"? Why then does he target the church leaders? Why not target his family? Why not go to their house and catch them all together? Seeing as he was also charged with sodomizing a juvenile, it's even more absurd to pretend one cannot connect the dots. This business may rate its own thread, actually. I'm not going to take the time to research it fully just now. There's a lot more of this going on than folks probably realize. The media sure downplays it, and it looks like the Feds are in on that game as well. Check this out The FBI’s 2007 Hate Crimes Statistics list 3,870 race-based hate crimes, 1,400 religion-based, 1,265 crimes based on sexual orientation and 1,007 based on ethnicity or national origin.
Broken down by anti-religious bias, 969 reported crimes were anti-Jewish, 130 were anti-Other religion, 115 were anti-Muslim, 61 were anti-Catholic, and 57 were anti-Protestant. So far so good, huh? Not so fast. Colorado Springs, Dec 6, 2008 / 08:01 am (CNA).- As the anniversary of the 2007 Colorado shootings at a youth missionary dormitory and a prominent megachurch approaches, CNA has learned that the homicidal incidents were not classified as hate crimes in state and federal reports.
The perpetrator, 25-year-old Matthew Murray, posted heated anti-Christian remarks on the internet during the 12 hours between the two attacks he carried out, which killed four and wounded three.
The exclusion of the incident from state and national hate crime reports calls into question the reliability of hate crime statistics and the consistency of “hate crimes” classifications.
{skipping ahead}
In between the attacks in Arvada and Colorado Springs, Murray, who had been raised in a strict Christian home, posted anti-Christian comments on the internet blaming Christians for the attacks.
“You Christians brought this on yourselves” he wrote on a forum for former Pentecostals and fundamentalists. “All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you ... as I can especially Christians who are to blame for most of the problems in the world.”
“Christian America… this is YOUR Columbine!” he said, according to the Rocky Mountain News, referring to the 1998 high school shootings in Jefferson County, Colorado. Apparently the FBI has folks like you to explain the hate right out of these things, when they don't want to acknowledge it. You mock "evolutionists" and a great number of Christians on the internet and in print do the same. Should "evolutionists" consider themselves "persecuted"? What in the world do you think you're talking about? Exposing liars constitutes "persecution"? Isn't it a shame you have to distort every other word in the language? I'll tell you something right now. I can defend myself, my beliefs, my friends, and my family. I can and will use words to accomplish the job, and if words aren't enough, I can and will use other resources. Call that whatever you want in evospeak, or just plain untruth. It's the way things are. I don't have to take crap, and you can't make me. Neither will you make me ashamed of the policy. What a splendid example of twisting the credibility clean out of one's own words. Shooters come in and gun down folks in church, and if you think you can sell (yourself - won't nobody else buy it) any other possible motive it's not persecution. But my defense of truth is. You're playing this junk on the wrong audience. You need a crowd of atheists so blinded by hate and rage they don't care that everyone knows they don't think or talk straight. I can PM you some links to that kind of forum, if you'd like.
Last edited by CTD; 05/13/09 07:06 PM. Reason: a word got deleted
Dark Matter + Dark Energy = Dark Truth"We find that such evidence demonstrates that the ID argument is dependent upon setting a scientifically unreasonable burden of proof for the theory of evolution." - Judge Jones Kitzmiller case http://www.talkreason.org/articles/Falsify.cfm"To Compel A Man To Furnish Funds For The Propagation Of Ideas He Disbelieves And Abhors Is Sinful And Tyrannical." - Thomas Jefferson "And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?" - Thomas Jefferson
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