Posted on 06/02/2016 7:07:07 PM PDT by marshmallow
Moscow, June 2, Interfax - The Russian Foreign Ministry is concerned over a sharp increase in discrimination on religious grounds in Europe, predominantly towards Christians.
"Despite the measures taken by states, the OSCE area saw a severe increase in intolerance based on religion towards Jews, Muslims and, especially, Christians, over recent years. Christianity, its relics and followers have been subjected to oppression, violence, persecutions and discrimination," Russian Foreign Ministry Ombudsman for Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law Konstantin Dolgov said at the conference titled The Role of Religion in the Modern World, the Russian ministry's website said.
Manifestations of intolerance and discriminations take place even in those OSCE member states where Christians make up the majority, Dolgov said.
"Among such manifestations, there are attacks on clergy, obstructing from holding religious events, destruction and desecration of Christian temples and cemeteries, attempts to remove religious symbols from public places, infringements of the freedom of expression of Christians, discrimination in the economic life and other fields. There are a growing number of acts of vandalism, arsons, thefts of Christian treasures and objects of cultural heritage," he said.
Under the guise of freedom of expression, some media take the liberty to "openly scoff at Christian values" and "it runs to the absurd, the prohibition to wear religious symbols, set up Christmas trees and so on, and so forth", according to Dolgov.
"The aggressive Western neoliberalism and militant secularism aimed to compromise spiritual, moral and traditional foundations of society", as well as the imbalances in implementation of the multiculturalism policy amid the increasing immigration are due in no small part to the growth of such negative trends, he said.
"The ECHR [European Court on Human Rights] is primarily concerned over the problem of tolerance despite the Court is, essentially, engulfed with complaints from individuals over discrimination based on religion, including Christianophobia (250,000 lawsuits, while ECHR reviews no more than 40 per year)," Dolgov said, adding that the EU legislation on non-discrimination and hate crimes "is more and more actively used for marginalization of Christians and Christian values".
Dolgov described as depressing the scale of intolerance based on religion in the U.S., and also referred to the data of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, which said that while followers of Islam account for less than 1% of the U.S. population, they are the target of 14% of all cases of religious discrimination investigated by the government. U.S. sociologists believe that 15-20% of the country's residents can be classified as absolute xenophobes and according to a study conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, about 15% of Americans (approximately 35 million) hold radical anti-Semitic views.
"In recent years, ahead of Christmas, voices appear in U.S. media saying that it is inappropriate to publicly demonstrate religious attributes during the period of festivities. Their number is constantly growing. American conservatives, for instance, started, in anger, drawing attention to the fact that the traditional greeting "Merry Christmas" has lately given place to the politically correct "Happy Winter Holidays" in the U.S., Dolgov said.
Solzhenitsyn tried to warn the West that this would happen.
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You got THAT right.
He was RE-ELECTED! That's what got ME.
John McCain and Mitt the Mormon...
I voted for McCain but I did a write-in, rather than vote for M the M.
Placemark.
So now the Russians are the good guys. Well, I’ve officially seen it all now.
LOL, you’re the second person on this thread to say that, see #8.
You are one up on me.
Plainly, I would never visit the place (Russia) for all the tea in China. Lacking comforts there is a given.
Thankfully, you made Russia your destination in 2009, though I wouldn’t have gone even then.
The events in Russia regarding the restoration of the churches of antiquity is true, regardless of when you went or your unhappy experiences there.
“Uncanny” is the perfect word for these uncanny restorations of the churches and a renewal of the faith.
That this is true, is a good thing. The impoverished feed on faith.
I wrote nothing at all on the issues you are projecting.
Russia is Russia. They are communists. Poverty is assured. This is not news.
Let’s see you go to Russia and try to “convert” someone to something other than Russian Orthodox. Putin will close your church.
“Uncanny.”
Really? Official atheism held sway only 70 years or so. Tens of millions of Russian Orthodox Christians held the faith. Their prayers and devotion lead to the destruction of official atheism and the Soviet state. We shouldn’t be surprised.
Here, where heresy has dominated for two hundred years, it is a different story.
They’re not really religious there. Russian Orthodox Church is a propaganda arm of Kremlin now (their Patriarch told in Russian TV that God wants Putin to Rule Russia), but that doesn’t mean those praising it go to church or anything.
Russian Orthodoxy is just another thing in the Kremlin effort to sell to people that Russia is very different from the rest of the world and rules of logic do not apply there. Logic would tell you that Russian weekly wage being less than $100 now is a failure of Putin’s system, but since “Russia is not bound by logic” it can be presented a great victory of Putin as now they can take over textile works from Malaysia.
Presumably Russian Christianity.
Although maybe we were *supposed* to intend for them to be Catholics. Now that you mention it, I don't know!
Fully agree. Words are cheap.
The abortion rate in Russia has come way, way, way down but is still above that of the US. But they are still in 1959 as regards other cultural insanities of the modern age. They are either going to fall really fast because of the world wide media or maybe they see the example of the West’s fall a lot easier because of the world wide media. I mean, they actually have examples of the boiling frog around them. So we will see.
Freegards
You are 100% right.
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