Posted on 05/08/2005 4:37:05 PM PDT by moneyrunner
George Will, a man who I admire greatly has written a column - “The Christian Complex” – that basically says: Christians are getting hysterical about nothing; chill out.
As proof, he cites the fact that:
George Bush said that non-believers can be good Americans. That non-believers are so numerous they could make up the third largest state. That the Terri Schiavo case was unpopular with the public. That Pat Robertson has no objection to Rudy Giuliani as President. That Mel Gibson’s “The Passion” is a very popular movie and the “Da Vinci Code” is a popular book (he must not have read it). That the “Left Behind” series is very popular. And that Presidents since Reagan end some of their speeches with “God bless America.”
Glenn Reynolds agrees with Will on this issue. As a libertarian, Reynolds has had his issues with Christian fundamentalists.
I repeat, I greatly admire Will and I rarely find myself in disagreement with him. Like Charles Krauthammer, Will thinks rationally and his conclusions are based on logic. But his “proofs” (read the whole thing) are not really germane. The logic of his thesis disappears when viewed from the perspective that asks the question: do Christians have nothing to fear? In fact, Will puts scare quotes around certain terms when he says: “There is much lamentation about various "assaults" on "people of faith."
What Will has managed to do is prove something that did not have to be proven: that there are a lot of Christians (“People of Faith”) in this country; and that there are a lot of people who are not. By showing that Christians are a majority, Will implies that they don’t need to fear persecution.
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(Excerpt) Read more at moneyrunner.blogspot.com ...
No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
George H. W. Bush speaking to Robert Sherman
-August 27, 1987
Will is a Democrat, a very conservative one, but still a Democrat. He doesn't let that knowledge out too often and I agree with the article's assessment -- but he IS a Democrat.
Who is Glenn Reynolds?
"The only problem with his argument is that there is no historical evidence that majorities always rule a country and need not fear persecution by minorities. The Sunnis in Iraq are a minority, yet they ran the place under Saddam, oppressing the Shiite majority. Members of the Communist Party and members of the National Socialist Workers (NAZI) party were always minorities in Russia, Germany and China. Yet they ran their countries. The just completed elections in England demonstrate that members of Labor are a minority, yet they will govern for the next 5 years."
Clearly this guy is not for real!
George Will is as conservative as a "LIBERALtarian".
In other words, NO "conservative" in my book. I pay NO attention to him or his illogical comments.
You may be thinking of Robert Novak, who is a registered Democrat.
EXCELLENT!
Glenn Reynolds is the blogger of Instapundit.
On abortion, normalization of sodomy, and other fronts of the cultural left, traditional Christians are the backbone of the resistance. The left has figured out that if we are not taken out and taken out hard, they have no hope of victory.
didn't read so there's the caveat. however, my fellow Christians can be a pretty skittish lot. I gave up skittishness in order to be about The Business. The Church is no place for Chicken Little. He's a distraction.
I am NOT thinking of Robert Novak. Will is a Democrat -- which you won't find anywhere in his bio. I only read it once or twice in HIS COLUMN over all the years I've been reading his column. He's also an avid baseball fan and has a Downs Syndrome child. You won't read about the latter either. He's pretty private.
No mix-up in my mind.
Sorry, you're dead wrong.
And it doesn't matter if we are a majority of the people. THEY are a majority of the media and academia. They control enough of the courts to usurp the will of the majority over and over again. Add to that that liberal Christians are not included in the ranks of the persecuted. They are not held to the "wall of separation" standards. No, it is only if you are both Christian and conservative that you are ridiculed. If you are a social liberal and call yourself a Christian, and if you beleive as all good liberals do that your Christianity -- whatever it is worth -- is to be hidden in the closet and never mentioned unless you want to pull a "I'm a Christian and I believe in a woman's right to choose...." then you are fine. They want to rewrite the Bible just like they want to redesign nature and redefine marriage.
African slaves were the majority of the population before the middle of the 18th century. An early census in 1790 showed that three quarters of the population were slaves, a tenth white, and the rest were free blacks and people of mixed races. Hundreds more slaves were brought to Belize before the slave trade was ended in 1807. But in the next 25 years the number of slaves declined from about 3,000 to 2,000, or from about three quarters to less than half of the population. This was because the free black and coloured population increased to almost half. The white population stayed at about one tenth of the total.
Poking around on DU this afternoon I saw a thread illustrating their idea of Christianity.
They think the way to neutralize us is to essentially restore Gnosticism. To say that Christianity is just what you feel and the Beatitudes and ignore everything outside the Gospels and call that "Jesus Christianity". As if Jesus, the saints, and the prophets weren't all sent by the same God the Father.
I don't believe Christians are the majority. If they were, our country would be a better place.
If you are going to quote someone, provide a link. This is the internet, you know, not a newspaper.
Now, I do not mean in any way to equate the hostility Christians are beginning to experience with the severe persecutions and slavery of the past. However, I do mean to show that majorities can and have been persecuted. And in this case, Christianity is itself being attacked and an attempt to crush it by redefining it is underway.
The Passover
"At one time Jewish people, known as Hebrews, were unable to harvest enough food for themselves in their land of Canaan, the area now known as Israel. They traveled to Egypt and there began to work for the Egyptians. However, the Egyptian pharaoh grew afraid of the Jews because they outnumbered the Egyptians. So he turned them into slaves for the Egyptians.
"The Hebrews were forced to make bricks and build pyramids. But one Hebrew man, Moses, who had been raised by the Pharaoh's daughter, warned the Pharaoh that God would punish the Egyptians with ten plagues if the Hebrew people were not set free. Still the Pharaoh would not let the Jews go.
"The ten plagues then began. Egypt suffered, among other things, locusts, frogs, and diseased cattle, but the Pharaoh would not let the Jewish people free. Moses, as described in Exodus 12: 21-28, directed the Hebrews to slaughter a lamb and mark their own houses with the blood of this sacrifice. Once the Hebrew homes were marked, the last plague came. This plague was that the first born son of each family would die. Only the houses marked with the blood of the sacrificial lamb would be "passed over."
"The Pharaoh's own son died in this plague, and the Pharaoh, concerned for his own life, told the Jewish people to leave Egypt. "
Now let me add that majorities are at risk only when they lose their democratic rights. When they have no say. There, I believe, lies the problem. We are misreprented and under represented in big media. There is a campaign to establish as a constitutional fact that we somehow cannot draw from our Christian worldview in the political arena. In fact, government can only endorse that which is contrary to Christianity or else it somehow endorses Christianity. Then you have judges who are willing to support that premise. You have teachers who teach it as fact. So it becomes irrelevant that we are many in numbers. It becomes irrelevant what offices we hold. We are unconstitutional. We get no say. If we find homosexuality appalling, too bad. That's an unconstitutional view. If we elected a school board that will allow criticism of evolution, so what! That's an unconstitutional view. If we elected representatives that will restrict or even ban abortion, so what! That's an unconstitutional view. Heck, we can't even get partial birth abortion banned unless the law is worded in such a way as to be useless. A liberal minority is seeking to render us powerless by judicial decree. By doing that they make Federalist 10 irrelevant. The point was always that the majority could combat a strong minority through their majority vote. Minorities need more protection precisely because they lack a majority vote. So we have a Constitution to limit the power of government and acknowledge that there are certain rights that come from God, therefore no government has the authority to take them away. But if you render the majority vote useless then the majority is unprotected. And if you allow a minority to redefine the Constitution to whatever is fashionable in their eyes, then EVERYONE is unprotected and we cease being a constitutional republic and becomes a judicial oligarchy. In that world, majorities have no particular protection.
Well, the majority of Americans identify themselves as Christians when asked their religion. I suspect that many of these are nominal Christians. Nevertheless, Christianity is the primary religion in the US.
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