Friday, March 30, 2012

Bull’s-Eye Placed On European Christians

We live a brave new world, ladies and gentlemen. Our European brethren in Christ are being persecuted for their faith. Europe has been influenced largely by Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, for the past millenia. Now His European followers are being persecuted in the year 2012. I wonder:
1) How long it will be before the persecution my European brethren in Christ becomes as violent as the persecution my Chinese or Pakistani brethren are facing.
2) How long it will be before me and my fellow American brethren in Christ face the same type of persecution.

In the meantime I pray that European brethren in Christ not compromise their Christian faith, act bravely in the face of persecution, and stay strong.

03/24/2012 EU (The World Net Daily)-A new report finds that Christians are the target of religiously motivated physical attacks, intolerance and discrimination more than the people of any other faith in Europe.
“Statistics show the breadth of the problem: 74 percent of U.K. respondents said that there is more negative discrimination against Christians than people of other faiths, said the Report 2011 by an organization called Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe.

The report said 84 percent of “the strongly increasing vandalism in France is directed against Christian places of worship. In Scotland, 95 percent of religiously motivated violence targets Christians.”
Authored by Gudrun Kugler, whose NGO is found at IntoleranceAgainstChristians.eu, the report highlights attacks on Christians because they are Christian.

“The term ‘intolerance’ refers to the social dimension, the term ‘discrimination’ to the legal. Intolerant and discriminatory behavior results from opposition to individual traits of the Christian faith or moral positions that are intrinsically part of the Christian faith,” the report said. “Intolerant and discriminatory behavior also results from a negative, categorical bias against Christians or Christianity as a whole.

This behavior causes various sectors of society to be used as vehicles of intolerance and discrimination against Christians. Such areas of society include the media or arts (through negative stereotyping or profane exhibitions); on the government level (through a discriminatory law or a biased court verdict); on the political level (exclusion from the public sphere, a resolution of a parliament, etc.). Intolerance and discrimination against Christians is also promulgated in the workplace, academia, and in the private and social sphere.

“‘Christianophobia’ or ‘Christophobia’ as well as ‘anti-Christianism’ are common terms describing the same problem,” the report said.

In Scotland, for example, of 693 charges aggravated by religious prejudice, 2.3 percent targeted Jews and 2.1 percent related to Islam. The rest targeted Catholics and Protestants. In France, 94 percent of vandalism with a religious link “was directed against Christian sites,” the report said.

According to the Christian Institute, some 85 percent of hate crimes in Europe are against Christians.
Kugler said, “We also notice professional restrictions for Christians: a restrictive application of freedom of conscience leads to professions such as magistrates, doctors, nurses and midwives as well as pharmacists slowly closing for Christians.

“It is high time for the public debate to respond to this reality,” Kugler said. “Teachers and parents get into trouble when they disagree with state-defined sexual ethics. Our research shows that only with a more accommodating approach to religion and specifically to Christianity, Europe will live up to its foundational value of freedom.”

The report listed dozens of instances of “Christaphobia” in a number of categories.
Under Freedom of Religion was listed a case involving a monastery in Turkey in which the lands were “expropriated” by the government, a move upheld by that nation’s courts. And in Spain, a glass panel was set up to prevent worshipers from entering the chapel of the University of Valladolid. Officials there told students to “Go away to pray in the field.”

In Germany, a mother served a 43-day jail sentence for refusing to enroll her children in state-mandated explicit sex ed classes, and one member of UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s staff called for a ban on weddings at Christian churches unless they also performed same-sex “marriages.”

Under Freedom of Expression, a French teacher was fired for showing students a video on abortion and talking about French abortion laws. In Poland a therapy conference aiming to help people who struggle with same-sex attraction was refused permission to use Medical School Foundation facilities in Poznan. Postal workers in the U.K. refused to deliver recordings of the New Testament book of Mark after calling it “offensive material.” A Scottish National Party leader, Gordon Wilson, reported a “lynch mob” booted him from the board of the Dundee Citizens Advice Bureau because he supported traditional marriage.

Regarding Freedom of Conscience, foster parents in the U.K. lost their right to provide help to children because they wouldn’t support homosexuality, a pharmacy was vandalized in Germany after the owner declined to sell abortifacients and marriage commissioners in the Netherlands will be given annual evaluations to ensure they pave the way for same-sex “marriage(Keep Reading).”

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