Persecution

PZ Myers at Pharyngula takes note of a creepy website, The Christian Underground, which posts the defiant motto

I will pray when I want / Where I want
School / Work / The street / The mall
Persecute me at your own peril

... And further explains:

Several people have written to me asking about this website's name, the Christian Underground, wanting to know why I would choose such a name.

We know dark days are ahead for Christians, the bible tells us this. That does not mean we cannot be active. It is not hard to envision, near in the future, when publicly discussing issues of deeply held biblical belief, that Christians will be arrested for "Hate Crimes".

Whoo-ee.

Know what? I can’t think of a single case, in my entire adult lifetime, of a Christian being officially prosecuted (or persecuted) for praying, or for any private religious act of any kind (okay, well, other than refusing to get medical attention for sick children, or killing youngsters because Jesus told them to – and I’m not joking, because these things have happened, and recently). If anyone even tries to persecute them, or tries anything that looks like it TO THEM, they rise up in a shrieking, enraged mass and make their feelings known. (The above site, for instance, is full of stuff about the persecutory acts of “homosexual activists.”)

The persecuted Christian schtick has a single purpose: to gain the upper hand over others.

It's a predatory assault meant to maximize the power of the people pulling it. And it works — in our decent society, people back off and give extra room to those people making the accusation. Worst of all is that it works only on people who are already caring and decent (which means the victims of the con suffer not because they’re bad, but because they’re good).

Certainly in the U.S., Christians are NOT persecuted. Far from it. Clearly, they get EXTRA leeway over other groups to pursue their goals and beliefs. Christians make up more than 75% of the U.S. population. They run both houses of Congress AND the White House. Christians can publicly rail against gays, against the rights of women, against the civil conduct of public business, in a way that no other group can. They can use public meetings as platforms for proselytizing in a way that no other group can. Every piece of American money is, in part, a Christian tract.

But it seems that they also want the schools, the media, the entertainment industry, they want the nation itself. They want it all. I sometimes think nothing would be enough for them.

The ones selling the “poor us” image are deliberately lying, deliberately taking advantage of a country full of innately decent people, so they can further remake the U.S. into THEIR nation. And if you have any idea that that might not be so bad, think again: the very fact that they're using a flat-out, ugly lie as their prime tool should give you some idea of how they'll run things as (if!) they gain more and more control.

Every time you hear or see a "persecuted Christian," wailing aloud about how downtrodden and disadvantaged he is, think bully. Think liar.

Think of a club aimed at the back of your head. Because that's really what the strategy is. Playing the victim card, by someone who is obviously not a victim, is an attack. A shameless, deliberate assault on others.

It seems to me the choice is to more actively defend ourselves ... or to complacently accept that more and more of our privacy and rights, more and more of our public business, will be controlled by people who have already shown they have no respect for fairness, truth, or live-and-let-live neighborliness.