In the liturgical calendar, Christmas Day is immediately followed by the feast of St. Stephen, the very first martyr of the church. Two days after that is the feast of the Holy Innocents, honoring those children under the age of 2 who were murdered by the brutal tyrant Herod. As many wiser than I have observed, our celebration of the birth of the Christ Child is marred by man’s sinful desire to stamp him out, as well as those associated with him.
They’re picking up the pieces from disproportionate restrictions.
Americans are increasingly coming to the conclusion that Democrats irreversibly damaged the nation through their pandemic restrictions.
Nowhere is this more true than in the decline of American churches, which were gutted by onerous rules and outright bans that stretched for months on end. In many instances, such restrictions remained in place much longer than those on shopping malls and movie productions, driving questions about why Democrats were incommensurately tough on churches.
IN THE Middle Ages there were no nation states. Instead, there were competing and interlocked feudal power blocs ruled by upper classes identifying with each other. The elite spoke the same language, had the same interests, shared the same culture. The peasants and serfs they ruled were of no account.
The head of a conservative Christian group in Virginia is speaking out after members of her organization were turned away from a restaurant based solely on their religious views.
Victoria Cobb, president of the non-profit Christian lobbying organization Family Foundation of Virginia, told Fox News Digital that several members of her group were scheduled to hold a private event at a side room at Metzger Bar and Butchery in Richmond, Virginia when they received a call an hour and a half before the reservation saying their reservation had been canceled.
A statement by the U.K.’s main prosecution service says it is “no longer appropriate” to read parts of the Bible aloud in public. Christian groups have called the statement “ill-judged” and “concerning”.
h/t NJ
Western authorities appear committed to discriminating against Christian asylum seekers, while welcoming Muslims ones.
Most recently, Germany — which has taken in millions of refugees from the Muslim world, including many, non-vetted, from Afghanistan — denied refuge to an Iranian convert to Christianity, known by the initials “H.H.,” whose brother-in-law had been imprisoned, tortured and killed after converting in their native Iran. According to a report from August 2
The Canadian Catholic church and its members, many of whom are Indigenous or immigrants, were last year buffeted by a horrendous 260 per cent spike in hate crimes.
Catholics were subject to a far higher escalation in police-reported hate incidents than any other religious or racial group, according to a Statistics Canada study.
The Atlantic’s piece on the Rosary as an extremist symbol is the funniest thing I’ve read in years
I’m one of the many, many millions who repeatedly reread P.G. Wodehouse. His humour is a balm and his writing a miracle of tone and diction. I also, since first tasting him in high school — The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias, later changed to The Sinking of the Mariposa Belle was the story — revisit Stephen Leacock.
Politicians have found a new straw man: climate change. There are certainly many things we can gradually do not to pollute or wreck our planet, but blaming it for the pervasive slaughter of Christians by Muslims in northern Africa is not one of them. It seems, sadly, that what drives the persecution of Christians there, and elsewhere, is doctrine, not climate change.
On June 5, 2022, Muslims massacred 50 Christians inside a Nigerian church on Pentecost Sunday (one of many examples of Nigerian Christians massacred while worshipping in their churches).
Two days later, Ireland’s President Michael Higgins issued a statement linking the Nigerian church massacre to — climate change. “The neglect of food security issues in Africa, for so long has brought us to a point of crisis that is now having internal and regional effects based on struggles, ways of life themselves,” he wrote, implying that food shortages caused by the climate are what cause murder.
In Finland, two people were tried simply for quoting the Bible
In 17th Century Europe, you’d have swung for blaspheming against the dominant church of the day. In 2022, you can now be criminalised for professing the scripture of that same faith.
A Bishop and a parliamentarian have been tried for ‘hate speech’ in Finland, in this case for merely quoting and affirming biblical views. In 2019 MP Päivi Räsänen, grandmother of seven, had sent a tweet, accompanied by a Bible verse, criticising her church for co-sponsoring the Helsinki Pride parade.
“When he entered the church, his wife and the children were seated at the back,” the church’s pastor said. “He pulled her out of the church, and about 100 meters away, a member saw him beat his wife.” Another neighbor confirmed that he later heard screaming from the Muslim household, then saw “two men wearing Islamic prayer caps outside [the] house putting together an undefined wooden structure.”
The next morning, the neighbor went to borrow a tool. No one answered, but the door was unlocked, so he entered. There he found the woman and her two young children hanging dead. The recently built wooden structure had served as a scaffold.
The year 2021 “saw the worst persecution of Christians in history” — with an average of 16 Christians murdered for their faith every day.
That observation comes from the World Watch List-2022 (WWL-2022), recently published by the international humanitarian organization, Open Doors. The report each year ranks the top 50 countries where Christians are most persecuted for their faith. The WWL uses data from field workers and external experts to quantify and analyze persecution worldwide.
The Islamic State: As always happens before the festive Christmas season, professional Islamic terrorists sought to incite Muslims to launch “lone wolf” attacks on Christians. On December 20, the ISIS-operated Rocket.Chat communication platform posted a drawing of a veiled jihadist brandishing a bloody knife in one hand while holding the severed head of Santa Claus in the other.
Vaguely worded hate-speech laws can turn widely held beliefs into criminal speech.
Finnish MP Päivi Räsänen stands on criminal trial today for sending a tweet. Less than 280 characters may amount to two years in jail.
Räsänen is a long-serving politician. She was the first female chairperson of her party, the Finnish Christian Democrats, and a former minister of the interior. She is now a grandmother of seven. She is officially being prosecuted for the crime of ‘ethnic agitation’, under the section of ‘war crimes and crimes against humanity’ in the Finnish criminal code. What on Earth did she say that caused such an extraordinary legal response? Did she encourage acts of terrorism against her own country? Did she marvel at the atrocities of Stalin?
A recent and ostensibly insignificant “label change” by the U.S. Department of State sheds light on both President Joe Biden and former president Barack Obama, as well as on a potential presidential candidate for 2024, Hillary Clinton.
On November 17, 2021, the State Department removed Nigeria from its list of Countries of Particular Concern, that is, nations which engage in, or tolerate violations of, religious freedom. It did this despite several human rights organizations characterizing the persecution meted out to Nigeria’s Christians as a “genocide.”
According to an August 2021 report, since the Islamic insurgency began in earnest in July 2009 — first at the hands of Boko Haram, an Islamic terrorist organization, and later by the Fulani, Muslim herdsmen also motivated by jihadist ideology — more than 60,000 Christians have either been murdered or abducted during raids.
