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ebia

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I have provided evidence,

and the discussion can continue to review this evidence, but you need to read it properly and think about how it can be applied to this discussion in the first place.
I did read it.
I questioned whether you had, since some of it doesn't address the question at hand, and some of it is just anacdotes. The one study that is repeatedly cited as making the statement (suspiciously in the same words) in several newspapers and book blurbs doesn't seem to actually exist; or at least isn't even mentioned on the website of the organisation that is said to have produced it.

To me, the "evidence" points towards someone having done some sloppy reading when the Pew Research report was issued, reported something it didn't say, and then everybody has just repeated that without actually checking original sources.

In the meantime feel free to provide your own evidence to support a differing view point..

Both yourself and Bungle Bear seem to be very tardy in stumping up ANY evidence for ANYTHING you argue for....

I haven't made a positive claim. I've challenged one:
What does "most persecuted people" actually mean - without defining that its a meaningless claim.
Where is the primary evidence - not politicians and newspapers all repeating ech other, but an actual statistical analysis that actually supports the claim.
 
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ebia

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Read it properly - especially the bit on harrassment which isolates individual religions..
Before I do, you need to define what "most persecuted people" means.
Just to make sure the goalposts are fixed.
 
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Bungle_Bear

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I said I'm happy to back my claim once Episaw backs his. If you want to provide the evidence yourself, go ahead. But until such time as somebody provides the evidence to support the claim "Christians are the most persecuted people on the earth" I will not be providing evidence they are not. Why not? Well, the moment I provide my evidence the discussion will turn to my evidence and the original claim will be forgotten. There are 3 options:

1. Provide the evidence
2. Withdraw the claim
3. Stop the discussion now and we all move on
 
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Danny777

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This is the claim you made in post 122: 'I can confidently state (and I can back this up) that Christians are not the most persecuted people on earth.'

Definitions are crucial and as part of this discussion the term 'persecuted' and 'Christian' are key (as is the time period you intend to use)

Both you (and Ebia) are picking the bones out of any suggestion that Christianity are world's most persecuted group - it's only fair that you stump up the evidence you say you have?

I am genuinely intrigued by the claim you made and I'm not particularly interested in subjecting it to the relentless nit-picking that you often engage in when a Christian makes an assertion.

Please defend your claim as it is very pertinent to this discussion - if you know you cannot back it up with the evidence you would insist someone else provides when they make such a bold assertion, just admit it...

For what it's worth, I believe true Christian's are the world's most persecuted group although can't provide conclusive evidence - with a discussion like this, it is possible to find statistics or create goalposts that will allow anyone to prove anything they like...
 
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ianb321red

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Stop wasting time and provide evidence to support your claim.

I've previously provided links to the Pew Research - this is evidence.
Read this also:
Serving Persecuted Christians Worldwide - World Watch List - Open Doors UK & Ireland

Do you understand what evidence is?
Evidence doesn't stop being evidence because some people (like you) don't accept it.
The evidence DOES support our claim the Christians are the most persecuted religion.

Barnabus Fund is another (Christian) organisation that collects data to support this claim.

There is OVERWHELMING evidence to support this view - anyone can see this, and any modicum of effort to look in to this matter will reveal this is the case..

I'm not interested in whether you or anyone else accepts or believes the evidence provided - this is entirely up to you. But it has been provided nevertheless.

I am NOT interested in tit-for-tat timewasters...What i am GENUINELY interested in is having a productive discussion on this subject. I would love SOMEONE - ANYONE to provide some EVIDENCE for an opposing viewpoint.

What i would request - if not beg - from you is to provide JUST ONE piece of evidence, or even some proof, of a religious group that is MORE persecuted globally than Christianity.

If you can't or won't do this then the discussion has ended as far as me posting any further on this thread - because you clearly are being a time waster. (NOTE - Same request applies to Ebola when he comes to making his next post.....)

So - can you provide some constuctive input here or not?
 
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ebia

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I've previously provided links to the Pehw Research - this is evidence.
You won't even make clea what the claim is.
The Pew Research doesn't make the claim, so in fairness you need to clarify it so we can see properly whether you can deduce that from the report.

Sorry - I'm not seeing where that does any kind of comparison between religions. Can you point to the page.

Pew Research I would trust to be accurate.
The above organisation I've never heard of, so I don't know.
Barnabus Fund I wouldn't trust as far as a paper aeroplane made from their leaflet will fly.

Barnabus Fund is another (Christian) organisation that collects data to support this claim.

ANYONE to provide some EVIDENCE for an opposing viewpoint.
I'm not making an opposing claim. I don't know which is the most persecuted religion. I'm not at all sure what the phrase exactly means.
If I were, it would be that a religion where all the population are severely persecuted would consistitute the most persecuted. There are such small religions in the world, such as the Kalash pagan religion of the Kalash people of a small, remote corner of NWFP, Pakistan.

I am concerned that the claim appears to originate with a seemingly non-existent report and become of those "truth by enough repetition" things.

Of course there is lots of religous persecution in the world. christians, Jews, Shia Muslims, Sufis, Hindus, Sunni Muslims, buddists, a whole mass of smaller religions, all suffer.
I have good friends who have been on the receiving end of it; listened to the stories of torture and oppression first hand; seen where fingers have been chopped off, feet broken, scars left from bullet holes...
And all of those religions have also been the perpetrators.
 
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ebia

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Perhaps you'd at least take a shot at defining what you mean by it.
Or have a go at my 10% of 1,000,000 vs 100% of 1,000 question.
 
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Bungle_Bear

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Stop wasting time and provide evidence to support your claim.
Take it up with Episaw. I do not see you asking him to stump up, so why are you insisting I jump the gun?

I've previously provided links to the Pew Research - this is evidence.
Read this also:
Serving Persecuted Christians Worldwide - World Watch List - Open Doors UK & Ireland
Which does not provide evidence for the claim being made.

Do you understand what evidence is?
Evidence doesn't stop being evidence because some people (like you) don't accept it.
I don't accept it for the simple reason that it's not evidence for the claim that was made.

The evidence DOES support our claim the Christians are the most persecuted religion.
But that's NOT the claim that was made. The claim that was made was not that Christians are the most persecuted religion, it was that they are the most persecuted people. That's a HUGE difference. If you can't grasp it then we are very definitely done here.

I am NOT interested in tit-for-tat timewasters...What i am GENUINELY interested in is having a productive discussion on this subject. I would love SOMEONE - ANYONE to provide some EVIDENCE for an opposing viewpoint.
Me too. So how about you get those who made the original claim to back it up and stop having a go at me?

What i would request - if not beg - from you is to provide JUST ONE piece of evidence, or even some proof, of a religious group that is MORE persecuted globally than Christianity.
Why? That is not the claim we are discussing?

But let me throw you a bone - one of the most persecuted groups of people on the earth are muslim. They are, statistically, far more persecuted than Christians (as a group of people). You want more? Stump up on your side first.

If you can't or won't do this then the discussion has ended as far as me posting any further on this thread - because you clearly are being a time waster. (NOTE - Same request applies to Ebola when he comes to making his next post.....)
Personal insults? That's really poor form.....

So - can you provide some constuctive input here or not?
Yep:

1. Understand what the claim being discussed actually is
2. Stop barking up the wrong tree
3. Harass the person who made the claim, not those who are asking for evidence to support it
4. Until the evidence to support the claim is forthcoming stop having a go at me when I've promised to deliver when that condition has been met

It's fairly obvious that you don't know what we are discussing. Please go back through the thread, understand the claim that was made (and not the claim that you are trying to twist it into) and then have a word with Episaw.

You're welcome.
 
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Bungle_Bear

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This is the claim you made in post 122: 'I can confidently state (and I can back this up) that Christians are not the most persecuted people on earth.'
Yep. And nobody has yet provided a single piece of evidence to support the claim that Christians are the most persecuted people on the earth.

There you go moving the goalposts. I suspect it's not intentional, but it is fundamental to the claim being made.

I am genuinely intrigued by the claim you made and I'm not particularly interested in subjecting it to the relentless nit-picking that you often engage in when a Christian makes an assertion.
To be fair, I take issue with anyone (Christian or non-Christian) who makes unsupported assertions. In this case, you'll find that I'm not nit-picking in the least. I'm simply insisting on understanding of basic English.

Why are you not berating the one who made the original assertion? Is it because he is a Christian? Why am I the one you're hassling when the original claimant refuses to come to the party?

Please defend your claim as it is very pertinent to this discussion - if you know you cannot back it up with the evidence you would insist someone else provides when they make such a bold assertion, just admit it...
Oh, I can back it up. I just wonder why you are so insistent that I back up my counter claim but have no interest in the original claim being supported first.

Let's stick to the original assertion, shall we? Please ask Episaw (or do it yourself) to provide evidence that Christians are the most persecuted people (not group or religion) on earth. Those were the original goalposts and it would appear I am the only one still trying to hit them - and I'm taking quite a harsh verbal beating for refusing to let them be moved.
 
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Danny777

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Oh, I can back it up. I just wonder why you are so insistent that I back up my counter claim but have no interest in the original claim being supported first.

Well back it up then!

At least, Episaw has made some attempt to back his claim up...

Let's stick to the original claim, shall we? Please ask Episaw (or do it yourself) to provide evidence that Christians are the most persecuted people (not religion) on earth.

I have already admitted that I cannot PROVE Christian's are the most persecuted people on earth, but I believe they are. I have not claimed that I can back this up.

Episaw has made a claim and has submitted what he consider's to be evidence. You have naturally rejected his evidence and picked the bones out of everything he has posted. So far, you have made an equally bold claim but submitted no evidence whatsoever.

You clearly revel in finding fault with other posters. Let's see what evidence you want to submit and see if it stands up to the same scrutiny you expect of others.

Let's start with parameters - can you define 'persecuted' and 'Christian'? There is no right answer to this and I'm genuinely interested in how you see this, but unless we start here, any further discussion is meaningless...

Let me put my neck on the line by suggesting that to me a Christian is a born-again believer and NOT a nominal Christian. (This makes the number of Christian's a fraction of so-called 'Christianity'). It is impossible to provide data on this as no-one can determine whether someone is genuinely saved. The devil is only interested in those who are genuinely saved - everything else is either religious or political persecution.

I suggest that persecution is the discrimination or ill-treatment of any individual/group based on one of many characteristics (eg. ethnicity, religion, political view etc).

Because these terms are so difficult to define and measure, I believe it impossible to PROVE anything either way. However, I did not make a claim - YOU (and others) have! Let's see some evidence...

I suspect you will pick the bones out of my (probably flaky) definitions and omit to provide support for yours claims. I'm not interested in ego's - for me, this is an interesting discussion but let's see you play by the same rules you expect of everyone else...
 
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Danny777

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Perhaps you'd at least take a shot at defining what you mean by it.
Or have a go at my 10% of 1,000,000 vs 100% of 1,000 question.

My first instinct is that 100% of 1,000 is a greater level of persecution - this seems common sense. The problem is that under this definition, some wacky cult of say 100 people who claim (rightly or wrongly) to be persecuted will top the charts! Therefore, it's not that simple...

All I can say is that I could never define Christianity as being the 2 billion or whatever figure where 99% of these are nominal Christian's at best and not in the least serious about any faith in Christ. The problem with definitions make it impossible to prove anything...
 
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ebia

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My first instinct is that 100% of 1,000 is a greater level of persecution - this seems common sense. The problem is that under this definition, some wacky cult of say 100 people who claim (rightly or wrongly) to be persecuted will top the charts!
We don't need to go looking for wacky cults though.
There are small religions around the world that really are in that situation. Eg the Kalash I mentioned before.


All big religions have nominal adherents, mostly in places where they are in control. Islam especially. The Kalash, however, have zero nominal members, because anyone not committed converts to Islam to gain the advantage.

I'd say the biggest problem with definitions is that without them phrases actually don't mean much; they become emotional manipulation without substance. And without statistics intuitive ideas have strong tendency to be miles out.
 
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Bungle_Bear

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Well back it up then!

At least, Episaw has made some attempt to back his claim up...
Actually, he didn't. And you didn't ask him to.

Double standard much?

I have already admitted that I cannot PROVE Christian's are the most persecuted people on earth, but I believe they are. I have not claimed that I can back this up.
I haven't asked for proof. You have backed the assertion, it is down to you to provide evidence to back that assertion or retract it.

You clearly revel in finding fault with other posters. Let's see what evidence you want to submit and see if it stands up to the same scrutiny you expect of others.
What have I been given to find fault with? So far everyone has evaded providing the evidence I asked for. You want me to play by your rules, you need to play by them too. This is a two-way street - you need to stop insisting that I provide evidence when others (including you) do not. Simply put:

Provide the evidence to support the assertion that Christians are the most persecuted people on earth or retract the claim.

Then we can move forward.

Nope, I'm happy to work with those definitions. Remember, the original claim was not made by me so please stop trying to insinuate that it was. The original claim was "Christians are the most persecuted people on earth." I have asked for evidence to support this assertion (which you have not taken any interest in) and said I will provide evidence of a counter claim when that evidence is provided or the assertion is withdrawn.

Ball back in your court - where's the evidence or is the assertion being retracted?
 
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Danny777

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Your clearly not reading my posts. Although I've stated I agree with the original assertion, I've repeatedly stated I CANNOT prove it for all the reasons I've already gone through.

Only two people (you and Episaw) has stated they can back up their opposing assertions - Episaw has tried to back his up (poorly in your view) but you have made NO attempt whatsoever to offer any support for yours, even though you've stated you can.

This is getting ridiculous - let's just call it quits as we're going nowhere...
 
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ebia

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episaw hasn't tried to back it up at all.
 
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Bungle_Bear

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I find it incredibly frustrating when people say "here's my assertion", cannot back it up but continue to insist it is true. Evidence for a different assertion is not evidence for the one you insist is true. If you have no evidence, what makes you so sure it is true? And why do you think it is so unreasonable of me to ask for evidence?

You've covered the definitions of "Christian" and "persecuted". We also need to define "people." Typically this word has one of two meanings:

1. The members of a particular nation, community, or ethnic group
2. Human beings in general

Christians are not covered by the first definition, so it's the second - but with a qualification that it is not all human beings, just those with a certain set of beliefs. So our definition of "people" needs to be something like "a group of individuals who share a certain characteristic." Notice that the first definition meets the new one.

Given this definition, I'm sure you could think of several peoples who are more persecuted than Christians if you tried. I'll give you two examples:

1. The Rohingya people of Burma. These people have been declared stateless by their own government. They are not citizens of their own country, cannot own land and may not have more than 2 children. However, there are only about 800,000 of them, so not a big, global people like Christians.

The reason I chose this example, though, is because of this statement: "According to the United Nations, they are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world." This is like the Pew Foundation claim that Ebia called attention to. If you search for Rohingya on the internet you will, more often than not, come across that claim. It sounds like the sort of thing the UN would say. But guess what? Nobody can find where the UN made the claim. If you cannot find the original claim that others rely on and perpetuate, that piece of evidence is actually not evidence.

2. Homosexuals. That's a nice, big global people. So how do they compare to Christians in the persecution stakes? The WHO recognises 194 counties in the world. The claim from the Pew study is that Christians are persecuted in 151 countries. That's just 43 countries where Christianity is not persecuted. Homosexuality is illegal in 79 countries, so from that perspective it looks like a win for Christians. But when we look from the other direction we find that gay marriage is legal in just 13 countries. So homosexuals are actually being persecuted in 181 countries. But there's more - within those 13 countries homosexuals are often still persecuted, in particular by members of certain religious communities who shun and reject them.

You're welcome.
 
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Episaw

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Islam is the new communism which is warring against the free West, and unless we stand against it, we will lose everything. That is why Wilders has had to go through all this misery, and that is why he has written this book. He has seen his own nation deteriorate rapidly, and he wants to see it – and the West – freed from the shackles of a seventh century political ideology.

And that is what Islam really is: “I am talking about the ideology of Islam, not about individual Muslim people. There are many moderate Muslims, but that does not change the fact that the political ideology of Islam is not moderate – it is a totalitarian cult with global ambitions. We should not treat Islam more leniently than other political ideologies like communism and fascism just because it claims to be a religion. We must treat Islam as we do every other despotic creed that calls for the submission of those who do not adhere to it.”

Gert Wilders.
 
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Episaw

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Last week, a disturbing video made the social media rounds. It shows an armed rebel dismembering a dead soldier’s body. He then extracts and eats the soldier’s heart. According to Human Rights Watch, the cannibal is a Syrian rebel leader named Abu Sakkar. His snack was a Syrian government soldier.

While cutting away at his victim, Sakkar says, “We swear to Allah that we will eat your hearts and livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog.” Bashar Assad is the Syrian President the rebels seek to topple.
 
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Episaw

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Now it is always possible that I may have missed something here, but after a horrendous few weeks of Muslim atrocities and bloodshed, the scorecard still seems to read as follows:

-Still no mass demonstrations by Muslim “moderates” condemning the Boston bombings.
-Still no mass demonstrations by Muslim “moderates” condemning the London terror attack.
-Still no mass demonstrations by Muslim “moderates” condemning the Swedish rioting.
-Still no mass demonstrations by Muslim “moderates” condemning the Paris knife attack.

Hmmm…. the silence is absolutely deafening. In fact, I am still waiting for the mass demonstrations by Muslim “moderates” condemning 9/11. These public protests seem to be non-existent. And there are plenty of such attacks to protest about. There have in fact been 21,000 Islamic terror attacks since 9/11. Well, OK, 20,946 to be exact.

A very important website monitoring all this offers this incredible statistic – and more. The stats are simply mind-boggling. Consider just the month of April 2013. In that month alone there were 202 such attacks occurring in 25 nations. In those attacks 957 people from 5 religious groups were killed, with 2403 injured. Not bad, considering this is the “religion of peace” we are talking about here.

So there we have 21,000 terror attacks by Islamic jihadists during the past 12 years, and as far as I can tell, we have had few if any mass protests by all these so-called moderate Muslims who are supposed to exist, telling the world they clearly abhor all this violence and do not at all approve of such terror.
 
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Episaw

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If you ask me, ‘Are there moderate Muslims?’ I will answer yes of course there are. But that is not really the proper question to be asking. The real question to raise here is this: ‘Is Islam moderate or peaceful?’ The answer to that question is a resounding no.

This political ideology – for that is what it really is – began with the sword, has been spread by the sword, and stays in power by the sword. Muhammad is of course the ideal example of the use of terror, violence, murder, beheadings and warfare.

His life is not only full of such jihadist terror, but this is all fully approved of in the Koran, the hadith, and the history of Islam. This is a religion of blood – built on blood, sustained by blood, and propagated by blood. Those are the simple and plain facts of history.
 
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