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...
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.
