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Religion Grade 8: Persecution of Christians

Article 1: Read through the following script

a) in your own words summarise the article (what are the main points)

b) in your own words write down the reasons why early Christians were not liked according to this article

c) explain/discuss whether any of the reasons above are similar in today's world? How or how not?

Why Early Christians Were Despised

Why Early Christians Were Despised   IMAGE LEFT: Ruins at Ostia can be visited today at this ancient Roman port. 12 million barrels of corn came through Ostia annually from Egypt. It was the setting for the encounter between the Christian Octavius and the pagan Caecilius as recorded by Minicius Felix in the late second century A.D. and was used as a basis for this issue.

The Christian Church, in its earliest centuries after Jesus, endured wave after wave of persecution. All kinds of insults and charges were hurled at them.

A document written in the late 2nd century A.D. called The Octavius of Minicius Felix describes a debate between a Christian and a pagan at the Roman port of Ostia. It provides valuable insight into how Christianswere reviled and how they responded.

Minicius Felix was walking about Ostia with two friends, Octavius a Christian, and Caecilius a pagan. When Caecilius pauses to pay respect to a pagan idol, Octavius objects. An extended debate develops. Here is an adaptation of their debate drawn from that document as well as other early church sources for a taste of that time. We suggest you look carefully at the following charges and consider in what ways Christians today are similarly accused, and where the specifics of opposition now may have changed.

Charge: Cannibalism
CAECILIUS THE PAGAN: You Christians are the worst breed ever to affect the world. You deserve every punishment you can get! Nobody likes you. It would be better if you and your Jesus had never been born. We hear that you are all cannibals--you eat the flesh of your children in your sacred meetings.

OCTAVIUS The Christian: That story is probably based on reports that we share together a meal of the body and blood of Christ. That we do. But it is not human flesh we eat. It is bread and wine we consecrate to commemorate our Lord's death.

It amazes me you give credibility to these rumors of cannibalism. You know what we're like. Keep in mind that if you have a child and it is a girl but you wanted a boy, or if the child is deformed, or if you simply don't want it, what is done? You leave the child outside, exposed to die.

CAECILIUS: You know that it is far more merciful to let the baby die than to bring it up in a home where it is not wanted.

OCTAVIUS: We do not expose our children, and you are well aware how so many of the little ones that have been left out to die have been rescued by Christians and given a home. So it's just the opposite of what you accuse us of, Caecilius. We don't consume human life; we rather protect and defend it.

Charge: Gross Immorality
CAECILIUS: All right. Granted, it was just a rumor, but we also hear that you meet in secret, even before sunrise, and the gross immorality that we hear goes on in those places is repulsive -- especially the incest.

OCTAVIUS: If you came to one of our meetings you would find that the lovemaking and intimacy you are so quick to imagine is of a totally different nature. We meet before sunrise because we are working people. We have jobs to go to. We do not always meet in secret, but we have no temples or synagogues, so we use somebody's home which has enough room. We call one another brother and sister and pledge to love one another because that is what our Lord commanded us to do. And we greet one another and bless one another with a holy kiss, not out of lust but out of genuine love and concern for one another. Come and you will see that we demand the highest standards of morality among all who join us.

Charge: Poor and Lower Class
CAECILIUS: Take a look at your gatherings. What are they made up of? Mostly women, gullible children, the majority are from the working classes, not well-educated, mostly poor and even slaves. It makes me laugh when I think how poor you are, barely enough to live on. If this God of yours is so great and so loving, why are so many of you so poor? Either He's not that loving and doesn't care that you are poor or He is not that great and is unable do anything about it. Some God! No wonder you're all regarded as fools.

OCTAVIUS: If you had bothered to take the time to find out, you would know that there are many from the upper classes among our number, even some of Caesar's staff. And notable scholars, who were once pagans, have written in defense of our faith for the more educated to consider. But let's not quibble. Many of our number -- most of our number are poor. But what is more important is how we regard ourselves. We consider ourselves to be rich. We have that which is most valuable, the most precious gift, which cannot be lost. And for your information, there are those of us who are wealthy. We do not despise wealth; we welcome it when it comes lawfully. But we do not lust after it. And when we get more wealth, we simply give more away. Wealth can be a great burden. It weighs you down with many cares and concerns. Traveling light has its advantages -- some big advantages!

CAECILIUS: Sorry, I haven't noticed any. I'll take the wealth instead any day.

OCTAVIUS: You know, Caecilius, talking to you makes me realize why God doesn't automatically bless us with wealth. Because if he did, people like you would rush to become Christians and miss the whole point. So don't pity us. We have plenty, not only for ourselves but also for those in need, the ones that you walk right by.

Charge : Self-righteousness
CAECILIUS: Oh, aren't you so pure and good. That's another thing that bothers me: you all think you are so righteous and better than the rest of us.

OCTAVIUS: First you accuse us of cannibalism and orgies, now you're offended because we seek to lead a holy life. Let me assure you, we do not consider ourselves to be holy. Every Lord's day we have a service of communion, and it is a service of thanksgiving -- thanksgiving because we are forgiven, not because we are holy, and if we are forgiven, then we shall seek to lead lives that are like Christ.

Charge: Atheism
CAECILIUS: What concerns me is what you really are. This is the reason that you are hated across all the lands of this vast empire. Let's get to the real problem. You are atheists.

OCTAVIUS: Yes, we are atheists -- if you mean that we do not pray to or believe in all of the gods that we are expected to worship. But these are not gods. We worship the one true God, the Lord over all.

Charge: Novelty
CAECILIUS: You act as if you people know more than the rest of us. You think you know more than all of our fathers. What it comes down to is that you people are captive to novelty.

OCTAVIUS: That is simply just not the case. Why is it you do not require the Jews to sacrifice to your gods. They alone are given exemption. Why? Because of the antiquity of their religion. Well, be assured that the God that the Jews worship is the very same God that we worship. Their sacred writings, the Law and the Prophets, we revere and read aloud in our meetings. And because we worship this God of the Jews, the one thing we cannot be accused of is novelty. It is just the opposite. Our faith looks back beyond the beginning of time to the God who created all that is. What you won't listen to and what the Jews refuse to accept is that this God has come into our world to show us what He is like in the person of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, whom we love and serve.

Charge: Foolishness, Lack of Patriotism
CAECILIUS: How you tire me with this reckless babble! I shall not take the time now to answer you, except to say, how absurd to think that even if the "one true God," as you assert, were to come to earth, he would surely do better than to come as an unschooled, working-class carpenter in a place like Galilee in Judea. And if forgiveness were to be found through some man, I assure you that it would never come through the death of some convicted and crucified criminal. But let's put aside such simplicity and naivet¨ for now, for we are a tolerant people, and you are free to believe as you wish. In many ways you do not sound all that different from some of the mystery religions, and they are left alone. But what makes you people so offensive is your stubbornness. Believe what you will, but that is no excuse for the lack of patriotism.

You people are happy to benefit from all that is ours, living in this greatest time of all history, but where is your gratitude? You are antisocial snobs. You will not show proper respect for our anniversary festivals. You will not sacrifice to the genius of the emperor. You will not fight and join the empire. Simply put, you are disloyal, unpatriotic, and not to be trusted. As far as I am concerned, you are a danger to society.

OCTAVIUS: Hold on! One at a time, please. We do not join the army, and we do not fight because we do not believe in killing. We love our enemies and do good to them. Even though we are often hunted down and killed because of accusers like you, we do not even take up arms to defend ourselves. So I fail to see how we are any danger to anyone. But yes, you are right. We do not pray to the emperor or join with our neighbors in the sacrifices to the gods. But while we do not pray to the emperor, we do pray for the emperor. We recognize those in authority as appointed by God to preserve order. We seek, we pray for the peace and tranquility of the empire. God knows, if any group seeks a quiet and undisturbed life, it is us. We never know when we will be blamed for anything that is going wrong, be hunted down and arrested.

Charge: Cause of God's Anger
CAECILIUS: Not without cause, I assure you. Why can you not see what is so clear to everyone? Your lack of patriotism has caused us all grief and suffering. The gods have been good to Rome. They have given us great victories, good food, fertile land. That is why we must propitiate them and rid ourselves of you atheists. You are no more than criminals and must be dealt with as such.

OCTAVIUS: Oh yes, we have heard that before, too many times. As one of our fathers wrote: If the Tiber overflows its walls, if the Nile does not rise to the fields, if the sky doesn't move or the earth does, if there is famine, if there is plague, the cry is at once, "The Christian to the lion!"

Article 2: Read the article

a) summarise the main points of the article in your own words

b) explain in your own words the reasons why Christians are persecuted today according to this article.

c) comment on whether you think any kind of persecution of Christians' beliefs happens at all in Finland. How/how not? Do any other religious beliefs get persecuted in Finland in any way?

Christians: The world's most persecuted people

The former Chief Rabbi is appalled at the lack of protest about the treatment of Christians round the globe, and so should we be

One woman, at least, is safe. Throughout much of her pregnancy, she had been in prison in Khartoum, capital of the Republic Sudan, living with the dread expectation that she would be hanged once her baby was born. Her crime was that she had married a Christian and been accused by the authorities of apostasy, renouncing her faith, even though she maintained she had never been a Muslim in the first place. On Thursday, Meriam Ibrahim's eight-month ordeal finally ended when she was flown out of the country to Rome where she, and her new baby daughter, met the Pope in the Vatican.

But it has been a different story for the 3,000 Christians of Mosul who were driven from their homes in northern Iraq last week by Islamist fanatics who broadcast a fatwa from the loudspeakers of the city's mosques ordering them to convert to Islam, submit to its rule and pay a religious levy, or be put to death if they stayed. The last to leave was a disabled woman who could not travel. The fanatics arrived at her home and told her they would cut off her head with a sword.

Most people in the West would be surprised by the answer to the question: who are the most persecuted people in the world? According to the International Society for Human Rights, a secular group with members in 38 states worldwide, 80 per cent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed at Christians.

The Centre for the Study of Global Christianity in the United States estimates that 100,000 Christians now die every year, targeted because of their faith – that is 11 every hour. The Pew Research Center says that hostility to religion reached a new high in 2012, when Christians faced some form of discrimination in 139 countries, almost three-quarters of the world's nations.

All this seems counter-intuitive here in the West where the history of Christianity has been one of cultural dominance and control ever since the Emperor Constantine converted and made the Roman Empire Christian in the 4th century AD.

Yet the plain fact is that Christians are languishing in jail for blasphemy in Pakistan, and churches are burned and worshippers regularly slaughtered in Nigeria and Egypt, which has recently seen its worst anti-Christian violence in seven centuries.

The most violent anti-Christian pogrom of the early 21st century saw as many as 500 Christians hacked to death by machete-wielding Hindu radicals in Orissa, India, with thousands more injured and 50,000 made homeless. In Burma, Chin and Karen Christians are routinely subjected to imprisonment, torture, forced labour and murder.

Persecution is increasing in China; and in North Korea a quarter of the country's Christians live in forced labour camps after refusing to join the national cult of the state's founder, Kim Il-Sung. Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the Maldives all feature in the 10 worst places to be a Christian.

A few voices have been raised in the West about all this. The religious historian Rupert Shortt has written a book called Christianophobia. America's most prominent religious journalist, John L Allen Jnr, has just published The Global War on Christians. The former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks told the House of Lords recently that the suffering of Middle East Christians is "one of the crimes against humanity of our time". He compared it with Jewish pogroms in Europe and said he was "appalled at the lack of protest it has evoked".

Why is this in a culture that is happy to make public protest against the ferocity of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza or the behaviour of Russia in Ukraine?

In part, it is because our intelligentsia are locked into old ways of thinking about Christianity as the dominant force in Western historic hegemony. The church has not helped in this, with its fixation on pious religiosity and on cultural issues that it falsely regards as totemic – issues such as gay marriage and women bishops.

A bogus dichotomy between religion and equality has been set up, resulting in a succession of comparatively trivial new stories about receptionists being banned from wearing religious jewellery or nurses being suspended for offering to pray for patients' recovery. Adopting the rhetoric of persecution on such matters obscures the very real persecution of Christians being killed or driven from their homes elsewhere in the globe.

Most of the world's Christians are not engaged in stand-offs with intolerant secularists over such small matters. In the West, Christianity may have increasingly become embraced by the middle class and abandoned by the working class. But elsewhere the vast majority of Christians are poor, many of them struggling against antagonistic majority cultures, and have different priorities in life.

The paradox this produces is that, as Allen points out, the world's Christians fall through the cracks of the left-right divide – they are too religious for liberals and too foreign for conservatives.

In the UK, it is socially respectable among the secular elite to regard Christianity as weird and permissible to bully its followers a little. This produces the surreal political reality in which President Obama visits Saudi Arabia and "does not get the time" to raise the suppression of Christianity in the oil-rich nation; and in which Prime Minister Cameron gets a broadside from illiberal secularists for the historically unquestionable assertion that Britain's culture is formed by Christian values.

The reality of being a Christian in most of the world today is very different. It only adds to their tragedy that the West fails to understand that – or to heed the plea of men such as the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem Fouad Twal when he asks: "Does anybody hear our cry? How many atrocities must we endure before somebody, somewhere, comes to our aid?"

Paul Vallely is visiting professor of public ethics at Chester Univeristy

 

Article 3: Examine the map on the World watch list tab, and then read the text below.

a) In your own words explain why Christians are persecuted in each of the 3 countries where persecution is the worst this last year according to THESE ARTICLES POSTED HERE ONLY.

b) discuss and present possible methods how you think this problem could be solved or abolished.

c) Discuss whether any of the 8 "Engines of Persecution" could happen in Finland?

WORLD WATCH DOWNLOAD:

Persecution Trends – Key Facts
3 Major Trends Impacting the 2017 World Watch List

Nationalism is on the rise, especially in Asia. Insecure governments are using nationalism to preserve their power, to the detriment of minority
Christian populations that don’t fit the nationalist mold. Often, this nationalism is religious in nature. Buddhist extremism in Myanmar and
Sri Lanka, as well as Hindu extremism in India, are driven by religious nationalism and result in the violent persecution of the Christian minority.

Islamic radicalization in sub-Saharan Africa is becoming mainstream. While the territorial foothold of Islamic State is under assault, its influence has
spread. The group has shared technical experience and financial support with terror networks throughout Asia and Africa, and generous funding from Saudi
Arabia has facilitated a new network of extremist schools in Somalia, Kenya,
Niger and Burkina Faso.

Polarization between radical and more autocratic regimes in the Middle East continues to affect Christians, who are targets of both
Sunni and Shia extremists. Heavyweight rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia are filling the leadership vacuum in the region, and Christians are caught in the
resulting crossfire. The mass forced migration of Christians in the Middle East for over a decade now shows that the birthplace of Christianity has
become a place of severe Christian persecution.

Engines Of Persecution
Open Doors research identifies these 8 main ‘engines’ of persecution. They often work in tandem.

Islamic Extremism
Attempts to bring the country or the world under the ‘House of Islam’ through violent or non-violent actions.

Religious Nationalism
Attempts to unite citizens under a single religious identity, often labeling those who don’t conform as “outsiders” or “radicals.“

Ethnic Antagonism
Attempts to force the continuing influence of age-old norms and values shaped in tribal contexts. Often comes in the form of traditional religions.

Secular Intolerance
Attempts to eradicate religion from both the public and private domains, imposing an atheistic form of secularism as the governing ideology.

Communist and Post-Communist Oppression
Attempts to maintain Communism as a prescriptive ideology and/or controls the church through a system of registration and oversight inherited from Communism.

Denominational Protectionism
Attempts to preserve one’s Christian denomination as the dominant or only legitimate expression of Christianity in a particular country. In most cases, exercised by the
majority Christian denomination.

Organized Corruption and Crime
Attempts to create a climate of impunity, anarchy and corruption as a means of self-enrichment.

Dictatorial Paranoia
Attempts to maintain power by any means necessary, usually without a particular vision in mind.

EACH YEAR, THE WORLD WATCH LIST RANKS THE TOP 50 COUNTRIES WHERE CHRISTIANS FACE THE MOST PERSECUTION. TYPES OF PERSECUTION, SEVERITY AND OTHER ELEMENTS ARE ALL MONITORED IN THE REPORTING PERIOD. THE WORLD WATCH LIST IS AUDITED BY AN OUTSIDE HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATION TO ENSURE CREDIBILITY AND AUTHENTICITY.

The World Watch List is a product of Open Doors—www.OpenDoorsUSA.org 

A DEEPER LOOK INTO THE TOP 3 COUNTRIES

NORTH KOREA 92/100 EXTREME PERSECUTION

Leader: Kim Jong-Un

Population: 24.5 million (300,000 Christians)

Main Religion: Atheism/traditional beliefs

Government: Communist dictatorship

Once again, North Korea is ranked as the most oppressive place in the world for Christians, #1 on the World Watch List. In this totalitarian communist state, Christians
are forced to hide their faith completely from government authorities, neighbors and often even their own spouses and children. Due to ever-present surveillance, many pray with eyes open,
and gathering for praise or fellowship is practically impossible. Worship of the ruling Kim family is mandated for all citizens, and those who don’t comply (including Christians) are arrested, imprisoned, tortured or killed. Entire Christian families are imprisoned in hard labor camps, where unknown numbers die each year from torture, beatings, overexertion and starvation. Those who attempt to flee to South Korea through China risk execution or life imprisonment, and those who stay behind often fare no better.

SOMALIA 91/100 EXTREME PERSECUTION

Leader: President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud

Population: 11,392,000 (a few hundred Christians)

Main Religion: Islam 

Somalia has been on the World Watch List since 1993. Islam was already firmly established in Somalia before the arrival of Christianity, and as a result, life for believers is defined by hostility. Somalia’s tribal system — as an informal way of governing Somalia — is very resistant to modern government models, including democracy, which means that Christians have absolutely no voice in society. Since the downfall of Ziad Barre in 1991, Somalia has become a safe haven for Islamic militants. Christian converts from Islam in the country have been facing a great deal of persecution, and martyrdom is very common. The mere suspicion of one’s having renounced Islam leads to a rushed public execution.

AFGHANISTAN 89/100 EXTREME PERSECUTION

Leader: President Ashraf Ghani

Population: 34,169,000 (thousands of Christians)

Main Religion: Islam

Government: One-party state

Christians in Afghanistan experience extreme persecution. Severe pressure on believers, resulting from Islamic oppression, is exerted mostly by families, friends and community, but also by local religious leaders. The state authorities are weak, and Islam is viewed as a welcome unifying factor, especially as society agrees that conversion away from Islam cannot be tolerated. Many who convert from Islam to Christianity are murdered once their extended families learn of their new faith. In other families, Christian converts are delivered to mental hospitals under the premise that no one in their right mind would ever choose to leave Islam. In any case, converts usually lose their rights to personal property and possessions, effectively leaving them destitute. This can occur even upon the mere suspicion of conversion — a fear tactic that leads family members to react all the more harshly in curbing even the slightest hints of interest in Christianity.

https://www.opendoorsusa.org/christian-persecution/world-watch-list/

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