Over the Fourth of July weekend during a casual and friendly conversation among friends about recent political happenings, the 1/6 committee, the latest SCOTUS decisions, in response to my pointing out that I thought it wrong and inequitable that a teacher can not have a Rainbow Pride Flag, original or updated, in their classroom but a teacher can have something up that is pointedly religious, and can have a picture of a spouse and/or the whole family while Gay teachers are told that they cannot do the same thing with their legally wedded spouse and/or family.
I had just finished relating my personal experience with this double standard and my having made a formal complaint resulting in the teacher in the classroom nextdoor having to remove her Easter Season banner sporting a big black cross draped in a white sepulcher wrap on a field of sky blue silk proclaiming, “He Is Risen!” after I had been directed by administration to remove and never replace the one Rainbow image I had in mine, when a person in the group chimed in that this was an example of the type of persecution presently being meted out on an innocent and loving group of people, Christians.
I will be quick to point out that all remarks that may have referred to any form of Christianity leading up to this defense only dealt with the far fringe people like those Christians who believe Jesus would never have been crucified if he had had an AR-15, not with the mainstream. If she felt the need to defend that group and not agree with the criticism, I suspect she may have seen some of herself in things said.
While silent about my situation which became the same for the teacher in the next room, the requirement to remove all non-curriculum related posters from our classrooms that the principal immediately issued, the person offering the defense saw the other teacher’s situation as persecution while mine seemed acceptable.
That teacher was not given individual treatment but was treated as other teachers were.
Equality is not persecution unless you feel it is an assault by lessers on your higher standing.
When I asked this person for examples of persecution, I was thinking of the atrocities we heard about in elementary school, torture, killings, and all manner of atrocities visited upon missionaries and the good people in satanic countries that called for our taking a monthly collection at St. John School to ransom pagan babies from all that.
Comparing that to not always getting things the way you want them, not having more rights than others so as to be able to ignore laws with which you disagree, and being criticized just as everyone else is when it comes to political actions, I failed to see any persecution and found it rather insulting that being treated like everyone else was to this person, and many others, persecution.
Oh, really.
Well, this 72 year-old, cis-gender, white, Gay male who has lived and worked his adult life from just before Reagan took office to the present, as one of millions of Gay Americans who had to first survive the attacks of Ronald Reagan and his Moral Majority and then had to deal with the subsequent conditions his era wrought and the attempts by those who cry about persecution attempted, and still do, to take away my rights and have the civil government recognize their claimed right to discriminate based on their religion and also enact their religion and its rules on everyone tjrough legislation doesn’t see any persecution.
I know about Christian persecution. The nuns told us all about it. First there were crucifixions, some regular with two being a little odd. One person was crucified upside down the other on a big ex, what is now known as the St. Andrew cross. Then there were the beheadings, arrow piercings, BBQing, flaying and salt pouring, nuns working out sexual frustrations by describing rather detailed BDSM dungeons etc.
The biggest eye opening persecution was the one where the Christians got fed to lions. There were poems, stories, and paintings of groups of praying Christians being stalked by lions as the crowd in the colosseum looked on.
In the 1960s, Yankee Magazine advertised a plush lion that came with Christians you could shove down its throat.
Now that’s some persecution right there.
My intent may have originally been to show not getting your way was not really an insurmountable sacrifice of life teetering on martyrdom like with the lions, but as I looked up Christians fed to lions, I found that in spite of the Romans keeping meticulous records, they preferred to avoid lawsuits wherever possible, among the records of events at the colosseum, while having people attacked by lions on rare occasions, there were no references to groups or even individuals as Christians.
The victims of the lions were convicted criminals.
There may have been Christians among those fed to the lions, but they were not the targets. They were not all that special. They were there for others reasons just like the others were.
The historian Tacitus does mention that Nero liked to throw Christians to wild dogs along with crucifying them and burning them alive, but he never mentions lions, and, as a Christian himself, Tacitus would most like have mentioned that as it hits close to home.
Tertullian, a writer who also happened to be Christian, did note that when Romans got mad about something, the rising price of lamp oil for example, and people needed a target for their anger, the cry of “Away with the Christians to the lion!” rang out, but he had never seen any follow up. And he had a vested interest in checking things out.
Claude Eam!
So, considering that Rome may have loved certain aspects of people being attacked by animals on special occasions, and the dedication of the colosseum having involved thousands of animals being killed or doing the killing, no records have been found to show that Christians were specifically targeted, but, rather, would seem to have been just one kind of fish caught in a net of many.
To claim otherwise is to ignore reality as so far recorded with no contradictory evidence. If the myth of a feeding Christians to the Lions campaign can be sustained only if you ignore that they were just in the group, and you have uneducated masses with no ability to fact check, you can see how sympathy for a persecuted people would be a great tool even if the persecution is a fiction.
The PR story became part of unverifiable history as anyone with a question had no way to check the evidence as illiteracy was in the way and there were few written sources regular people could access. You had to believe what you were told solely on trust as there was no way to fact check.
What records exist show that Romans did feed people to animals for the entertainment of the crowd, that only Nero went after Christians specifically (He did conveniently blame them for the burning of Rome) but he had them attacked by dogs, and that generally the spectacle of throwing people to animals involved unarmed criminals.
Mano Y Pata.
In the early days, one of the crimes committed as a group by Christians was that they refused to pay taxes since Rome was a rather warped theocracy and paying taxes could be seen a supporting a false religion and laws that went against their religion.
This tactic is a traditiom now.
The problem with the Christians was that they wanted all the glory of Rome without helping to cover the bill. It was not not solely based on religious tenets.
The idea that you eat the body of your dead founder in the catacombs below the pizzeria is bad in itself, but this not paying taxes thing was too much.
They really annoyed Rome with their demands for tax exemption.
Records, including personal correspondence and random writings, describe the supposed spectacle of animal feedings as rather long and drawn out affairs with no real big finish to make you go back for another show. Each time the animal would eventually get around to attacking after what could seem an eternity during which time people would go to buy lunch and return hoping they hadn’t missed the finale, and then the eating. Same thing each time.
The eaten aside, feeding the number of eaters required in an extermination program gets expensive since many animals used as eaters in one scenario end up the killed beast in another and replenishing the stock involves a lot of work and travel. You can’t just go out into the forests around Rome and get replacement lions for those who have been killed or simply died.
The Romans did not single Christians out for this form of persecution. This adaption of reality to fit a purpose worked well all through the centuries like the length of labor a mother can immediately bring up during an adolescent argument to invoke pity and get the offspring to relent.
This false pity for a false victim gave a veneer to a group claiming to have been persecuted that blinded people to the actual power grab taking place, i.e. replacing the earthly Roman Empire with a carbon copy based on another, not the Roman, theocracy.
Not getting your way all the time is not persecution.
Using religion to oppress people is.
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