Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity

Rating:
Summary: Liberal "Judges" are so full of themselves!
Review: I started reading this book and I can't put it down!! It makes me so angry, and yet the many cases that were described really scares me to death! I don't like the direction that this Country is heading, and neither should anyone else, especially those who are raising children in this unchristian, godless, "liberal" society. Thank God for Mr. Limbaugh for writing this book. I hope that some will open their eyes!
However, I especially enjoyed the first few pages of this book where I got a pretty thorough understanding of our colonial heritage, and what our "brillant" framers of the Constitution had intended for this great country of ours. It is really shocking to see where the "ideals" that were set forth for this country by the early settlers contrast to where we are now unfortunately headed. Please read this book if you care at all for the future of this great nation!!!!!!!!

Rating:
Summary: Identifies the Condition, but Neglects the Cure
Review: I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with everything the author presents in this book. There IS a growing persecution of Christianity today, stemming from the popular notion that there is no such thing as absolute truth. The author again and again illustrates dramatically that Christians are under fire along many fronts in our American society.

As I moved through the book, I kept thinking, "Yes, I agree, America IS biased against Christianity and HAS departed from her Christian foundations. Now what can I DO to reverse the trend?" Limbaugh offers a few tidbits of insight in his closing pages, but not nearly enough for the believer who wants to make a difference in the world of the 21st century.

I would have given this title five stars, but the lack of any direction and course of action diminishes the power of the message. Perhaps Limbaugh could write a follow-up that describes the cures available to concerned American citizens. This book makes it clear there is a problem -- now let's have a sequel that provides a plan.

Rating:
Summary: Boundless Hilarity
Review: Saying that any American Christian is persecuted just automatically kills the case immediately. I wonder how this got past the publisher without having a humor label attached to it. Persecution is something no Limbaugh fan can fathom. Then again, self-pity seems to be the Limbaugh way for both him and his pathetically insecure brother. This is all you can expect from that gene pool.

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Summary: Of course there's no real persecution of Christians ...
Review: in America. I've often thought that if there is any persecution going on, it must be by a group of five polio victims beating on the sides of churches with Nerf bats at 4 a.m. when everyone's asleep.

But come to think of it, real, honest-to-Beelzebub persecution (midnight "visits," re-education camps, even executions; it's worked like a charm in Latin America!) might not be that bad an idea. I mean, really, considering how many "serious" conservative Christian commentators are accusing liberals of treason by nature of their beliefs -- and considering treason is a crime punishable by death -- there might even be grounds for an extended roundup and persecution of these God-fearin' folks on the perfectly legal grounds of self-defense.

It's just a thought. Of course, then we'd REALLY be giving them something to complain about. We might even want to throw in a lion or two, just to make the book cover photo a little less ridiculous. I'm surprised Regnery didn't photoshop some blood and a crucifix on the lioness' mouth.

Rating:
Summary: persecution complex?
Review: How myopic. Christians in America enjoy more religious freedom (and overall prosperity) than believers anywhere else in the world, yet the minute anyone challenges our access to the public square, we play the persecution card. Do we really know what the word persecution means? Could any of us look a Chinese Christian, a Saudi believer, or a Sudanese refugee in the eye and try to tell them we know what it's like to be persecuted?

I'm no fan of the ACLU. I don't like it when they jump off the deep end in their relentless effort to sterilize the public square of anything sacred. But the last time I went to church, I didn't have to worry about being arrested in the middle of the service. I didn't fear being shot on the way back to my car. And chances are, no one from the ACLU is going to kidnap me and force me to recant my faith at knifepoint. Yet this sort of thing (minus the ACLU connection) is daily reality for more than 200 million Christians in places like China, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.

Maybe we should show a little more gratitude for our relative freedom and comfort. Perhaps we should show more concern for believers in other parts of the world who know what real suffering is. (Maybe we should just try to remember there's a whole world beyond America's borders!)

David Limbaugh's book is crippled by a pathetically myopic perspective. It is an insult to the millions of Christians who have sacricificed so much more than we American Christians ever will--including their own lives. No way we can compare our petty little inconviences to the suffering they endure. No way we have the right to use the same word "persecution" to describe our own experiences.

Rating:
Summary: What Elephant in the Living Room?
Review: David Limbaugh's "Persecution" forces us to look squarely up the trunk of the elephant in the liberal living room: the "secret" that the modern-day heirs of a political tradition built on fighting for justice, tolerance, and freedom have become some of the most unjust, intolerant oppressors in recent American history, at least where Christianity is concerned. Limbaugh documents case after case of religious discrimination perpretrated by liberals against Christians, all in the name of tolerance and open mindedness.

We might expect a book entitled "Persecution" to be only another mindless rant from a stereotypical uneducated fundamentalist. But this is not the case here. Limbaugh does veer into the territory of diatribe every so often, but the bulk of his book is a series of carefully documented incidents of liberals denying Christians opportunities in employment, education, and even freedom of speech. Opening up "Persecution" to a random page, we find successful college football coach Ron Brown denied a head coaching position because of his religious beliefs. Turn a few more pages and we find a public office in Dade County Florida having Hannukah and Kwanzaa displays set up during the Christmas holiday season, but prohibiting a nativity scene. One more turn and we find a town in California ordering a church to take down a banner advertising summer vacation Bible school, while other organizations had banners on display throught the town. I just grabbed these cases at random from the book. You will also find cases of Christians being fired and sued for things like wearing crosses or keeping a Bible on their work desk.

Limbaugh details discriminations that Christians have faced in public schools, universities, government, industry, and in the media and entertainment industries. If you are the least bit unsure that Christians are getting less than a fair shake in many sectors of modern public life, "Persecution" should put an end to all your doubts.

The book is not without its problems. First and foremost is the lion on the front cover. That's certainly overkill. Despite Limbaugh's clear chapter headings ("The Battle for the Academy", "Muzzling Public Officials, Employees, and Appointees", etc.), the book could use some better organization. More than once I found myself trying to remember just what the current chapter was supposed to be about. The next to last chapter, where Limbaugh attempts to demonstrate the relationship between the Founders' Christian faith and their politics is, unfortunately, the weakest. I think he makes his point, but he could have made it stronger by supplying us with more quotes from original sources and less from modern commentators. (I couldn't help but notice that he quotes quite a bit here from writers who were published by his own publisher.) And he gets a few things wrong. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, was an out and out Deist, Limbaugh's arguments to the contrary notwithstanding. (Given T.J.'s numerous and egregious moral shortcomings, if someone want to call him a Deist, it's perfectly OK with me.)

But these blemishes do not detract from the validity of the work in any important respect. Not many honest options are open to us if we want to disagree with Limbaugh. We can try to refute his documentation point by point. Good luck. (In this regard, my admittedly non-exhaustive perusal of this page's 1-star reviews has turned up none that actually deal with the cases Limbaugh presents.) Or, we can try to show that plenty of groups in America are being similarly disadvantaged -- that things are tough all over. This tack seems to hold little promise either. We might try to say that Limbaugh is just going to bat for his poitical "religious right" cronies. But this won't do either. Not many of the people he defends in this book are "political." Most of them that are "poltical" became so because it was the only way they could see to secure for themselves the rights and privileges those around them enjoy.

"Persecution" is not the book to read if you want to know what everyone else is reading. Limbaugh's audience will be mainly conservative Christians, the people least in need of his book. However, if you're wondering what that big pachyderm-looking thing behind the sofa is that only the Christians are pointing at, "Persecution" will draw back the curtains and let you seeit in the full light of day.

Rating:
Summary: Backwards
Review: Liberalism is not against Christianity, christianity is against liberalism. The liberal belief of freedom of religion applies to Christians as well as everybody else. But the true question is what Jesus would do. Jesus helped the poor, thats pretty liberal isn't it? Jesus taught that justice is more important than money, thats pretty liberal, right? This book is a big lie. Propaganda.
God Bless.

Rating:
Summary: But there again....
Review: I was going to quote Dr Who in full here, but that would be difficult and meaningless for those not familiar with the medium. I would, however, like to get you imgaining the cornball scene where one ancient, venerable character cries out ..."evil!... evil!!" without any particular context. It's a fine moment for people such as my circle of B movie heavies who relish these things. Sorry. There's a good reason for this. Nothing is entirely without context, and to have evil just ... there.... is very amusing but not very probable.

Persecution, if it's anything is irrational. It's in the word itself. You can't speak about persecution of rapists - it's meaningless - (though you might well be able to speak of the persection of people who park their car carelessly).

Nothing else is so material as this one fact. People who do this kind of thing actually risk a great deal.

In physics, you start teaching about thermodynamics by using a convenient fiction known as Adiabatic processes. The idea is, if you compress a gas very slightly, you increase its pressure and temperature, but as you release it, you restore these two physical atributes to their former values. In fact, this is indeed a fiction, since even the tiniest imaginable changes have an effect - they permamently increase the entropy of the resulting system.

There would appear to be laws operating in the REAL world which have a similar effect in human behaviour - in cause and effect. The machinery behind these laws may very well be astonshingly complex, but the consistency is amazing. The fact is, that persecution CHANGES the people that do it, sometimes irreversably.

Take for example, an organisation, a company, for instance. If there is a minority of competant people who aren't "one of the lads" but separate (they don't even have to be Christians for this to work, but it helps), then if persecution of this lot occurs, what happens falls into two loosely defined groups of possibility. Firstly, the input of said minorities are disregarded or abused (which is usually what is meant by persecution). This might not matter for a long time, but there is a time bomb often ticking with a long or short time constant - which goes off sometime, often to devastating effect. The input of those people is ignored, and mistakes and errors accumulate, hidden and invisible until a crucial time.

(Remember that the fall of the Nazis was almost inevitable once they had thrown out the "Jewish Physics", i.e. Einstein, Heisenberg, aka quantum theory...)

The problem is that the irrationality of persection doesn't stay put. It "leaks" into other areas of life, and this is what changes and sometimes destroys those people to that extent. Example - instability and failure in relationships.

The second possibility is that the persecutors sucessfuly "partition" their lives or careers so that they have a sort of A/B/C mentality. In this way, they maintain not just one model of physics, or accounting, or just plain good behaviour, but a whole load of them. Some of these are for the "good old boys", some are for the Christians, some are for the nancy boys, etc.

But this leads to it's own problems eventually. The very existence of partitions has been described (see Storr and others) as being a catalyst for mental and intellectual problems which may surface in quite unexpected and subtle ways. It all depends if this can be "managed" by the person concerned, but in any case absorbs time, energy, and a certain amount of "oxygen" from the creative fire.

I won't quote examples. There have been a great many though, but I want to stay with a full set of arms and legs!

Persecution in small forms is doubtlessly occuring in various situations in America. Over in England we have a prohibition on Easter and Christmas which is wobbly and disappears and reappears from time to time. Employment? Yes, I've had that one, but it was in Australia, with a very small company, not England. But I can well believe it.

But I would not get so sore about it. The Hollywood people have indeed probably done this quite a lot. They have undoubtedly been taking the mickey out of born agains (which I am) for a while. But look where they are - stuck, to a large extent. No-one now can, even theoretically make anything like "The Sound Of Music" again. In many ways, in in the full glare of irony - more technology is now available than ever before - their actual arena of action is FAR less than it was. Horror or fright films HAVE to get worse, and worse. Less freedom, not more. Does no-one remember the last few years of critical noise about the appalling lack of quality at the Oscars? Look at the arts, for goodness sake. The best testamonies of the arts from the secular point of view is that of trouble brewing; there is an unprecidented fall in CD sales, and if anyone can FIND a slew of really great recent movies, then email me, because I need to find some for my kids this Christmas. Woe is me, I had to dig back two decades this time.

Maybe some people are really persecuted in the USA. I can tell you that in some places (Egypt, North Africa), they most certainly are. but rest assured, it changes the people who do it, and they don't last. Ghandi figured that one. So did Solomon. That's just people stuff, cause and effect. But, you wait for when God gets involved. Then things get really wild....

Rating:
Summary: a must read for anyone who loves the Constitution
Review: Limbaugh sets out with the premise that PC Liberals are persecuting (discriminating against, etc.), Christians in the USA; He sites example after example to prove his case. I find his premise and conclusion compelling. This book is well documented and could of been 3 times longer. Limbaugh throughley proves his case. Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity is a must read for anyone who loves the Constitution, the USA and OUR freedoms.

Rating:
Summary: A MUST READ!
Review: A well researched and written book. If you are concerned about the state of our Union, this is a must have. Highly Recommended!