[Askel5]

==== And like Eastern Europe and USSR, the communist hierarchy cannot suppress them. In fact, persecution helps Christianity to grow. What is deadly is prosperity and apathy among Christians.


No doubt the faith of some survived the persecutions -- dare we say "holocaust" of believers that was overt communist rule -- but I have my doubts about the state-sanctioned and corporate-sponsored Dramatic show of Faith that is resurrecting the Cathedral of Christ in Moscow and canonizing what could be cobbled together of the Romanov remains in Petersburg.

If Stalin understood the efficacy of "faith" and sanctioned God during wartime, who's to say the Former Soviets (and others) aren't hip to the idea?


I dunno ... is the fact our President has no compunction about salting with Scripture his prime-time pitch to legitimize the manufacture of human life as a cash crop somehow translate to our being "religious"?

Is the fact we're taking the Lord's name in vain as shield for our Crusades against terrorism somehow translate as "religious"?

Is our reserving the word "marriage" for heteros (while protecting the "civil unions" from which Family Benefits spring in our welfare state) -- even those who expressly exclude God's will from the family with birth control -- somehow a testament to our Christian understanding of marriage?

[Neophyte]

...we're taking the Lord's name in vain as shield for our Crusades against terrorism

What's wrong with going to a Crusade with the Lord's name on your shield? What's wrong with the Crusades in the first place?

It seems you're are using the word in the sense the liberal vocabulary hijackers do. Remember that the original Crusades were an attempt to liberate Christian lands taken over by Islam and having been converted into that death cult by the sword.