RedPenPete_v2 said: milfchaser said:
Branch Davidians were an unusual and very rare case, of an extremist sect using guns against the government. Statistically it was even smaller, especially when considering their tiny numbers (tinier now, as 90% of them were wiped out during the fire in Waco).
As for religious people knocking on one's door, how often does that happen? Once a year maybe? I get more knocks from people trying to sell me shit.
I still hold to my opinion that hypocrisy is one of the major reasons Christianity gets ridiculed but other beliefs don't, at least in the West. In Asia and Africa, of course, it's a different matter.
A knock on the door is the least of the ways in which Christians proselytize in America. Legal battles over reproductive and LGBTQ rights and book bans in schools are just a few ways in which they are trying to enforce their views on others. If someone responds to that with mockery, I can hardly say I blame them.
I brought up the knock on the door because you brought it up first, as a prime example of proselytizing.
Point taken on the legal moves, most of which I detest. But that is in the political arena, in in the political arena even the Mother Earthers are attempting to push us to live their way. I'm paying more for gas and utilities because the paranoid Mother Earthers think that if I drive my car to work, or light my natural gas burner to cook food, I'm killing all life on the planet.
It's a maniacal, paranoia-based take on science, and based more on a neo-pagan ideology than actual reality. There are a lot of different ideologies trying to push their views and practices on the rest of the populace, which want to ban books, ban ideas -- right wing evangelicals do not have a corner on that practice. But thats all political. We're talking just the religion here.
In the US and EU, it's generally Christianity that gets the ridicule, while other major religions (that believe in similar fantastic deities -- read the Bhagavad Gita some time, about the exploits of Krishna -- its as supernatural based as anything in the Bible), they get a pass. Charlie Hebdo was unusual -- but look what happened to them. And one cartoon in Denmark caused an EU-wide, and international ruckus. There were some who supported the cartoon's publication, but it also put a stop to such lampooning of the religious figure in question.
However, if the same periodical had a similar one of the Pope, it would be no great shakes, nothing to see here, move along, "freedom of speech!", all that. On top of that, people would think it was funny.
There is indeed hypocrisy when it comes to how the different religions are treated in the West.