“Burning the Koran is Worse than Burning the Bible”

If you think that Christians are not still being persecuted in the U.S. and Europe, you only have to look at the hypocrisy of the news media when it comes to religious freedom.  Christianity is a second-rate religion and does not rate the same degree of freedom as Islam, according to some of the media and even government officials.

For example, in a published interview between Bobby Ghosh of Time magazine and NBC Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd, they agreed that burning the Koran is “worse” than burning the Bible.  Their reason? The Koran is the word of God, whereas the Bible is not!

Bobby Ghosh (Time Magazine): The thing to keep in mind that’s very important here is that the Koran to Muslims, it is not — it is not the same as the Bible to Christians. The Bible is a book written by men. It is acknowledged by Christians that it is written by men. It’s the story of Jesus.

Chuck Todd (NBC Chief White House Correspondent): Yes.

Ghosh: But the Koran, if you are a believer, if you’re a Muslim, the Koran is directly the word of God, not written by man. It is transcribed, is directly the word of God. That makes it sacred in a way that it’s hard to understand if you’re not Muslim. So the act of burning a Koran is much more — potentially much, much more inflammatory than –

Todd: Directly attacking — directly attacking God.

Ghosh: — than if you were to burn a — burn a Bible.

And this phenomenon is not limited to the U.S. As stated by David Simpson, a member of the British (UK) Parliament:

In the United Kingdom, the policy seems to be that people can do whatever they like against Christianity – criticise it or blaspheme the name of Christ – as long as they do not insult Islam.

The UK controversy arose when a public employer, who allowed Muslims to keep religious artifacts on the dashboards of their vans. When a Christian driver, however, put a small cross on the dashboard of a van, he was threatened with termination if he did not remove it, because it might insult Muslims.

I hate to point out the obvious to these people: Muslims, in the name of Islam, are murdering the citizens of your countries. Of course, this does not apply to all Muslims, but to “extremists”. Unfortunately, these extremists appear to be in charge of a number of countries in North Africa and the Middle East, where Christians are regularly arrested for “blasphemy” and, in some cases, murdered.

One can only wonder what our Founding Fathers, who wrote the First Amendment, would think about this.

(April 4, 2011, from a story copyright by MSNBC.)

The word of Christ, which extends all over the world, is alive in Iran.  Even the repression of the fundamentalist regime has not destroyed the faith of Christians who live in an atmosphere of state-sanctioned repression.

During the past year, over 250 Iranian Christians were subjected to arrest and incarceration.  Many of them spent months in prison, suffering deprivations that included sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, lack of medical treatment and unsanitary conditions.  Some reported outright physical and psychological torture, to obtain confessions of crimes and information about others who share our faith.

Photograph of a man lashed by Iranian police for having a Bible in his car

Currently there are many converted Christians in Iran and people convert to Christianity on a daily basis, but there are no exact statistics about the population of this new emerged Christians.  Estimates of the Christian population of Iran range from 7,000 to 300,000.

At least one, Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani, has been sentenced to death for “apostasy”.  In the past, a number of Christians have been murdered, forced to leave the country, or suffered in smaller ways such as beatings or the confiscation of property.

All of us should remember to pray for Christians who are suffering persecution in Iran and throughout the Muslim world, and also in the few remaining Communist regimes, such as Cuba and North Korea.

And let us hope and pray that the recent revolutions in many Islamic states in North Africa and the Middle East will not lead to further persecution of Christians.  The Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist Islamic faction, currently seems to hold the upper hand in Egypt.