one would not expect sympathy from those who hate the fact that Christ shows up their hypocrisy and pathetic attempts to explain Him away. Thanks Babette for your well written article however the rights of the bumble bee are of higher priority to the ungodly.

Runner, I thought that you "christians" would look upon a Bumble Bee, as one of Gods little creatures also!

'Even in democracies such as the US and Canada, Christians can be fined or lose their jobs for imaginary "hate" crimes, i.e. speaking about the health risks of some homosexual practices or declining to provide services for homosexual "marriages".'

Translation: people get fired for telling malicious lies or refusing to do the tasks in their job description that they are being paid to do.

Trying to pretend that Christians are persecuted in the US is like trying to pretend that elite athletes are a persecuted minority in Australia. Good luck with that. As for the attacks on Christians elsewhere, the solution is less religion, not more. Atheists are remarkably unlikely to violently attack ANYONE, Christians or otherwise. Perhaps the solution to persecution is to promote atheism for everybody?

'Atheists are remarkably unlikely to violently attack ANYONE, Christians or otherwise. '

ask the bubs in the womb or Stalin or Mao and you will see how hopelessly blind jonJ is.

Runner,
And, Hitler had the support of the Roman Catholic Church. Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot didn't kill their people because they were, themselves, atheists. They did it because they were power hungry ethically deficient mad men. And, Stalin was had seminary training.

None of the many secularists, skeptics and atheists that I have as friends are in the least like those tyrants. Rather, they are competent friendly men and women with high ethical standards.

Study the following sites. Which end of the OECD social justice scale shown in the NY Times table is the end where religion is most influential? It is the opposite to what you peddle. The study by a German research group is at the first site and the chart prepared by the New York Times, based on the study results, is at the second address.

http://www.sgi-network.org/pdf/SGI11_Social_Justice_OECD.pdf
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/29/opinion/blow-americas-exploding-pipe-dream.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

@Runner: Stalin believed in Stalin. Mao believed in Mao. Neither of them were in close touch with reality and reason. And the massacres they brought about were not done in the name of atheism, but for the greater glory of Communism -- an ideology just as daft as that of any fundamentalist church.

As for 'the bubs in the womb' -- they're not 'bubs', are they? Not really, no matter how much you like to pretend they are, any more than acorns are oak trees. If a ten-week-old foetus was dropped in your lap -- blind, mute, mindless, about the size of a peanut, and squirming around in an amniotic sac -- I'm willing to bet that you'd recoil in horror and dismay at the damage to your trousers. But they can't speak, and they can't hear, and they certainly can't respond, so there's no point asking them anything, is there?