Who are the Christians of Lebanon?

To be a "Christian" in Lebanon is a political identity, not a religious one. Just as an Irish Catholic is not necessarily a practicing Catholic but is "Catholic" only in opposition to "Protestant", a Lebanese Christian is not necessarily a practicing Christian, but is Christian only in opposition to the Lebanese Muslims who have been threatening the existence of the Christians ever since the Muslim Arabs invaded Lebanon in the 7th century, drove the Phoenicians-turned-Christians from the seacoast into the mountains where they hid and maintained their faith and traditions.

When the Jewish sect known as "Christians" seized power in Rome around 300 AD and imposed its religion on the Roman Empire, the Romans who occupied Lebanon for nearly 500 years forced us Phoenicians to convert to Christianity and embarked on eradicating every aspect of Phoenician culture which they deemed inferior, barbaric and pagan. Our temples became churches, our gods were baptized: Baal became Yahweh, Adonis became Jesus, Ishtar became Mary, and all the way down to every little god that became one saint or another. So we gradually ceased to be Phoenicians as we mutated into Christians. Once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Church became a tyrannical dictatorship, the equivalent of what Daesh (ISIS, Islamic State) is today for the Muslim religion: radical, barbaric, extremist, murderous, violent, etc.. Whereas Christians were persecuted prior to Emperor Constantine (who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire), it was now the turn of the Christians to persecute anyone who was not a Christian. Look up what those early Christian bishops did to the mathematician and astronomer Hypatia of Alexandria, and you'll get a flavor of that early and oppressive Christian love that persisted well into the 17th century when it began wilting by force of reason and revolution.

The Romans, who practiced human sacrifice in their religion, became condescending and racist toward the Phoenicians whom they had been occupying here in Lebanon. The Phoenicians, like most human cultures of their time, practiced human and animal sacrifice. In their efforts to forcibly convert people to Christianity, early church leaders began attacking Phoenician culture on the ground that human and animal sacrifices made to their gods were abhorrent pagan practices. But what is the crucifixion of Jesus other than the apex of human sacrifice, with the same objective as all human sacrifices in all human cultures, namely to "save his people and bring them redemption"? Ancient cultures sacrificed animals and humans to appease the gods. They often chose a goat (or a virgin woman), metaphorically dumped on it all their sins, and either killed it or sent it to wander in the desert to die, for the purpose of cleansing themselves of their sins. Hence the term "scapegoat". Isn't this why Jesus supposedly was killed? In the Christian narrative, didn't God dump humanity's sins on his son and sacrificed him to cleanse humanity of its sins? Isn't Jesus the ultimate scapegoat? Doesn't this belief trace itself back to the biblical account of Abraham and his aborted sacrifice of Isaac? Hasn't this practice been humanity's universal way to shirk personal responsibility for one's actions, supposedly by unloading it on someone else who is then sacrificed to atone for my sins and take them with him? 

If the Christian religion was a revolution, as is claimed by its adherents, it may well have been a revolution against the Roman occupation, but in terms of the code of morality, it was nothing more than a continuation of the same barbaric beliefs held by preceding cultures and religions, including for that matter such concepts as being born of a virgin. If one catalogs all the gods of antiquity who were born of virgins, the number is astounding and is across a large number of ancient religions, and Jesus ends up being just another boring virgin-born star among many. For example, the Persian god Mithra was made the “Protector of the Empire” by the Romans in 307 AD, right before Christianity was declared the official religion. Some versions of Mithra’s story, predating Christianity, make him the son of a human virgin. His birth, on December 25, was seen by shepherds and Magi, who brought gifts to a cave, the place of his birth. [For more see: https://gsgriffin.com/2016/12/08/other-gods-born-to-virgins-on-december-25-before-jesus-christ/].

From the early European perspective of the Romans, the opprobrium and chastising aimed at the Phoenicians because they practiced human sacrifice is nothing short of an early form of European anti-semitism. As they became the recipients of the new Christian religion that migrated from the Semitic Near East to Rome, the Romans became more royalists than the king himself, and tried to assign their own barbarity to those who had given them Christianity.

I ask our contemporaries not to place "Lebanese Christian" on a par with "American Christian". The label of "Christian" to a Lebanese is a passive qualifier; it does not mean that the person is a fundamentalist or devout or practicing Christian. In their daily lives, Lebanese Christians are by all definitions pagan; they sometimes attend church on Sunday and worship statues and shrines, but they implement none of the claimed Christian beliefs in their daily lives. Theirs is a barter-motivated faith, which they share with many other religions, and their prayers to God often sound like this: Grant me health and I'll make an offering; make me rich and I'll build a church for you; etc. Typical Semitic religious mercantilism, like all the biblical garbage we grew up with: "Worship me and I'll make you numerous; worship a golden calf and I'll spank you; Obey me and I'll give you another people's land." I am a Lebanese Christian by birth, but I have deliberately discarded that kind of trash from my life. Since the country of Lebanon is based on religious identities, I therefore have no other way to distinguish myself from other Lebanese except by my otherwise unwanted label of Christian. The day when Lebanon becomes a civilized place where religions are dumped aside, I will become a Lebanese, and only a Lebanese, without any qualifiers. 

There are no proselytizing Lebanese Christians running around the world trying to convert people. In fact, we live with Muslims on a daily basis, and while Muslims and Christians periodically go at each other's throats, no one tries to convert anyone because the hostility is not grounded in dogmatic religious differences. Over the centuries, other Christians in the Near East kept their ethnic identities - we speak of Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Armenians, etc... who maintained their pre-Christian identities after converting to Christians. For some reason, the ancient Lebanese lost the "Phoenician" ethnic identifier (Phoenician referring to the ancestors of the Lebanese who lived along the seacoast and built powerful seafaring empires across the Mediterranean and beyond). It eventually mutated into "Lebanese" (that is, inhabitants of Mount Lebanon) when our Phoenician ancestors fled the seacoast from the barbarity of the Christian Roman (Byzantine) and Muslim Arab occupations to find shelter in the highlands of Mount Lebanon.

Though the vast majority of Americans are Christians by birth, the term "American Christian" has nowadays become confined to a specific group of people known today as "evangelicals": Active proselytizing ultra-conservative political missionaries, fighting what they call "liberal" rights (women's, abortion, civil rights, gay rights, etc.) and generally hailing from the southern US states where the ignorance inherited from the early English peasant settlers remains untouched. The ultimate objective of the evangelicals is to make the US a "Christian nation" in opposition to the US constitution which outlaws religion in the public sphere. Which is why the evangelicals have teamed up with the ultra-orthodox Zionists to make Israel a "Jewish nation", a trait they both share with radical Muslim fundamentalists like the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia and the Shiites of Iran, both of whom claim out loud that they are "Islamic Nations".

In their ignorance, American Christians have no idea that they are the last in a long series of Christian sects that kept mushrooming ever since the rebel rabbi Jesus of Palestine mounted a failed revolt against the Roman occupation. They think they are the ones who discovered Christ and are trying to convert the non-Christian world - and also all other Christians - to their brand of the religion. In America, you have Methodists, Adventists, Evangelicals, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, Anglicans, Jehovah's witnesses, Quakers, Lutherans, Calvinists, Mormons, Amish, etc., all of whom are protestant American sects constantly trying to convert each other and other people. It's like a primordial soup of barbarian idiots who keep spawning new sects, such that one day a few of them gave up trying and declared themselves "Unitarians", i.e. they believe in everything and nothing at the same time: An à-la-carte supermarket of religions where you pick and choose whatever beliefs you like. American dumbness at its best! Mormons in fact added a new book to the Bible, in an adorable but imbecilic act of arrogance! 

Evangelicals are active missionaries and just like Muslim preachers invading the west, they are on a campaign to convert everyone everywhere to their brand, and in doing so they are altering the politics of many countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and dumbing down people with more regressive American-type beliefs. In effect, as a copycat of Donald Trump of the US, Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro's followers are evangelical Brazilians newly converted from Catholicism by American evangelical missionaries who brainwash them into ignorance, racism, and other Fascist qualities. That is also why in every hotel or hospital room around the world, you'll find an American bible sitting in the top drawer by your bed "donated" (how charitable is that?) by the Gideons, another emanation of American missionary Protestantism who can pay their way into your own bedroom. Obviously, they are in bed with corporate and white supremacist America and try to subject the world to the "American way of life", which may be succinctly summarized as the way of life of a fat, white, redneck, meat-eating, moon-shining, one-toothed, inbred, incestuous Appalachian who drives a pickup truck, gets drunk on Friday evenings, and occasionally mows a lawn.

As the world is sinking into violence, and Lebanon is again on the verge of a war against its unwanted guests, I ask westerners not to believe the ignorant or insidious propaganda that portrays Lebanese Christians as some right wing fundamentalist Christians trying to forcibly convert others. In fact, Lebanese Christians are by far the most liberal community in the country, when compared with the Lebanese Muslims who have for the most part turned into radical Sunni (Saudi followers) or radical Shiite (Iranian followers) militants. In contrast, Lebanese Christians look to the western world for their political and social references, even though they still remain backward and conservative in many aspects of their lives. For example, Muslims try once in a while to ban alcohol sales in their regions, or mount attacks against liquor stores owned exclusively by Christians, or chastize women who wear bathing suits on the beach. But the Lebanese Christian churches too demonstrate intolerance and monopolistic barbarity by opposing any effort to implement civilian laws for the personal status (marriage, divorce, inheritance...). But tourists, mostly Arab Muslims, flock to the Christian regions of Lebanon because there are more freedoms (unfortunately equated with prostitution, gambling, alcohol...) there than in the more austere and depressing Muslim regions, which is why Lebanese Muslims find it hard to separate themselves from the Christians: they want them because they bring money and reputation, but they want them only as storefront hostages they can rule and parade around and pretend to be "tolerant" of them. Without the Christians, Lebanon would quickly become another repressive and depressing Muslim Arab country, and Lebanese Muslims know that.

During the 1975-1990 War, Lebanese Christians were tagged as extremists by ignorant and hostile western media that favored the extremists of the other side, namely the left-wing-Muslim-Syrian-Palestinian-Communist coalition that perpetrated massacres, shellings, kidnappings, and terrorist bombings against the Christians. In the end, the Christians lost the war and were badly bruised, but survived. It's happened before: During the 1840s-1860s, Muslims carried out wholesale massacres of tens of thousands of Christians in Lebanon and Syria, with the backing of the barbarian Ottoman Turks, which prompted an uprising of the Christians with the backing of the Powers of the time (Russia, Prussia/Germany, France, Great Britain, Austria-Hungary), which led to Christian Lebanon's independence from Istanbul.

Today, Lebanese Christians remain the last bastion of a free liberal Christianity in the east. The Muslims - led by the Shiite Hezbollah terror organization affiliated with the theocracy in Iran - have taken power since 1990 and have led the country into the abyss in which it finds itself today: an economy in shambles, collapsed state institutions, political stalemates, etc. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, when the Christian president had the same powers as any other president in any presidential-parliamentary system, the country was prosperous, liberal, cosmopolitan, open to all cultures. Then the Muslims convinced a credulous and oil-blackmailed West that the Lebanese Christians were dictatorial Fascists like Somoza, Pinochet, Stalin, Franco, or Hitler bent on tyrannizing their fellow Muslims, when the fact is that Christians and Muslims had agreed to a power-sharing agreement in which the President is a Christian who shares power with a Sunni Muslim Prime Minister and a Shiite Muslim Speaker of Parliament. But, as they often do, the Muslims reneged on the agreement, waged war against the Christians, and took power in 1990, relegating the Christians to a "tolerated" (Dhimmi) community, and the country quickly became a typical third-world Muslim country: corruption, Islamic radicalism, ultra-conservatism, destitute institutions, and is right now in a total economic and social meltdown. 

Under the Christian-led administrations between the 1940s and the 1970s, the country had all the features of a successful liberal democracy that attracted investments, with a functioning infrastructure and a booming economy based on tourism and agriculture. Indeed, Lebanon was a donor country: In 1954, it gifted Holland one million dollars after a major flooding event (according to the former ambassador of Holland in Beirut) and loaned India a few million dollars. Lebanon is also one of the founding countries of the United Nations in 1945 when its Christian representative Charles Malek co-wrote the UN Charter and was one of the eight representatives that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today, after 32 years of Muslim rule, Lebanon has become a den of terrorism and a beggar country economically on its knees.

When the Muslims took over in 1990, they invited God to take charge because Islam is based on surrendering everything, including one's free will and personal responsibility, to the Big Zombie in the Sky (a.k.a. God, Yahweh, El, Allah, Dieu, Gott, Dios, Astvats, Jainko, Atua, Chúa, etc.). Since God is a somewhat capricious manager of public affairs, everything began collapsing. Today, the Muslims continue to reject Lebanon as their ultimate national identity, just as they refused to join Lebanon when it became independent in 1920. They are divided between the Shiites who want Lebanon to be Iranian, and the Sunnis who want it to be Saudi. The Christians don't want Lebanon to be anything else; they have no identity reference other than their own. They want the country to run like any genuine democracy: individual freedoms, separation of church and religion, under the rule of law, free of corruption, and adherence to international laws and treaties. They want Lebanon to be sovereign over its entire territory and borders, after the Muslims surrendered it to the Palestinians and the Syrian and Iranian regimes. 

As an example of how Lebanese Muslims simply do NOT understand how democracy works, picture their current actions: Lebanon has now been without a president for the past two months. By law, Parliament elects the president who is by custom and constitution a Christian. But through their victory in 1990, the Muslims politically castrated the president into a figurehead without any real authority. Led by the Shiite Muslim Speaker, Parliament is convened every week to elect a president. The Christians show up and vote for candidates, while the Muslims attend a first round of voting (requiring a 2/3d majority) but drop blank votes instead of a candidate's name. Since no candidate crosses the 2/3d threshold in that first round, an immediate and mandatory second round (with a 51% majority) should be held according to the constitution. But in collusion with the Muslim Speaker, Muslim MPs withdraw from the assembly just before the second round and kill the quorum, and the Speaker violates the constitution by adjourning until the following week when the same masquerade is repeated. Why? Because the Muslims, who relied for three decades on the Syrian occupiers to bring their own puppet Christian presidents to office, no longer have the Syrians on the ground to impose their candidate, and lost the legislative elections last May and with it a majority to elect their own candidate. Fearing an anti-Syrian, anti-Iranian, anti-Hezbollah independent president, the Muslims are obstructing the election and are calling instead for "dialogue", which is code word for a backroom deal over an ineffectual puppet president whom they can manipulate. They reject the democratic process and want what they call a "consensus" president, i.e. a weak, ineffective president who will cower to Hezbollah, Syria and Iran, just like that traitor Michel Aoun did during his 6-year term. 

Thanks to Saudi military help and oil-driven American hypocrisy, the Lebanese Muslims defeated the Christians in 1990 and transferred the prerogatives of the Christian president to the Sunni Prime Minister and the Shiite Speaker of Parliament, producing a three-headed Cerberus that can't possibly govern. Just like the Americans did in the Balkans in the 1990s, where the same problems continue to fester. But these victories are never enough: With Muslims, it never ends, you give them an inch, and they want the whole nine yards. 

Also, please do not compare the real plight of Lebanon's Christians under Islam to the fake plight of Israel's Jews under Islam: The Christians of Lebanon have always been in Lebanon since before the birth of Christianity as Phoenicians, they never left, and they never needed to "return". Unlike the European Israelis who are recent converts (17th-18th century) to Judaism, and who claim an unfounded genetic and historic link with the ancient Hebrews upon which they claim ownership of, and "return" to, Palestine. Contrary to Zionist lies, when the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem temple in 70 AD, there was no massive Jewish exodus out of Palestine. As hard as Israeli scientists have tried, they have never found any historical, genetic, or archaeological evidence suggesting an en masse displacement of the Jews of Roman Palestine after 70 AD, or for that matter any evidence of that ocean-splitting, frog-raining, plague-inflicting, exodus from Egypt as related in the fictional garbage of the Bible. After the Romans quelled the Hebrew uprising and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, the Hebrews stayed in Palestine, and just like their northern neighbors the Phoenicians, they were eventually forcibly converted, first by the Romans to Christians, then a couple of centuries later they were again converted to Muslims when the Arabs arrived. 

Which means that the Muslim Palestinians today are the direct descendants of the original Hebrews. The so-called Jewish Israelis of today are recent converts to Judaism who decided in the late 1880s to copycat other 19th-century Europeans by colonizing some territory somewhere. Just like Leopold II of Belgium who wanted his own personal colony and found it in the Congo where he proceeded for 100 years to enslave Africans in the industrial production of chocolate and rubber, cutting off the hands of lazy slaves among other atrocities he inflicted on the Congolese. In a me-too kind of impulse, European Jews wanted their own colony, just like Leopold II. And just like him, they initially targeted Latin America and Africa, but ended up aiming at Palestine during WWI because they offered financial support to both the Ottoman Empire and Britain in exchange for a land grab in Palestine over which Britain eventually obtained a mandate from the League of Nations in 1920. Today, after conquering and colonizing Palestine, the Israelis treat the Palestinians worse than Leopold II treated the Congolese: You throw a rock, we demolish your house; you protest, we kill you; you expose the terror we inflict on the Palestinians on the ground (e.g. journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh), we shoot you dead; if you travel, you cannot return; you want to add a room to your house, we deny you a permit, etc.... It is truly ironic that those foreign fake Jews who call themselves Israelis are in fact murdering the original Jewish inhabitants of Palestine who have become Muslim Palestinians.

[Clarification: Lebanon's largest Christian community are the Maronites - named after their founding saint, Saint Maron. Early on in the development of the Christian religion, the Maronites adopted the dogmas of Western Roman Catholicism, while other nascent Christian communities in the East were followers of the Eastern Roman or Orthodox Byzantine Church. Hence, before the Muslims arrived from the Arabian peninsula, the Maronite Catholics of Lebanon were persecuted by the Byzantine-Orthodox Church].