A correction and apology and Reason 9Billion why our (meaning America’s) news media sucks: I just found out now that this guys manifesto that was cited as him being Christian says so in the context of him differentiating himself from other non-Christian nations and that instead of any preaching, fundamentalism endorsement or anything somewhat somehow partially approaching a belief that God wants him to kill people – he says he has “no relationship” with God or Jesus Christ. So in other words: he is a “Christian terrorist” on less of a level that he is a “weird studded chin hair whisker terrorist”.
There’s no way around this one, guys. I get that people are eager to have a Christian, or at least non-Muslim terrorist movement example to point to in the decade wake of September 11th and it’s related jihadist bombings around the world, but distortion is never a way to argue a point. This Norway loser said that “Christian fundamentalist theocracy” is “everything we DO NOT want” and a “secular European society” is “what we DO want.” There’s no Christian-terrorism here…
I apologize for my previous comments that took anti-Christian biased reports as fact without checking for myself.
His use of the term is not based on faith but out of collective identification with a notion of “Christian Europe.”
“Regarding my personal relationship with God, I guess I’m not an excessively religious man,” he says in his 1,500-page manifesto. “I am first and foremost a man of logic. However, I am a supporter of a monocultural Christian Europe.”
Breivik’s video, in which he blames “cultural Marxists” for supporting a multicultural Europe, is replete with imagery of various sword-wielding and carnage-provoking crusaders and defenders, many of whom sport crosses.
Ironically, anyone who has recently checked the state of deep and abiding faith, or “piety,” in Europe, will find the place is decidedly, and more than ever, secular. In this sense at least Breivik is honest about his brand of Christianity. God-talk hasn’t occupied much of northern Europe for years, and not because bearded jihadists have blocked the entrance to the church.
Update, August 2012: Trained to be a sociopath?
UPDATE: More info and humorously delivered facts about the killerthat is spot on, but… you’re not gonna like that it’s from Ann Coulter, who titles her piece New York Times Reader Kills Dozens in Norway (a reference to the fact that Breivik cited the NY Times over a dozen times but the bible 0 times):
Breivik says he is “not an excessively religious man,” brags that he is “first and foremost a man of logic,” calls himself “economically liberal” and reveres Darwinism.
But Times reporters had their “Eureka!” moment as soon as they heard Breivik used the word “Christian” someplace to identify himself. No one at the Times bothered to read Breivik’s manifesto to see that he doesn’t use the term the way the rest of us do. That might have interfered with the paper’s obsessive Christian-bashing.
Other famous killers dubbed conservative Christians by the Times include Timothy McVeigh and Jared Loughner.
McVeigh was a pot-smoking atheist who said, “Science is my religion.”
Similarly, Breivik says in his manifesto that “it is essential that science take an undisputed precedence over biblical teachings” –- a statement that would be incomprehensible to all the real scientists, such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Newton, Mendel, Pasteur, Planck, Einstein and Pauli, all of whom believed the whole purpose of science was to understand God.
The Tucson shooter, Jared Loughner, was lyingly described by the Times as a pro-life fanatic. Not only did more honest news outlets, such as ABC News, report exactly the opposite — for example, how Loughner alarmed his classmates by laughing about an aborted baby in class — but Loughner’s friends described him as “left wing,” “a political radical,” “quite liberal” and “a pothead.” Another said Loughner’s mother was Jewish.
The only reason Timothy McVeigh has gone down in history as a right-wing Christian and Jared Loughner has not — despite herculean efforts by much of the mainstream media to convince us otherwise — is that by January 2011 when Loughner went on his murder spree, conservatives had enough media outlets to reveal the truth.
As explained in the smash best-seller “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America,” the liberal rule is: Any criminal act committed by a white man with a gun is a right-wing, Christian conspiracy, whereas any criminal act committed by a nonwhite is the government violating someone’s civil liberties.