Gee, what would a Copt need with weapons in peaceful, tolerant, post-revolutionary Egypt? Note that the church was approved, until it was suddenly unapproved, and note the appalling hoops Christians have to jump through to get permission for a building project involving a church. Those only reflect Islamic law. As Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveler), a manual certified as reliable by Egypt's own al-Azhar University states, non-Muslims are:
... "forbidden to ring church bells or display crosses, recite the Torah or Evangel aloud, or make public display of their funerals and feastdays, and are forbidden to build new churches" - o.11.5 (6,7)
"Egypt sentences Copts over church scuffle," from Agence France-Presse, May 29:
AFP - An Egyptian military court on Sunday sentenced two Coptic Christians to five years in jail for violence and trying to turn a factory into an unlicensed church, judicial sources said.
The two men, also convicted of possessing weapons, were arrested on May 18 after clashes between Christians and Muslims in Cairo's Ain Shams district as the Copts planned to hold prayers in the building.
A Coptic-led group that took part in a reconciliation meeting between the two sides says the two men are innocent and their lawyers will try to appeal the ruling.
Sameh Abdel Satar, a member of the Egypt Lovers and Peace Society, said the Coptic Church had obtained permission in January to convert the building, which it had purchased in 2006, into a church.
"The first prayer was meant to be held on January 30, but the revolution happened," he said of mass protests that began on January 25 to overthrow president Hosni Mubarak.
The military prosecution said the building was registered as a garment factory and that the two men assaulted workers inside.
Copts, who held a sit-in earlier this month after Muslim mobs attacked to churches elsewhere in Cairo, said the government had promised to reopen closed churches, including the one in Ain Shams.
Since Mubarak's ouster on February 11, the country has seen a spike in religious violence that killed at least two dozen people in March and May.
Copts, who make up about 10 percent of the country's 80-million people, complain of state sanctioned discrimination in the form of a law that requires them to obtain presidential permission before building churches.
The decision is delegated to governors, who consult security services on whether a proposed church would anger Muslim neighbours.
The caretaker government has said it will draft a law to ease restrictions on building churches.
"Ease," not abolish.
It could easily turn out that millions of Christians in the Muslim world will give up on Christianity and convert to Islam simply because, as the Christians face extermination and turns for help to their fellow Christians in the Modern world, they will continue to find that their comfortable cousins just don't give a shit.
I could see millions of Christians just quitting the game and giving in to Muslims because Christians who could help prove themselves worthless when the battle is serious. If it all comes down to 'one faces death and the other faces television and dinner,' then why care any more? Christians prove themselves worthless as co-religionists and as human beings if they won't act to save their fellows. A few thousand Iraqi Christians are going to move to America, and 2.5 million or so Copts are facing the jihadi sword; and all the while the Western Christians do little more than have inter-faith dialogues and praise their fellow Abrahamic believers. That's hard to believe-- or believe in.
Most Christians I know are sort of all right people, in a tepid and stupid way. I did get out of hand a while ago when I chased and tried to beat up a couple from the suburbs who approached me and asked if I would like a crack-smoking kit. They fled in terror as soon as I swung the first blow. I've never seen people run so fast. They were, no doubt, attempting to make contact with "inner-city" people so they could have a dialogue. But, you know, I see them as drug enablers and killers. So I tried to smash them. Lucky for me I couldn't run fast enough to catch them and kick them to the ground and stomp on them. Christians. Giving out drug paraphernalia. It's a good deed.
More and more I am finding I have less and less tolerance for Social Gospel loser-Christians who want to do Good Deeds to get themselves accolades at the local hang-out. No, I should not try to beat them and hospitalise them. That is a bad thing. I should just hate them and spit.
I don't hate Christians in general. I met a missionary a few years back who was quite nice. Liked his family. They were hacked to death a bit shy of a week after that. I wouldn't have done anything to save them. The parents and the older kids knew what they were doing, and the little ones had no choice but would have wanted to be with the family anyway. It's unfortunate that the family died, and especially like that, but life is tough and they had a reason to face it that made them want to face it. I don't expect that kind of fervour from anyone, but I have some respect for it. I don't despise those who won't face death by a mob and who won't subject their families to death like that. I find that those Christians who will-- and do-- sit and do so little that it is effectively nothing, that they have worked hard to earn my contempt, eternal and profound. I don't ask for much. More than nothing, though.
It would take almost nothing to redeem themselves as human beings. Forget about being Christians, just human beings. But when we see that millions of Christians are facing extermination in Muslim lands and Christians in the West do nothing more than stare at their shoes, then I, for one, would be happy, were I a Christian, to convert to Satanism just so I had clearly nothing to do with such people.
We know why the Jews were slaughtered. "America First." Anti-war Christians. Christians did next to nothing until the state organised them into the military to fight World War Two. If Christians won't of their own free will save Christians, why save anyone at all? I don't see much difference today.
If the Muslim world continues to mismanage its general economy to the point that most Muslims face starvation, what then for the local Christians? The time is now if one cares to save Christians. Get them out of dar al Islam and to some place safe, some country that needs and wants Christians as new residents. If you wait, the Christians in the Islamic world will all be dead.
Start a charity for saving Christians. Raise money. Rent an office. Hire staff. Make it a career. Or wait and watch as Muslims eventually exterminate millions and millions of Christians; and then you can go through life not talking about what you didn't do. Yeah, you might even get angry in public and say, "Well, I just don't understand how people could have simply done nothing." I hear that often. I hate those people. If they were any kind of decent people they'd hate themselves even more than I hate them. Not much chance of that.
I have seen before that there's a constant struggle ongoing between the Army, the Police and the Security Service, and the Copts sometimes could find help from one of them against the others.
Low and high level internal struggles are common in such countries - well, in all countries where the state organizations are almost independent states within the state - but they appear to be especially vicious in many Muslim states with little concept of democratic and balancing rules. Iraq was and is the prime contender here, politics being the same as extreme violence.
The danger now is that all energy formerly directed towards the preservation of Status Quo and Mubarak now sees itself set to prop up an Islamic state only. Perhaps many officials are already proving themselves good Muslims, just in case?