i wonder how much of this tendency toward glorified the suffering of
> oppression is rooted in the punitive aspects of christianity.
>
I'm lost. Who's glorifying anything? I'm talking about things that suck. Granted, one may ultimately reflect its opposite (like anti-/philo-Semitism), but that doesn't make them the same thing. And while airstrikes and earning paychecks both suck, I don't think many people who've experienced both would dispute that one sucks more than the other. Really, I've never heard a single thing that might convince me to think otherwise.
And at the risk of getting Ravi's goat, I'm enough of a Žižek fanboy to find the whole Marxist tradition pretty Christian. Of course every major cultural event shapes all succeeding ones, but the road from the Sermon on the Mount to the *Critique of Hegel* is more direct than most.
-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."