What in the name of Jesus H. Christ has been going on here??
I have just cancelled a busy afternoon to respond to this bloody anti-semitic garbage you have smeared on this thread. Damn you.
The only thing the hate writings of Justin prove--and the only thing that the continued use of it in anti-semitic whacko groups proves--is that the only way that Christians can replace God with Jesus is by destroying the Jews. They destroyed them in Hungary; they destroyed them in France; they destroyed them in Portugal; they destroyed them in Italy; they destroyed them in Austria; they destroyed them in Spain. Bunch of ignorant bastards.
Justin was not the first--but he is perhaps the logical beginning of all the anti-semitism that had its genesis in Christianity, and that has plagued the world ever since. Anti-Semitism, as an entrenched attempt to justify Gentiles as the Chosen People...began with Christianity--and it is Christianity which has been responsible for 1900 years of Jewish oppression and hatred and genocide. For you to bring this mouthpiece of hate onto this thread under the guise of "proving" that Jesus is God, and for the purpose of "proving" that Jews are vermin who were given special consideration by God in the beginning, only because they were defective people, and therefore needed special prescriptions and proscriptions--from sacrificing their foreskin, to sacrificing kine--well, this is intolerable in decent company. Why in the Hell have you smeared this hate literature across this thread? What is your purpose?
The Jews were a rag tag group of foreigners--probably from Ethiopia--who were able to create a God, or a symbol, that expressed their identity and their cohesiveness. Their path is not merely one of an infinite number of philosophical constructs to deal with the fear of death--but it is a justification for their existence: it is their meaning; it is their blood. Christianity was the thief that robbed the chicken house, but the chickens live, don't they? And they will continue to live. But the days of the fox (I mean the days of the anti-semitic belief system of the foxes)--these days are numbered.
If you wish to attack ideas--FINE. Thinking is valued on this thread. If you wish to make the case for defective people( under the guise of philosophy)--well, you can go to Hell. That is not what this thread is about.
The Jews will be worrying about their names being written in the Book of God...long after Christians have moved to appropriate the ideas of other people with slick tongues and marked decks.
Why did you bring this anti-semitic crap over to this thread, anyway? This thread is happy to attack ideas. Many of us are capable (even) of HATING ideas, and of denigrating beliefs. But this thread is NOT about hating people--neither on the individual nor the collective level. You can take your anti-semitic heroes, and you can take a flying f--- at the moon.
http://www.billwilliams.org/ANTI/anti-semitism.html
"The Holocaust took place only a few decades ago under the very eyes of Christian Europe. The Christian clergy looked on while six million men, women, and children were murdered. And as the Jewish extermination program spread from one end of Europe to the other, the Pope sat in the Vatican with his attitude of neutrality concerning Hitler and his victims. There can be no doubt that the mass genocide of millions of Jews all over Europe called for enormous participation by huge numbers of people, both Protestant and Catholic. The horror of these events transcends anything known in human history. That it should have happened at all and in our time, and in a part of the world long thought to be civilized, culturally advanced and "Christian" is incomprehensible. What would cause such terrible hatred of every Jewish man, woman, and child that they should become the mortal enemy of the populations with whom they had lived for generations? What allowed millions of people who considered themselves to be Christians to participate as perpetrators, collaborators, or silent bystanders, as six million men, women, and children were slaughtered? And how did a competition between two sister religions become so great an abyss that it made mass murder possible? These are the questions this paper seeks to answer through an understanding of the theology and practice of the Christianity in which these perpetrators, collaborators, and bystanders were raised, and which would support an environment that could allow such a horrific event to take place.
In the light of history, one can't help but wonder if the events of this century have had any impact on today's Christian theology students who will be tomorrow's pastors and teachers? As the foundational teachings of the faith and the writings of the Church Fathers and "great theologians" are studied, are they accepted uncritically as indisputable authority? And to what extent is the information on Jews and Judaism presented in inadequate, biased, and distorted ways? As these students graduate, will they go on to teach large numbers of Christians who will be even less informed? As they stand in their pulpits and talk about "the Jews," the "Pharisees," the crucifixion of Jesus, and the early Church, will these pastors and teachers no longer be thinking of Auschwitz?
To understand the anti-Semitism of Christian Europe of this century, one must look back two thousand years to the birth of Christianity and its separation from its beginnings in Judaism. As we look back to the beginning of the Christian Era, the issues are indeed multitudinal and complex. Only through a knowledge of this critical time of transition can we understand the roots of the prejudice which developed into Christian anti-Semitism. To understand how a thoroughly Jewish religion of the Nazarene sect became the anti-Jewish religion of the Christian Church, it is necessary to retrace the events of the early centuries starting with Jesus.
It is the intent of this paper to focus on the person of Jesus and his teaching, the theology and teaching of the Apostle Paul, culminating with the writings and theology of the Church Fathers through the 4th and 5th centuries and how each has or has not contributed to the roots of Christian anti-Semitism..." |
