MC’s latest essay discusses mendacity in the popular culture and politics of the 21st century, especially in the United States.
Lies
by MC
“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” — John 8:44
I suppose the reality of today’s society is that just about everything is a lie. Scientists lie to gain grants and maintain ‘consensus Science’, the medical profession lies to maintain funding and freebies from Big Pharma, Churchmen lie, Rabbis lie, Imams are taught to lie. Governments lie and local authorities lie. Few are those who do not lie.
This is no different from history, except for that strange aberration that we call Judeo-Christianity. For the short time that Judeo Christianity held sway, lies became unacceptable, and the person caught out in a lie was punished.
Not so now.
Socialism is the opposite of Judeo-Christianity, it exists solely for the purpose of eradicating Judeo-Christianity from the planet; it fights Judeo-Christianity wherever it finds it, it fights against them until ‘bigotry’ is no more and Marx’s religion reigns supreme. … Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them (with apologies to Sura 9 verse 5).
For Judeo-Christianity, the end did not justify the means and each individual (subject to appropriate age and mental condition) was responsible for his/her own behaviour, and this lead to a society of prosperity for anybody with the will to put in a good days work for a fair wage.
Judaism and Christianity (and to a certain extent Atheism) are personal belief systems where ‘unbelief’ is not a threat to the individual. Not so with Socialism (and Islam; an ancient form of theistic socialism) where the whole of society must be forced to conform to the core fundamentals (which are not necessarily static), and are dictated by “the great and the good” of the society.
At times Christianity has been hijacked by Socialism (the Inquisition, social gospel, revolutionary theology to name but a few) but it has up until now been a temporary set of deviations.
We don’t know for sure how life, the universe and everything happened, and there must be at least 42 different explanations, but mice, dolphins and cats exist. Truth also exists, and it is intimately tied to the creation event. If we understand creation (in its widest sense) we can then set the foundations upon which to anchor truth.
If we insist that ‘nothing’ became something, then we are going to have an extreme difficulty with truth, because the statement is obviously an oxymoron. What we can say is that an entity or entities as yet unknown to the physical realm, made something happen which stimulates our physical senses, and which we call “creation”.
We can define and describe those things which stimulate our senses and thus establish truths, but the abstracts are much more difficult. Here we each have a set of opinions, usually based upon other people’s opinions, and it is here where the lies count.
Health services are a vitally important sector of many people’s lives, and are thus also a focus of potential exploitation. Worldwide, trillions of dollars change hands in the quest for ‘good’ health.
Quite naturally then, it is around the health industry that the predators gather.
Nationalised Health services provide a wonderful vehicle for the movement of public money to private hands, hiding behind a beneficial ‘public’ face. Once more, fear is the key, and fear can be stroked and fondled by propaganda — basically, lies. Change the system and hope that it works, as opposed to ‘if it works, don’t fix it’. And we fall for it every time, straight out of Hegel; thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Affordable Medical Insurance for most people, Obamacare (its unaffordable antithesis), and the synthesis is a nationalised healthcare system.
Can we really be naïve enough to think that the administration really thought Obamacare would work? It started with lies, and it will finish with lies. And the public will pay the price: extra taxation with a large slice skimmed off the top for the great and the good.
We all know the guy at the top lied, but we are unable to do anything about it. Why? Because all the organs of society support the lies. The TV journalists, the newspaper journalists and all their acolytes — they are all part of the plot.
In a nation of liars, the truthful man is a revolutionary of the most dangerous sort, because truth is tied to creation. Creation tends to tell us the truth and eventually expose the lie, not only in the physical, but in the metaphysical, too. For this reason, many liars deny the existence of the metaphysical, but to me, consciousness is metaphysicality staring me in the face. There is no physical science that can explain what turns a bucket of chemicals into a living creature, and there is no doctor of medicine that can bring a carcase back to life.
In his work The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Joseph Chilton Pearce describes the physical environment as a sort of egg from which we must break free of to ‘come to full life’. By this he sees life in the inside the physical ‘shell’ as an environment of the sort depicted in the film The Matrix. To stop living the lie, we must be prepared to crack the shell and escape through the crack, not actually knowing what is out there.
Lying is the natural ‘animal’ state of mankind, and a society based in truth is the aberration. In days past this did not matter, as the lies just tended to cancel each other out, leaving the natural truth of creation to the fore. Now we have television where we can show the same lie to billions of people at the same time…
The post-modern society is a terribly naïve society that thinks itself highly sophisticated. The relative truthfulness of the Judeo-Christian era has dulled the suspicion of most people to the extent that, using television, the biggest of lies can be sold as truth, and it is obvious that this is being done, and we all know it. We, as a society, take the good essences of Judeo-Christianity and forge them into the weapons of cultural Marxism with which to beat ourselves into submission. This is what is at the heart of Political Correctness.
And so the ‘Religion of Peace’ makes headway because the gullible desperately want the ‘peace’ bit of it to be true. It would be ‘racist’ to reject the brown skinned hoards, but their violent religion is culturally unacceptable, so we fabricate a pretence, a ‘religion of peace’.
To ‘see’ the inherent lie is to have to acknowledged something far, far more unacceptable: that the umbrella of honest democratic paternal government has already collapsed, and that the Huns are already upon us. America is betrayed…
MC lives in the southern Israeli city of Sderot. For his previous essays, see the MC Archives.
To say Socialism exists to eradicate Judeo-Christian culture just as Islam does is a bit conceited to say the least. Marxism and its derivatives are an ideological construct and as such it wants to be the sole construct people believe in to effect a Marxist revolution and get to the classical worker’s classless paradise. Counter ideologies such as Islam and Christianity and any family structures are eliminated as they stand in the way and represent traditional class structures of society. As we have seen from the USSR, communists were equally happy eradicating Islam as well as Christianity and any other religious or social constructs not congruent with Marxist ideology.
You start with a mild Ad Hominem attack to bolster the weakness of your argument, Lies are used to take control of the tints on your spectacles, their author wants YOU to see the world in HIS colour.
We have to be aware of this or else we fall into a trap of THEIR making.
Read what Karl Marx was actually trying to do, and maybe more importantly, who was paying him to do it.
Try and look at what people actually DO not what they say they DO
Who was paying Marx to do what exactly?
He lived off the funds provided by Friedrich Engels, who simply admired the little rascal, for reasons I cannot comprehend.
The inquisition was a legitimate, neccesary response to political conditions of that period. Religious unification was neccesary, as Muslims had exploited it before.
Great, spelling errors.
I guess the Reformation was also “necessary” for “religious unity,” right?
P.S. In fact the various protestant (splinter) groups had their own inquisitions–some religious unity!
Power, power is addictive.
Its channels are reproduced so often in history because it is so addictive.
Religious unification was definitely necessary, the Muslims attempted to exploit these differences, and there are reports of various religious groups pairing up with the Muslims. This was far to dangerous to risk in those days, and might have allowed the Muslim armies to take Spain once again. All religious and ethnic groups who collaborated with the Muslims during and prior to their rule were rightfully viewed with suspicion. The fact that such matters tended to escalate was predictable given the conditions of those days, not a reason to discard the importance of these events.
So an ‘auto de fe’ was necessary?
Was ‘zyclon B’ necessary as well?
Religious unification was necessary as both the Sarrasins,and later the Ottomans and the Arab caliphates always exploited religious differences. I cannot be any more clear then this. When I have to chose between an Arab invasion enabled by their trading contacts in the region and ”religious intolerance”, as vastly overrated as the ”devastation” of the inquisition is, then I prefer the latter. If you wish to imply that my opinion is equal to supporting the war crimes committed by the Nazis, then so be it. My post had nothing to do with Nazism, therefore its clear what elicited such a response. The inquisitions were an important measure in securing the borders of Europe, much needed to recover from the Muslim invasions, and its fortunate that it happened.
Auto de Fe was the ritual burning alive of groups of innocent people (Jews) found guilty by the inquisition, it was a method of killing, same as zyclon B.
The inquisition did absolutely nothing to aid ‘unity’, and the muslim threat in the Americas was what did you say? I think your argument lacks substance.
The link with Nazism lacks substance, people have been killed in an endless amount of ways, comparing the inquisition with Miss Mandela’s obsession with tires would be just as valid, its simply a way to call me a nazi, a common nickname for us Europeans who dare to question the unquestionable.
Individuals have been brutally murdered in many wars and conflicts, I do not condemn all those conflicts, I place them in the context of their time, and then make a conclusion about the value of this affair. Since religious disunity had often risked European sovereignty,from the Roman empire to Spain, therefore I support this event without a doubt. In what world is a disunified country able to resist subversion and invasion on the scale Islam provided?
In those days, these threats were even greater then today, and we have all read Diana West’s latest book.
Its a shame such religiously induced madness caused these ritualistic burnings, i do not support this obviously. Such violence became normal in those days, introduced by the Muslims and in the view of the Spaniards, by those who aided them.
So @OZ, you agree with what I wrote about the inquisition in the text…..
Socialism is the opposite of Judeo-Christianity, it exists solely for the purpose of eradicating Judeo-Christianity from the planet; it fights Judeo-Christianity wherever it finds it, it fights against them until ‘bigotry’ is no more and Marx’s religion reigns supreme. … Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them (with apologies to Sura 9 verse 5).
I don’t agree: socialism is a collectivist ideology designed to advance the interests of the high priests. So is “Judeo-Christianity”. Not that I like that term. Judeo-Christianity is as sensible a term as Judeo-Islam. Or rather: it’s less sensible. Islam has far more in common with Judaism than either do with Christianity and especially with Protestantism. They’re both intolerant, militant and anti-female religions forged in the very tribal setting of the Middle East and both are very bad for free enquiry. Christianity can be intolerant and militant too, but it has overseen some of the greatest art and intellectual endeavour the world has ever known. Islam has overseen some great art and architecture too: nothing Judaism has ever produced compares with the Taj Mahal or with Arabic calligraphy.
And they are also Oulanem, Oulanem.
The name rings forth like death, rings forth
Until it dies away in a wretched crawl.
Stop, I’ve got it now! It rises from my soul
As clear as air, as strong as my bones.
Yet I have power within my youthful arms
To clench and crush you
with tempestuous force,
While for us both the abyss yawns in darkness.
You will sink down and I shall follow laughing,
Whispering in your ears, “Descend,
come with me, friend.”
From the Drama “Oulanem” by Karl Marx
You should see the Spanish Synagogue in Prague- smaller than the Taj Mahal, but exquisite.
The Hebrews gave the world the first flight for freedom, the concept of liberty, and the Bible. While beauty may dwell in the tents of Japheth, it is HaShem, the Almighty who dwells in the tents of Shem.
“I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation [by propagating] to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all
morality, and consequently of all civilization. — John Adams
The Hebrews gave the world the first flight for freedom, the concept of liberty, and the Bible.
No, they didn’t give us the concept of liberty. Judaism is a totalitarian religion that doesn’t tolerate dissent. So is Islam. So are traditional forms of Christianity. The concept of liberty — and of free speech — was given us by white northern Europeans in Protestant cultures. That is why the Jewish heretic Spinoza stayed alive in Holland: because Holland wasn’t ruled by his own folk:
Baruch Spinoza.
Well, my Jewish friends who practice their religion tell me that that there’s an amusing saying among eastern European Jews: “Two Jews, three synagogues.” So regardless of the conditions in Amsterdam during Spinoza’s lifetime hundreds of years ago (remember Christians were murdering religious dissenters during that period–I guess you consider that non-totalitarian?), there’s a lot of room in Judaism for dissent.
A Hebrew scholar told me that much of the talmud, which is a commentary on the Old Testament, consists of opinions from various rabbis, many of which disagree with each other. For example, regarding a particular interpretation, the talmud might say something like “Rabbi A says V, Rabbi B says X and Rabbi C says Y. But the majority of the Rabbis say Z.”
Lots of room for dissent and for differing opinions.
Honestly, I do think you should learn something Judaism before you try to tell everyone what it is and is not.
As far as I know, Jews were not murdering their apostates and dissenters during the Middle Ages and Reformation. Unfortunately, the same can not be said of Christianity
P.S. I meant no disrespect to you in my commentary. I have a tendency to do the same thing–spout off on topics about which I know too little.
P.P.S. Modern Judaism is quite different from the Judaism of the Old Testament. Again this comes from my Hebrew scholar as well as my own observations and conversations.
I’m told that the first talmud was compiled in the 6th century BC. And that it says in the talmud that for every statement in the Old Testament there are 70 levels of meaning. Modern Judaism is a religion of interpretation.
Apparently not even orthodox Jews take the Old Testament literally. One of my practicing Jewish friends tells me that the only people who do so are some Christians.
You’re right: the pogroms against Jews during the Crusades were condemned by the Church at the time. I mean, there they were off to Jerusalem to get it back, but first those Crusaders had to do a detour and kill them some Jews…
…after reading Emmet Scott I have a strong suspicion that such behavior was picked up from the incessantly raiding Arabs in the Mediterranean. The Arabs arrived in the Med with their strong antiSemitism intact. Prior to their coming, the Christian and Jewish traders got along well enough. It wasn’t until the Arabs sowed the seeds of deep hatred that things changed. People stopped trading and gradually abandoned the coast as the slave catchers and marauders never let up.
It was then that the redoubts in the mountainous areas inland began. Places like Sicily, which had no bolt holes, learned to go the Arabs one better by adopting and adapting their methods. Some have questioned whether the Mafia would have ever developed had Sicily not been overrun repeatedly.
The overwhelming feeling after reading Scott’s book is a deep sense of loss, of how much those Arabs cost southern Europe. Not only in money, but in the development of our culture, architecture, and general well-being. Both the Baron and I are reluctant to remove Scott’s book from our sidebar because that work is the foundation of our understanding of what might have been had those mass killers never taken to the sea…
Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited History of a Controversy by Emmet Scott [New English Review Press,2012] [Paperback]
In fact it is worth considering to what extent the Arab virus may have invaded and contaminated post-Roman culture. Thus the methods of treating dissenters may well have been adopted by Christians from the invaders who demanded their total submission in exchange for being allowed to live. It’s merely a variation of idenitifying with the powerful in order to stay safe.
The beginning of change is to realize how incalculable was this robbery. And they are still here, the veneer of civilization simply sprayed on until such time as they have conquered all.
I agree with Bill Warner: we are a culture in denial, terrified to look at what is gaining on us. As for *our* capos, the media/political/academic elite, they are deluded into thinking their capitulation will save them. We wear blinkers because we’re terrified. The Capos wear them because they think they can cut a deal after the dust settles.
…there’s a lot of room in Judaism for dissent…
Just as there’s a lot of room in Islam for dissent. When the Muslim is living in a non-Muslim country. In the UK, Ahmadis are free citizens. In Pakistan, Ahmadis don’t do very well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Ahmadis
As far as I know, Jews were not murdering their apostates and dissenters during the Middle Ages and Reformation. Unfortunately, the same can not be said of Christianity…
You don’t know much about Judaism. Here is the excommunication decree for Spinoza:
By the decree of the angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of all the Holy Congregation, in front of these holy Scrolls with the six-hundred-and-thirteen precepts which are written therein, with the excommunication with which Joshua banned Jericho, with the curse with which Elisha cursed the boys, and with all the curses which are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza#Expulsion_from_the_Jewish_religious_community
If they had been in control of the state, how long do you think Spinoza would have lasted?
Re “Can we really be naïve enough to think that the administration really thought Obamacare would work?”
Tom Hayden was being only true to all Leftist methods when he realized that if you want to control what is taught in schools you have to control who teaches. Not being able to come clean on what curriculum he wants to impose he essentially drops all real reference to it and gets his people in teaching positions and in positions that control education.
Obama and the radicals he works for have an ambitious goal which is this – if you want to control all medical services and control who in society gets what protocols and when they get it with emphasis on who in society doesn’t get it and when they don’t get it – control medical insurance.
So before we answer the question – did the Obama people think it would work? we have to understand what they are trying to do.
Well stated.
This is a valiant effort but you have entered into a vast thicket of theology and history that is be no means amenable to simple formulas. Take for instance: “Socialism is the opposite of Judeo-Christianity.” Is it? In fact one of the things that the two religions have in common is that both, in their contemporary permutations, promote Socialism.
Take the Pope’s statement the other day: ‘Inequality Is Root of Social Evil.’ I corresponded with some Catholic friends about this absured statement and they expressed worry about this Pope being a commie. But I worry not about thew Pope’s politics but his religion, his theology. Here is how I put it:
“How is it possible to devalue Christianity in such a manner, to saddle it with such hypocrisy while claiming to be God’s representative on Earth. All of Nature, all of the Cosmos, are based on inequality. Are Earth and Jupiter equal in size? Do the tortoise and the hare run equally fast? Do Norway and Barbados have climate equality? Are Norwegians and Bushmen equal in heigth? [or, for our friend Mark H, in IQ?]. Can women bench press 100 kg and men lactate? And all that inequality, according to church teachings, is God’s doing. So how is it possible for a Christian, let alone a Pope, to say that inequality is evil among humans?”
Of course the same applies to non-Orthodox Judaism. You attempted elsewhere to parse the difference between “Jew” and “”Religious Jew” as far as proclivity to lunatic leftism is concerned. But the fact is that in America and the rest of the Anglophony the great majority of Jews are both observant in varying degreess (if not Orthodox) and lightning rods for “Equity,” “Racial Equality,” “Gender Parity,” socialized medicine, high taxes with high income redistribution and so on. All that is Socialism with rouge and mascara adopting it to modern times.
Of course. Equality is a theoretical construct – nothing is equal to anything else. The more one examines the more unequal ‘things’ become.
I covered ‘Revoluutionary Theology’ in the text, to me it is a socisalist abberation, I would advise further research into where Marx was coming from – particularly see his poetry above.
I’m not a believer, though I’d like to be, but it seems to me that Christ’s teachings can be read as a primitive form of socialism, and many Christians read them that way. Rich men, camels and needle’s eyes come to mind.
Exactly. People avoid the hard theological questions but they are by now embedded in our civic and secular culture just as they are present in the avearage rabbi’s or minister’s sermon. Not only that: Christ’s “socialist” teachings were distinctly, classically Jewish: it was Judaism that invented the concepts of man’s inherent dignity and social justice.
The issue is one of balance — but the monotheistic (and linear)religions hardly have a concept of balance, as opposed to the Eastern (and circular) religions where, for instance, the Tao expresses the very essence of balance.
Socialism is therefore Judaism and Christianity rampant, and not their opposite. Except it’s Judeo-Christianity stripped of the great and salutary effects that the Greek and Roman civilizations have had in the formation of our culture, as had the earlier nature-centered influences of the proto-Europeans’ paganism.
Where does the fact that Jesus did not speak out about the evils of slavery fit into your analysis? If you think that multicultural socialism or modern leftism is Judaism and Christianity rampant, how do you reconcile that with the fact that Jesus was not a social reformer?
How does the insistence upon the dignity and worth of each individual automatically lead to socialism? I don’t see the logic in that.
I am not saying anytghing about “automatic” or otherwise, nor offering an opinion. I am stating a historical fact: all mainstream Christian exegesis in the past 150 years, and in the instance of breakaway sects 200 and 300 years earlier, has been along the Socialist mode, if not all equally. If there is any other Christian theology on offer currently, its exponents have failed to make a streong case for it.
I don’t think the gospels are “primitive” so much as they are pre-industrial. And now that we’re in a post-industrial new century slouching towards heaven knows what kind of obliteration, socialism is going to become too tight around the collar for even its most devoted adherents. It has been outgrown because polities can no longer afford socialism’s utopian aims. Not to mention the perverse kinds of ‘rewards’ built into welfare states; they end up promoting self-destructive behaviors.
If you view Christ’s teachings as a form of socialism, do read the parable of the talents.
Going back a bit, money isn’t the root of all evil, though sometimes that’s what is quoted. More accurately, it is the love of money which corrupts the person who yearns for it. For rich men burdened with that craving, no amount of money is ever enough.
One can look at the Bible as a hammer and anvil, or as an extremely subtle analysis of how a Creator relates with His creation.
The quote from John at the front of the piece is highly significant and I suggest people might like to read the essay at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1121228/posts
The major differences, as I hint at in the essay is the use of force and coersion, Socialism and Islam are all about tyranny and compulsion; the Islamic/socialist propensities to force compliance is nowhere found in the Judeo-Christian scriptures. Man has free will, and God always respects that free will, but with one exception, that being Genetic modification. If one reads carefully, one understands that all of God’s ‘savagery’ is directed at those who breed with angels and produce ‘giants’ (this tends to be obscure in the English). So Sodom was wiped out, not because of homosexuality, but because the Sodomites wanted to breed from the ‘angels’ accompanying Abraham, and produce “men of renown”; giant warriors like Goliath, and King Og og Bashan.
Bakunin and Proudhon discuss Marx’ Satanism openly in their letters, but it is otherwise a close kept secret only hinted at in poetry and letters.
This is why it is always safer to look at what people do, not what they say they are doing, and cultural Marxism is intent on purging every last vestige of Judeo-Christianity from American life, and many are happy to unwittingly aid them because they won’t see the wood for the trees.
Unfortunately many believe the fabrications that the great and the good erect around themselves, Marx kept a ‘slave’ girl, and produced children by her, his son addressed him as ‘Satan’, he was most unlike a Messiah.
I agree with that.
Socialism is hardly what it was up to 1950. It is no longer about degrading and humiliating the rich, the successful and the deserving (not all of which necessarily reside in the same group), but about cowing and giving them a great haircut in the name of “social justice.” There are dozens, maybe hundreds of places in the Gospels where Jesus preaches about social justice, about the virtue of the poor and the wickedness of the rich, about giving away what you own, sharing with other etc.
I am not offering any original insight in this: Protestant Christianity has been offering this reading of the Gospels for at least 150 years now, with pious New England being a hotbed as of the 1880s to such an extent that its popular Baptist minister Francis Bellamy was a vice president of the Christian Society of Socialists and a sought-after speaker on subjects such as “The Socialism of the Bible,” “What is Christian Socialism?,” “Jesus the Socialist,”and “How Many Angels Can Live on the Point of a Needle.” Catholics also had their specimens, e.g. Dorothy Day.
I, in turn, am not saying that Jesus was a Socialist. But Jesus was, certainly, an apocalypsist, and a social thinker in a dark and evil period of history. The problem here is how to interpret His sayings and parables in light of known history, rather than getting lost in Johnian unproavable fancies of “before Abraham was born, I am.”
A rational acceptance of Jesus allows for concluding that if some measure of Socialism was salutary then, it does mean that it is salutary now. An irrational one leads to Marxism + God, i.e. Marxism with a human face as the ultimate eschaton.
That is the essential ‘social Gospel’, but reading the NT as a Jew and relating it back to the Tanack gives a very different picture:
In the beginning was Torah, and Torah was with Yah and Torah was Yah…..(John 1)
“And Torah became flesh and dwelt among us.”
That “Torah” is a legitimate translation of the Greek ‘Logos’ (word in the KJV) is demonstrated in the LXX.
This changes perspectives somewhat, but I don’t want to take this further out of respect for the Christians on the forum. Its their Scripture not mine.
But I would refer Christians to Ephesians 6 v 12 “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. “
Christianity recognises inequality, and considers earthly inequality to be natural. That is my reading at least, the bible speaks of ”the least of my brethren”, exactly because the laws of nature, which are expressed in the laws of economics, we cannot be the same.
Jesus did not speak out against slavery. Despite how his teachings may be interpreted currently by the religious left, he was not a social reformer.
See Richard Wurmbrand’s short work: “Marx & Satan”. Original and very plausible interpretation of the deeper and more fundamental motives of Marx and his heirs: that the economic was downstream, and secondary to the religious; or more accurately, the anti-religious. I think it is along the same lines that MC is thinking here.
The essay was based more on Paul Johnson (Intellectuals) than Wurmbrand, but I certainly would thank Wurmbrand for doing the tedious work of ploughing through Marxian literature.
But it has been very obvious watching the purging of Judeo-Christianity from the USA, that this is not unlike the denazification process of 1945/47. SPLC and ACLU have gone to extremes to purge every vestige of J-C from US public life, and now they are starting on private life. Political Correctness removes spontaneity, it means that every word must be pre-planned and pre-vetted, even in private. I can no longer ask my daughter/girlfriend/wife not to bring aliens home/to the game, without somebody listening in and shouting it out…..
Donald Sterling gets trounced whilst much nastier (black) racists sit, impregnable, and jeer…..
This is the way of our brave new world without J-C and its strange ideas of equality under law.
I hesitate to comment further after this outpouring of expertise (no, I’m not being sarcastic), but would like to respond to a couple of Dymphna’s points:
1) When I suggested that Jesus preached a “primitive” form of socialism, I should have made it clearer that I meant appropriate to the time, place and economic system pertaining then. Indeed he didn’t condemn slavery, but nor did he speak against the subjugation of women; I suspect that if he considered these matters, he’d have realised that it would be too much, too fast for that time and culture, particularly if he had a more general and important (indeed universal and eternal) message to deliver.
The parable of the talents is a good lesson, but what should be the fate of those who have few?
2) Re the likelihood of the crusaders picking up bad habits from the Muslims, it has been argued that the Brits were less racist before US troops arrived here in WW2. Certainly many were unhappy with the segregation imposed, which extended to our civilian pubs and dance halls (with the connivance of our authorities), and some women in particular ignored it- with occasionally tragic results for black American servicemen.
He did not need to condemn Christianity if you understand the treatment of this matter in Christian theology. Nor did he need to condemn the treatment of women, his message made this quite clear without referring to specific ”identities” who needed to be protected. This is why women’s rights were born in Christian nations.
To Blessed Foot Forward:
You don’t seem to understand the difference between being excommunicated and/or shunned (however accompanied by curses) and being murdered/tortured to death. You appear to equate these.
You remind me of the leftists who like to equate the dangers of Muslim violence with fundamentalist Christian intolerance. “Right-wing Christians are just as bad” they say. And in their ignorance, they mean it.
And Muslims are NOT safe in non-Muslim countries–not if they are suspected of apostasy or are thought to be disrespectful toward Islam or Mohammed. Or if they are women or girls who don’t want to obey. They are not safe at all. The world over, Muslims are only safe if they toe the Islamic line.
And when is the last time you have heard about an honor killing among Jews either in Israel or elsewhere? Or about a high prevalance of Jews trying to plant explosives to murder those who have insulted them or insulted Moses? I’m talking about now, not in ancient times.
And what do you think was happening among Christian dissenters who lived around the time of Spinoza? You think they were not tortured and killed? History tells us otherwise.
It is clear to me that it is you to appear to know too little about both Judaism and history.