Originally posted by jaywill
also argued that the Creationist clip is deceptive in omitting the huge evidence that anti semitism is a product of - and a continuing feature of - Christianity.
I think you failed to fault Paul for anti-semitism in Christianity. Your attempts I found twistings.
While you are sensative to distance Hitler from Darwin's ideas you cert ...[text shortened]... angelical Christians.
You cannot deny this contemporary Christian pro-semitic activism.
I see good reason on your part to say that it was always wrong to cite Paul in support of antisemitism. It's unfair to Paul you argue. Well I argue your video was unfair to Darwin so where do you recommend we find some common ground? You are not using reasonable arguments. You are quietly evading the issues I have raised by diversionary tactics. I am carefully conceding to you points that I think are well made, but that is not reciprocal, as I would expect in an honest debate.
It would be anachronistic to suggest that Paul shared the attitudes or the concerns of people in later periods of history. Even after the first three hundred years Christianity had developed a lot and faced entirely new and different issues. It is valid to say that people later placed a significance on some of Paul's words which was not necessarily even close to his intention at the time. Without replicating an entire discussion, suffice to say that people have nevertheless found words in Paul to support their antisemitism.
Since antisemitism is and always has been perverse, I fully agree with you that to search out and exploit any such phrases is in itself a twisted and perverse occupation. They were wrong on many levels to do so and deeply malevalent in their motives. They did it, though.
As you know early Christians were distinguished by their intolerance and the bitterness of their disputes. No change there. Look for example at the political skullduggery around the council of Nicea, which established the basic tenets of the religion and led in time to the production of a definitive set of documents later known as the Bible.
Leaving Paul entirely out of the matter, you yourself have agreed that Christianity has had a deep stain of antisemitism, flaring up in diverse locations and periods of history. Examples would include the Crusades which typically got things rolling by murdering and tormenting local Jews before heading onwards to - and not always reaching - the Holy Land. Another example might be the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella and the proces of the Spanish Reconquista. One reason for the famous Balfour Declaration during the First World War was to appeal to the persecuted Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe, who suffered pogroms throughout the preceding century, in the hope they might support the Allies against their own regimes. Balfour never thought through what he was saying, which was in direct contradiction to other commitments made to his Arab allies.
As my reference to the Balfour Declaration reminds me the Great Powers had reason in the Twentieth Century to play with the politics of the Jews and the Arabs for cynical ends. Kaiser William actively set out to excite Arab anger against the European powers and as part of his campaign, played with the issue of the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion to foment trouble. That was because the one power with little track record in Muslim lands at that time was Germany and he hoped to cause trouble especially for the British, the French and the Russians, while getting access to markets and resources for German industry via the famous Berlin to Baghdad Railway project.
This will also remind us both that the project to set up an Israeli state began before the First World War and, if it was indeed motivated by a desire to escape anti-semitism, that anti-semitism was a problem that predated Hitler by centuries and extended far beyond the borders of Germany.
You should also understand that the same thinking about biologcally based races within humanity that led to the notion of a German master-race was also part of the reasoning behind the desire to establish a Jewish state and the pseudo science which supported this nonsense was promoted by Jewish Zionists and it is still part of the composition of the Israeli state, to its shame.
I am perfectly aware of the recent affection of American Evangelical Christians for the Jewish state in Isareal. As you know, this has no small connection to their reading of Revelations and their hope that the modern state of Israel might be helping to bring to fruition some of the alleged prophecies in Revelations. This may account partly for the way this video seeks to associate the two fundamentalist religious groups. Sadly, that does not in any way have the most remote bearing on the antisemitism of the Germans in the early Twentieth Century. It is an entirely new and modern development.
Generally, America's Creationist / Evangelical movement is not at all a mystical, exclusively religious project but is part of a political project to impose very material and tangible marks on our world today. It is reactionary, dangerous and has to be challenged. Behind the screen of your affable and devout readings of the holy text, you are persistently slipping onto this forum references to the most unpleasant, extremist and destructive political propoganda and it is that, not your faith, that I am questioning. I challenge your faith only because it is a screen for a very modern, not at all religious but political agenda.
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