cnorman18
Critical Thinker
- Joined
- Oct 22, 2007
- Messages
- 304
So I'm over on a Christian forum, trying to get a little respect for Judaism, and having about as much success as I am here (the subject being why Jews don't believe in Jesus), when a guy I'll call S***** comes on with the first of a series of truly horrifying posts.
This guy believes in the International Jewish Conspiracy. He believes that Jews worship Satan. He even believes the Blood Libel--that Jews commit ritual murder and drink the blood of Christian children as a sacrament.
Now I've been posting on various boards for maybe ten years, and I've dealt with a lot of antisemites, but this is the first time I've seen that.
After ten pages of posts, this my latest--a bit of perspective, perhaps, on why I get so irritated when people mistake me for a Christian or say there is no difference:
------
There is a reason besides Scriptural interpretation that more Jews don't become Christians, and it's worth considering. It looms rather large in the minds of many Jews whenever the subject comes up.
As I posted earlier:
"Even if your way IS the right one, can you understand how hard it is for Jews to listen to those who tell us to abandon and betray everthing that has sustained us and helped us to survive as we have for almost 4.000 years, in favor of a system of belief that makes no sense to us and seems contrary to some of the most basic tenets of our faith?
"Is there any intellectual argument, any logic of history, any proof text, any Biblical insight, any line of reasoning, any words from any authority figure, even from your own faith, that could convince you to spit on the Cross, admit that Jesus did not rise from the dead, give up Heaven, throw away the entire New Testament, laugh at Christian martyrs as fools, and turn your back on your spiritual ancestors of two thousand years? Is there anything at all that could convince you to do that?"
Especially if the people trying to convince you had a history of murdering, torturing, burning, banishing and harassing your people for almost as long?
We're not just talking Bible verses and theology here. History has a voice, too.
Think on that for a moment. I personally know an elderly Jewish woman who shudders and crosses the street to avoid walking in front of a Christian church. The sight of a cross makes her frown blackly, and sometimes she spits on the ground.
She has a very good reason; in her childhood in Eastern Europe, the Christians would beat Jews and occasionally kill them (with no official consequences) if they caught one too near their house of worship. They thought their presence a contamination.
She stays indoors on Easter, trembling in fear with the blinds closed and the doors locked, for a similar reason; in her home town, gangs of Christians would roam the streets on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, looking for Jews to punish for killing their Savior. Easter Jew-murders were rather common, and punishments for them rare; none of the Christian officials in the town thought it much of a problem.
Now: How ready is she, do you think, to listen to Christians preach to her about how Christianity is the only true religion, the way of Righteousness and
Peace and Love?
This was in Poland. Similar things happened in Russia--and I hate to be the one to tell you, but they still do. The Russian Orthodox Church still turns a blind eye to, or even tacitly encourages, the worst and most vicious kinds of Jew-hatred--and we have seen it promoted on this very board.
Those things don't happen much in Poland any more. Virtually all of the Polish Jews are dead. Other than the few that escaped to America and Israel, they went into the gas chambers and the ovens. Out of more than 5 million Polish Jews before the war, there were only 50.000 left at war's end.
Germany and Poland were both overwhelmingly Christian nations. If the Holocaust was not the fault of Christians, then who? You were the only ones there. WE didn't do it.
Do you really think Christianity is going to have much appeal for us anytime soon?
Your response, no doubt, will be "I had nothing to do with that."
Your faith did. Explicitly, deliberately, and as a matter of formal teaching and doctrine, for centuries. You have seen it on this very thread--and some others of you have preached a milder form of it yourselves.
The teaching that Judaism is obsolete, that now that Christ has come there is no more need for the Jews, that God is done with them and that all Jews should immediately become Christians, led directly--DIRECTLY--to mass murder on an absolutely unprecedented scale, just as it has led to mass murder on a smaller scale at frequent intervals for well over a thousand years.
The protest that "those were not true Christians" is a plain falsehood. The doctrine that the Jews killed Christ, that Jews practiced ritual murder and drank the blood of Christian children, poisoned wells and caused the Black Death, and much more, were universally taught and believed by ALL Christians till only a few hundred years ago--and were still widespread in Europe at the turn of the 20th century, and are still believed by some today. The idea that Judaism is over, now that Christ has come, is probably in your own mind and heart, and that is a very large piece of the problem; maybe the biggest.
You have never seen anything from the point of view of a Jew. You have no clue how Christianity looks from inside the synagogue.
When the basketball team at the private Jewish school where I taught for some years was about to play the team from a nearby Catholic school, our campus rabbi was horrified to learn the name of their team; it was the "Crusaders." He was absolutely furious, outraged. "Why don't we call our team the 'Jesus-Killers,' then?" he roared.
Do you know why he was so upset?
The Crusaders of the Middle Ages, on their way to the Holy Land, would often--very often--stop and casually massacre whole villages of peaceful, virtually unarmed Jews--men, women, children, the aged, infants in arms--and burn their towns to the ground, leaving nothing behind but corpses and smoldering rubble. Hundreds of villages, thousands of corpses. It was one of the worst times in Jewish history. We do not have admiring thoughts about brave men in shining armor when we hear the name "Crusader." We think of laughing cowards who made a game of throwing Jewish infants in the air and catching them on their spears--and raping their mothers as they watched their babies impaled.
All wearing the Crusaders' cross over their armor, of course.
Did you even know that?
That sort of thing happened regularly, all over Europe, all over the Mideast, for most of Western history. The Inquisition you have heard of; the Chelminitzki massacres you probably have not. Google them sometime, but don't do it after you've eaten.
And then we come to the most educated, the most religiously sophisticated, the most cultured and technologically advanced nation of its day; the center of Christian scholarship and of classical art and music, a thoroughly modern industrialized society, with a free and democratic system of government and an independent free press, where Jews were more accepted in society and more successful and secure than at any time until present-day America.
Germany in 1930.
When I was in seminary, I read a book by a Methodist scholar that affected me deeply. It was Franklin Littell's The Crucifixion of the Jews. In it, Littell says that the Holocaust is the great unhealed wound of the Christian faith. To this day, the fact that the most hideous crime in human history was perpetrated by Christians, as other Christians looked on and did nothing, has never been addressed by the Christian church or by the Christian community as a whole.
Forgive? Jews do not believe that even God can forgive a crime against another human. Only the injured have the the right to forgive the injury. Forgiveness for the Holocaust must be asked of the six million. Neither I, nor any Jew living, has the right to give it.
And how can there be forgiveness where there is no repentance? To this day, the Christian church has never acknowledged ANY responsibility for the Holocaust or for complicity in it. And before you say it had none, read what Martin Luther had to say about the Jews. Founder of the Protestant Reformation--and a good German in every way. Don't pretend otherwise; the camps were run, guarded, administered and engineered by good Catholics, Lutherans, Orthodox and Calvinists.
Littell also said that any Christian who looks at the murder of two-thirds of the Jews of Europe and at the literal rebirth of the two-millenia-dead nation of Israel after three years (cf. "three days") and does not think of Crucifixion and Resurrection isn't paying attention.
God is not finished with the Jews. The Old Covenant has not been revoked. We still have a place in the Divine Plan, and as Jews, not as ought-to-be-Christians.
Yes, it is true that some Jews have become Christians. That has always happened. How do we feel about that? For the most part, OK. People can believe as they like, and go in peace. But there is a bit of history there, too.
In earlier generations, Jews converted at sword's point, or in the shadow of the stake, or on the rack with red-hot irons poised over their genitals. "Come to Jesus" had a slightly different tone then. Some chose baptism over torment and death, and we understood. Peace to them, and we let them go.
But very, very many Jews refused. The great rabbi Akiva has been cited here as a source for Messianic quotes; do you know how he died? He was wrapped in a Torah scroll and burned alive, with a roll of wet wool over his heart to keep him alive in the flames as long as possible. He had been forbidden to teach Torah, and refused to stop.
I fudge on the kosher laws quite often; many Jews do. I often eat unkosher meat, and sometimes I even "don't want to know" if there's milk or cheese in a meat dish.
But I won't eat pork.
In the concentration camps--and though you have heard the names of only a few, there were literally thousands of them all over Europe--there was very little food. The Nazis had carefully calculated the precise number of calories that would allow them to extract the last bit of labor from their prisoners while starving them to death. A typical day's ration would be a half-cup of watery spoiled-vegetable broth and a quarter of a raw turnip.
But every year, on Yom Kippur--when observant Jews do not eat or drink at all--the Nazis would treat the prisoners to sumptuous feasts; fat, juicy sausages, thick slabs of roasted meat, ribs and chops and steaks, served with bread, vegetables, fruits and all the trimmings.
All pork, of course.
It was a deliberate bit of humiliation, and it was considered great fun when the starving Jews ate the forbidden meat on their holiest day, a day of prayer and fasting.
Now the rabbis in the camps would eat the food themselves, to show the people that it was all right; there is almost no Commandment that cannot be broken to save a human life.
But there were some that would not eat on Yom Kippur. They would rather die. And they did.
As the well-fed Christian guards watched and laughed.
All through our history, there have been Jews commanded to eat pork, with knives to their throats or guns to their heads, and they would not; and they died. There are other meats as unkosher as pork, but for whatever reason, pork has become a symbol of forbidden food for Jews, both to us and to our enemies.
Eat pork willingly? How could I? When so many who came before me laid down their lives before they would eat it, in token of their faith?
Some have asked why a Jew is allowed to be an atheist and yet remain a Jew--but a Jew who confesses faith in Jesus is not. This is why.
Do not blame us. Blame the Christians who tried to force us to baptism for centuries with dungeon, fire and sword.
Jesus himself talked about this, you know. Something about those who would not enter in, but allowed no one else to enter, either. Who did you think he was talking about? Jews?
Do you not know that those phony preachers on TV actually drive people away from your faith? Why do you tolerate them in silence?
How much more have my people been driven away?
A Jew who follows Jesus is free to do so, and peace be upon him; but he is no longer one of us. When so many of us had molten lead poured down their throats as the alternative to baptism, how should we feel about one who takes the side of the pourers?
Jesus was never our enemy. We think Jesus was a very nice guy, if a little misguided. But don't ask if we think Christians have been our enemies. History will have an answer for you.
Is anyone here ashamed?
Why not?
S***** has been spreading the most vicious and evil kind of antisemitic excrement on this very thread. Did YOU respond to it?
Few did. Most just pretended he wasn't there--"nothing to do with ME or MY faith." A few Christians spoke out against him--two? three?-- but who has been most vocal? Myself--and a professed atheist!
Where were the Christians?
We asked that same question from 1933 till 1945. Where were the Christians?
Has anything changed?
Did YOU have anything to say when you saw Jews accused of Christ-killing, Satan worship, ritual murder, and religious cannibalism, right here before your very eyes?
Why should I believe you'd have done anything if you saw Jews being loaded into trucks and cattle cars? Millions of your fellow Christians didn't.
"You dare to equate not posting something to a nut on the Internet with complacency in the face of the Holocaust?"
Damn right.
If you can't be bothered to post a rebuke to literally Satanic hatred from the anonymity of your keyboard, why would anyone think you would have the stones to face down men with guns? Fat chance.
(Yes, a very, very few did; and of them you may be proud. But do not pretend that they were more than a tiny, brave minority. If ALL the Christians had stood up, Hitler could have murdered no one at all.)
When Christians, as Christians, have something to say to Jews on the order of "Yes, we did all this to your people, and we did it for centuries, and we did it in Jesus's name, and it was horribly wrong, and we are sorry," then Jews will have a reason to listen.
But to sit on top of a mountain of Jewish skulls and ignore it, and preach to us about what WE have to do to go to Heaven--
Words fail me.
Maybe these:
"Take the beam out of your own eye before you try to take the speck out of your brother's."
Oh, yes, and this:
"By their fruits ye shall know them."
What do the "fruits" of Christianity look like, do you suppose, to a Jew?
If you read the foully evil fulminations of S***** and posted nothing, you have no right whatever to complain about this post.
None.
At.
All.
Have you denied Jesus before men with your silence?
What will you do now?
Repent--or attack?
This guy believes in the International Jewish Conspiracy. He believes that Jews worship Satan. He even believes the Blood Libel--that Jews commit ritual murder and drink the blood of Christian children as a sacrament.
Now I've been posting on various boards for maybe ten years, and I've dealt with a lot of antisemites, but this is the first time I've seen that.
After ten pages of posts, this my latest--a bit of perspective, perhaps, on why I get so irritated when people mistake me for a Christian or say there is no difference:
------
There is a reason besides Scriptural interpretation that more Jews don't become Christians, and it's worth considering. It looms rather large in the minds of many Jews whenever the subject comes up.
As I posted earlier:
"Even if your way IS the right one, can you understand how hard it is for Jews to listen to those who tell us to abandon and betray everthing that has sustained us and helped us to survive as we have for almost 4.000 years, in favor of a system of belief that makes no sense to us and seems contrary to some of the most basic tenets of our faith?
"Is there any intellectual argument, any logic of history, any proof text, any Biblical insight, any line of reasoning, any words from any authority figure, even from your own faith, that could convince you to spit on the Cross, admit that Jesus did not rise from the dead, give up Heaven, throw away the entire New Testament, laugh at Christian martyrs as fools, and turn your back on your spiritual ancestors of two thousand years? Is there anything at all that could convince you to do that?"
Especially if the people trying to convince you had a history of murdering, torturing, burning, banishing and harassing your people for almost as long?
We're not just talking Bible verses and theology here. History has a voice, too.
Think on that for a moment. I personally know an elderly Jewish woman who shudders and crosses the street to avoid walking in front of a Christian church. The sight of a cross makes her frown blackly, and sometimes she spits on the ground.
She has a very good reason; in her childhood in Eastern Europe, the Christians would beat Jews and occasionally kill them (with no official consequences) if they caught one too near their house of worship. They thought their presence a contamination.
She stays indoors on Easter, trembling in fear with the blinds closed and the doors locked, for a similar reason; in her home town, gangs of Christians would roam the streets on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, looking for Jews to punish for killing their Savior. Easter Jew-murders were rather common, and punishments for them rare; none of the Christian officials in the town thought it much of a problem.
Now: How ready is she, do you think, to listen to Christians preach to her about how Christianity is the only true religion, the way of Righteousness and
Peace and Love?
This was in Poland. Similar things happened in Russia--and I hate to be the one to tell you, but they still do. The Russian Orthodox Church still turns a blind eye to, or even tacitly encourages, the worst and most vicious kinds of Jew-hatred--and we have seen it promoted on this very board.
Those things don't happen much in Poland any more. Virtually all of the Polish Jews are dead. Other than the few that escaped to America and Israel, they went into the gas chambers and the ovens. Out of more than 5 million Polish Jews before the war, there were only 50.000 left at war's end.
Germany and Poland were both overwhelmingly Christian nations. If the Holocaust was not the fault of Christians, then who? You were the only ones there. WE didn't do it.
Do you really think Christianity is going to have much appeal for us anytime soon?
Your response, no doubt, will be "I had nothing to do with that."
Your faith did. Explicitly, deliberately, and as a matter of formal teaching and doctrine, for centuries. You have seen it on this very thread--and some others of you have preached a milder form of it yourselves.
The teaching that Judaism is obsolete, that now that Christ has come there is no more need for the Jews, that God is done with them and that all Jews should immediately become Christians, led directly--DIRECTLY--to mass murder on an absolutely unprecedented scale, just as it has led to mass murder on a smaller scale at frequent intervals for well over a thousand years.
The protest that "those were not true Christians" is a plain falsehood. The doctrine that the Jews killed Christ, that Jews practiced ritual murder and drank the blood of Christian children, poisoned wells and caused the Black Death, and much more, were universally taught and believed by ALL Christians till only a few hundred years ago--and were still widespread in Europe at the turn of the 20th century, and are still believed by some today. The idea that Judaism is over, now that Christ has come, is probably in your own mind and heart, and that is a very large piece of the problem; maybe the biggest.
You have never seen anything from the point of view of a Jew. You have no clue how Christianity looks from inside the synagogue.
When the basketball team at the private Jewish school where I taught for some years was about to play the team from a nearby Catholic school, our campus rabbi was horrified to learn the name of their team; it was the "Crusaders." He was absolutely furious, outraged. "Why don't we call our team the 'Jesus-Killers,' then?" he roared.
Do you know why he was so upset?
The Crusaders of the Middle Ages, on their way to the Holy Land, would often--very often--stop and casually massacre whole villages of peaceful, virtually unarmed Jews--men, women, children, the aged, infants in arms--and burn their towns to the ground, leaving nothing behind but corpses and smoldering rubble. Hundreds of villages, thousands of corpses. It was one of the worst times in Jewish history. We do not have admiring thoughts about brave men in shining armor when we hear the name "Crusader." We think of laughing cowards who made a game of throwing Jewish infants in the air and catching them on their spears--and raping their mothers as they watched their babies impaled.
All wearing the Crusaders' cross over their armor, of course.
Did you even know that?
That sort of thing happened regularly, all over Europe, all over the Mideast, for most of Western history. The Inquisition you have heard of; the Chelminitzki massacres you probably have not. Google them sometime, but don't do it after you've eaten.
And then we come to the most educated, the most religiously sophisticated, the most cultured and technologically advanced nation of its day; the center of Christian scholarship and of classical art and music, a thoroughly modern industrialized society, with a free and democratic system of government and an independent free press, where Jews were more accepted in society and more successful and secure than at any time until present-day America.
Germany in 1930.
When I was in seminary, I read a book by a Methodist scholar that affected me deeply. It was Franklin Littell's The Crucifixion of the Jews. In it, Littell says that the Holocaust is the great unhealed wound of the Christian faith. To this day, the fact that the most hideous crime in human history was perpetrated by Christians, as other Christians looked on and did nothing, has never been addressed by the Christian church or by the Christian community as a whole.
Forgive? Jews do not believe that even God can forgive a crime against another human. Only the injured have the the right to forgive the injury. Forgiveness for the Holocaust must be asked of the six million. Neither I, nor any Jew living, has the right to give it.
And how can there be forgiveness where there is no repentance? To this day, the Christian church has never acknowledged ANY responsibility for the Holocaust or for complicity in it. And before you say it had none, read what Martin Luther had to say about the Jews. Founder of the Protestant Reformation--and a good German in every way. Don't pretend otherwise; the camps were run, guarded, administered and engineered by good Catholics, Lutherans, Orthodox and Calvinists.
Littell also said that any Christian who looks at the murder of two-thirds of the Jews of Europe and at the literal rebirth of the two-millenia-dead nation of Israel after three years (cf. "three days") and does not think of Crucifixion and Resurrection isn't paying attention.
God is not finished with the Jews. The Old Covenant has not been revoked. We still have a place in the Divine Plan, and as Jews, not as ought-to-be-Christians.
Yes, it is true that some Jews have become Christians. That has always happened. How do we feel about that? For the most part, OK. People can believe as they like, and go in peace. But there is a bit of history there, too.
In earlier generations, Jews converted at sword's point, or in the shadow of the stake, or on the rack with red-hot irons poised over their genitals. "Come to Jesus" had a slightly different tone then. Some chose baptism over torment and death, and we understood. Peace to them, and we let them go.
But very, very many Jews refused. The great rabbi Akiva has been cited here as a source for Messianic quotes; do you know how he died? He was wrapped in a Torah scroll and burned alive, with a roll of wet wool over his heart to keep him alive in the flames as long as possible. He had been forbidden to teach Torah, and refused to stop.
I fudge on the kosher laws quite often; many Jews do. I often eat unkosher meat, and sometimes I even "don't want to know" if there's milk or cheese in a meat dish.
But I won't eat pork.
In the concentration camps--and though you have heard the names of only a few, there were literally thousands of them all over Europe--there was very little food. The Nazis had carefully calculated the precise number of calories that would allow them to extract the last bit of labor from their prisoners while starving them to death. A typical day's ration would be a half-cup of watery spoiled-vegetable broth and a quarter of a raw turnip.
But every year, on Yom Kippur--when observant Jews do not eat or drink at all--the Nazis would treat the prisoners to sumptuous feasts; fat, juicy sausages, thick slabs of roasted meat, ribs and chops and steaks, served with bread, vegetables, fruits and all the trimmings.
All pork, of course.
It was a deliberate bit of humiliation, and it was considered great fun when the starving Jews ate the forbidden meat on their holiest day, a day of prayer and fasting.
Now the rabbis in the camps would eat the food themselves, to show the people that it was all right; there is almost no Commandment that cannot be broken to save a human life.
But there were some that would not eat on Yom Kippur. They would rather die. And they did.
As the well-fed Christian guards watched and laughed.
All through our history, there have been Jews commanded to eat pork, with knives to their throats or guns to their heads, and they would not; and they died. There are other meats as unkosher as pork, but for whatever reason, pork has become a symbol of forbidden food for Jews, both to us and to our enemies.
Eat pork willingly? How could I? When so many who came before me laid down their lives before they would eat it, in token of their faith?
Some have asked why a Jew is allowed to be an atheist and yet remain a Jew--but a Jew who confesses faith in Jesus is not. This is why.
Do not blame us. Blame the Christians who tried to force us to baptism for centuries with dungeon, fire and sword.
Jesus himself talked about this, you know. Something about those who would not enter in, but allowed no one else to enter, either. Who did you think he was talking about? Jews?
Do you not know that those phony preachers on TV actually drive people away from your faith? Why do you tolerate them in silence?
How much more have my people been driven away?
A Jew who follows Jesus is free to do so, and peace be upon him; but he is no longer one of us. When so many of us had molten lead poured down their throats as the alternative to baptism, how should we feel about one who takes the side of the pourers?
Jesus was never our enemy. We think Jesus was a very nice guy, if a little misguided. But don't ask if we think Christians have been our enemies. History will have an answer for you.
Is anyone here ashamed?
Why not?
S***** has been spreading the most vicious and evil kind of antisemitic excrement on this very thread. Did YOU respond to it?
Few did. Most just pretended he wasn't there--"nothing to do with ME or MY faith." A few Christians spoke out against him--two? three?-- but who has been most vocal? Myself--and a professed atheist!
Where were the Christians?
We asked that same question from 1933 till 1945. Where were the Christians?
Has anything changed?
Did YOU have anything to say when you saw Jews accused of Christ-killing, Satan worship, ritual murder, and religious cannibalism, right here before your very eyes?
Why should I believe you'd have done anything if you saw Jews being loaded into trucks and cattle cars? Millions of your fellow Christians didn't.
"You dare to equate not posting something to a nut on the Internet with complacency in the face of the Holocaust?"
Damn right.
If you can't be bothered to post a rebuke to literally Satanic hatred from the anonymity of your keyboard, why would anyone think you would have the stones to face down men with guns? Fat chance.
(Yes, a very, very few did; and of them you may be proud. But do not pretend that they were more than a tiny, brave minority. If ALL the Christians had stood up, Hitler could have murdered no one at all.)
When Christians, as Christians, have something to say to Jews on the order of "Yes, we did all this to your people, and we did it for centuries, and we did it in Jesus's name, and it was horribly wrong, and we are sorry," then Jews will have a reason to listen.
But to sit on top of a mountain of Jewish skulls and ignore it, and preach to us about what WE have to do to go to Heaven--
Words fail me.
Maybe these:
"Take the beam out of your own eye before you try to take the speck out of your brother's."
Oh, yes, and this:
"By their fruits ye shall know them."
What do the "fruits" of Christianity look like, do you suppose, to a Jew?
If you read the foully evil fulminations of S***** and posted nothing, you have no right whatever to complain about this post.
None.
At.
All.
Have you denied Jesus before men with your silence?
What will you do now?
Repent--or attack?
)
