ANTI-SEMITISM IS WOVEN INTO THE CHRISTIAN FAITH & ITS DEVOTION TO JESUS
The Church and its ideology and influence will always be bigger than you. Don't pretend that you can give it money and pray with it and give it your children in baptism and distance yourself from its anti-semitism. Don't be an ant who denies responsibility before the elephant.
On Good Friday and at other times, the
Churches read John's gospel. And that includes the line where
Jesus without qualification blames the Jews for him being on trial
for his life. In John 18:36 Jesus tells Pilate that he has no
kingdom on earth for if he had it would fight to keep him from being
handed over to the Jews. Trying to make out it means only certain
Jews or Judeans and therefore not Jews is not an option. Don't
try to get around an anti-semitist text. Don't forget that if
he did blame all Jews, this is not a deal-breaker for Christians
even if they admit he was trying to impute evil to them all.
That is appalling.
The Church got a lot of power over Jews
especially women and children and got a lot of property by advancing
the blood libel myth. But do not forget that the story that the Jews
manipulated and forced the Romans to execute Jesus on a cross and
set him up is the biggest blood libel myth of all. The work,
The Life and Passion of St William the Martyr of Norwich lies that
William was killed by Jews in 1144 AD for his faith as part of a
ritual they associated with Passover. Miracles were rife as if
in confirmation of this creature being used to hurt Jews.
William had an uncle, a priest, called Godwin Sturt who made the
claims and the Church enabled him and give him his platform of hate.
A lot of blood libels have been issued by the Church with impunity.
No compensation was ever paid to the victims. The Church did
not regard the sin of antisemitism as much of a sin for it canonised
saints who hated Jews and lied about them. The whole atmosphere was
one of permission. And those who wished to speak out could not
or chose not to out of love for Jesus.
TRADITION FORMS CHURCHES AND IS THEIR FABRIC
The thinkers of the Church and its tradition preservers and who father the Church in a sense are anti-Semitists.
In the book, Portraits of Paul, Malina and Neyrey show how “in the ancient world, people took their major identity from the various groups to which they belonged.” They say there were no individuals as such just a “collectivist culture”. This is true and the Bible teaches that the Church is the body of Christ which is why the whole body is to blame for the sin of a member. This teaching silences those who wish to use the few bad apples thinking when members of their religion do harm. It is their responsibility too. Their enrolling babies into the religion is a total abomination in that light. Sectarian enrollment grows into sectarian violence. Consent is very important when there are issues around collective responsibility. Christianity however has preferred to impute collective responsibility to the Jews rather than itself. As we shall now see.
~ St. Justin Martyr: I hold that those of the seed of Abraham who live according to the Law of Moses and who do not believe in Christ before death shall likewise not be saved; and especially shall they not be saved who curse this very Christ in the synagogues and who curse everything by which they might obtain salvation and escape the vengeance of fire.
~ St. Amphilocius of Iconium: God abhors those who refuse to offer to His Son the honor they pretend to pay to Himself.
~ St. John Chrysostom: How dare Christians have the slightest intercourse with Jews, those most miserable of all men. They are lustful, rapacious, greedy, perfidious bandits -- pests of the universe! Indeed, an entire day would not suffice to tell of all their rapine, their avarice, their deception of the poor, their thievery, and their huckstering. Are they not inveterate murderers, destroyers, men possessed by the devil? Jews are impure and impious, and their synagogue is a house of prostitution, a lair of beasts, a place of shame and ridicule, the domicile of the devil, as is also the soul of the Jew. As a matter of fact, Jews worship the devil: their rites are criminal and unchaste; their religion a disease; their synagogue an assembly of crooks, a den of thieves, a cavern of devils, an abyss of perdition! Why are Jews degenerate? Because of their hateful assassination of Christ. This supreme crime lies at the root of their degradation and woes. The rejection and dispersion of the Jews was the work of God, not of emperors. It was done by the wrath of God and because of His absolute abandonment of the Jews. Thus, the Jew will live under the yoke of slavery without end. God hates the Jews, and on Judgment Day He will say to those who sympathize with them., "Depart from Me, for you have had intercourse with My murderers!" Flee, then, from their assemblies, fly from their houses, and, far from venerating the synagogue, hold it in hatred and aversion.
~ St. Polycarp of Smyrna: Whosoever does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is Antichrist, and whosoever does not profess the testimony of the cross is a devil, and whosoever perverts the saying of the Lord to his own evil desires ... is the first-born of Satan.
The latter was a friend of John the apostle. Even without the anti-Semitism of the New Testament we would still know from tradition and the prevalence of Christian hate for the Jewish that the founders of the faith were outrageous bigots and absolute proof of how bigoted doctrines will produce violence when the bigots are able to inflict it.
THE CHURCH PUBLISHES ANTI-SEMITIST MATERIAL
Jews are a religion and also a race. The religion and the race are so intertwined that there is no essential difference between them. Thus opposition to Jews on religious grounds is racism or so close to it that it will spill over into shameless racism.
Church history is riddled with anti-Semitism. So accepted was it that the writings of notorious anti-Semitists were preserved by the Church and distributed as inspirational.
They still are - Chesterton is highly regarded as a Catholic CS Lewis in every Catholic level from ground to pope. He is venerated as a top Catholic writer, influence, authority and future saint though and often because his writings are riddled with anti-Semitism and religious rancour towards Jews. His devotees confessed that his faith and his writings promoted views that enabled and helped validate the Nazi regime. That did not stop them or the Church from advocating people to peruse them. And that goes on today. For him, the Jew is "a traitor in France and a tyrant in England". The Jew must be distinguished in appearance from others: "The point is that we should know where we are; and he would know where he is, which is in a foreign land".
Anti-Semitism is both accepted and practiced aggressively. It is only in recent years that somewhat nicer statements have come which shows that the Christian religion is a purely human construct pretending to be holier than what it is. Holocaust deniers deserve what they get but the Church gets away with worse.
Frank Mc Donough in 2001 informed us that "active resistance against Nazism was undertaken by less than 1 per cent of the German population." As Christianity was the one link between them, it is clear that it subtly, latently and also, without shame, practically - perhaps through deliberate negligence, negligence can be an action should be called to account for its role in the worst sectarian bloodbath in history.
THE EXPERTS
Cardinal Lustinger was born Jewish. He became Catholic and was Archbishop of Paris. Of the opposing Nazi regime he said, “At the heart of the opponent’s ideology was the persecution of the chosen people, the Jewish people, because they were a messianic people. When as a child I spent time in Nazi Germany, I had understood: Nazism’s aim was more than Promethean; it was Satanic.”
It was not just Promethean like people taking from gods to put themselves in their place but not as gods but as superior human beings. It was religious. If Satan and Satanic are only in the heads of Christians then the religion must take the blame for the Nazis. We need only indirect endorsement which is worse than direct for it is stronger and more manipulative.
Karen Armstrong: "There is nothing in the Islam that is more violent than Christianity. All religions have been violent, including Christianity. There was nothing in the Muslim world like anti-Semitism: that is an import of the modern period. They got it from us. The missionaries brought it over. And then came the state of Israel. Judaism has become violent in the modern world, thanks to the nation state...My message is not that religion has nothing to do with violence. It has always been implicated in it, and trying to take religion out of politics and warfare would have been like taking the gin out of the cocktail. It is inextricably intertwined." www.nieuwwij.nl 2015.
FINALLY
The notion that the New Testament could be right that Jesus rose from the dead to be with us forever and help us even if it lies about Jews and tries to whip up hatred against them seems reasonable. It is not. The point of the resurrection was to inspire us to be good and holy and that cannot happen if the authority saying it happened is poisonous. Anything toxic like that does damage to us that we are not even aware of. Poison does the obvious but there are other things it does too that are less clear. Christians by saying the Bible validates the resurrection even if it is caught lying about the Jews makes no sense. Lies ensure that you cannot trust the other stories. And lies have to mingle with truth to survive so if Jesus's holy resurrection is doing that then how holy is it really? The assertion that the resurrection is a core doctrine trivialises the seriousness of the anti-Semitism assuming it is there. And it is there.
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