Hate Your Neighbor Week
The right is celebrating the kick-off of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week Islamophobia Wallowing Week. Christianists everywhere are leaping on OBL tapes that they joyfully announce have arrived just in time for the festivities; attacking the "leftist-Islamist axis" (i.e., anyone who objects to the idea that a religion with roughly 1.5 billion adherents is the source of all evil in the world); and cataloging the horrors that Islam will visit upon us all if it achieves its goal of dominating the world.
Dr. Rusty Shackleford tells us that Christians are not free under "sharia" (sharia in this context is a synonym for Islam) because they can't try to convert Muslims. He appears to be perfectly serious:
Christians are not free under sharia. The final command Jesus gave to his followers was to go and make believers of the world. Sharia forbids Christians from proselytizing Muslims. How can one be a Christian under sharia when one is not allowed to practice a fundamental requirement of the religion.
Christopher Hitchens studiously lists the qualities of Islam that make it fascistic and, I have to admit, he convinces me ... that he is describing the United States under George W. Bush (links, probably needless to say, are all mine):
... The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.
It's the most wonderful time of the year.
6 comments:
I commented at Jawa Report the following:
"You say, "The final command Jesus gave to his followers was to go and make believers of the world."
This statement has exactly what to do with Islam and/or Christianity ?
Jesus (whatever his last name was) was a Jew. And he was an ultra-conservative radical (throwing money changers out of the temple). The folks that wrote the new testament were not even born when Jesus was executed. They never knew him."
Not only that, but Christianity did not exist as a separate religion until several centuries after Jesus died. It was a sect within Judaism until then. Jesus himself was an observant Jew and did not view himself as "the messiah" or as the founder of a new religion. That was others, and it came much later.
Hey Kathy!
What do you mean Jesus never considered himself the messiah?
Take Care
Joan
What do you mean Jesus never considered himself the messiah?
Just that. He felt jewish practice had become corrupt and hypocritical, but he had no thought of starting a new religion with himself at the center of it. He did not see himself as the "son of God," or as "the Christ." If anything, he would probably have called himself a rabbi, or a teacher (which is what rabbi means). Jesus did not write the New Testament. His followers wrote it, long after he died, and I think most if not all of them were born after he was crucified.
None of this is radical or revisionist, Joan. It's really pretty much the established understanding in Christian religious scholarship and among historians of Christianity and Judaism.
Hi There!
I agree Jesus was an observant Jew. I also agree that Jesus was probably not thinking of starting a new religion. But everything points to the fact that he did think he was the messiah. He thought his teachings would irrevocably change Judaism, which is of course different from thinking he was starting a new religion. I don't know what Christian scholarship you are referring to, but I never heard of it. Everything attributed to him doesn't make any sense if he did not know himself to be the messiah. There is no doubt that he saw himself as the way to salvation. I think that would mean he had his mind on something greater than a really learned rabbi.
Take Care
Joan
Everything attributed to him doesn't make any sense if he did not know himself to be the messiah.
Why not? Why would Jesus have to have believed himself to be "the messiah" in order for others who came later to have believed that he was the messiah and convinced others that he was?
I am certainly no expert on Christianity, but the statement "There is no doubt that he saw himself as the way to salvation" seems to me clearly wrong in its certainty. I don't think there is such absolute certainty on this point.
What IS pretty much universally acknowledged among religious scholars (and really everyone who is reasonably well educated about the Judeo-Christian tradition)is that the Christian concept of salvation through belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God was developed largely by Paul (formerly Saul of Tarsus). He is the one who began to separate Christianity from Judaism. There's much more to this than I can possibly write here, but my understanding from what I've read is that it's pretty much beyond reasonable question that Paul is the one who came to see belief in a personal messiah (Jesus) as superseding the Torah and Jewish law -- an extremely controversial view at the time.
No one knows what Jesus thought or believed except through what Christians call the New Testament, and Jesus did not write the New Testament. He was dead long before it was written.
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