Re: Re: Re: The root cause of HATE/ANGER towards our fellowman..Plez vote and comment.
nbcrusader said:
Scripture states that the Jews are God?s chosen people. The Elect is another term for Christian. The doctrine of election simply states that God knew who would come to faith in Christ before the creation of the world.
The Old Testament indeed states that Jews are God's "chosen people," but Jesus came to Earth and wholly rejected that claim. St. Paul makes an equal condemnation of that claim, and his entire Church of Antioch (ideological and chronological predecessor to the entire Christian Church) emphasized on Gentiles--e.g., the excluded. I believe that the entire concept of "chosen people" is an archaic relic of polytheism, as I'm sure the Philistines were the "chosen people" of Baal. Since we don't believe in polytheism, the idea of "chosen people" is ridiculous. Aren't we all equal children of God?
Is there a continuing history of Jews and Christians trying to destroy all those who are not believers? I think not. Quite the opposite ? Jews have a continuing history of being targets for hatred. Christians also are being imprisoned or killed today as a result of their faith.
Read the Bible, for instance. In conquering Canaan in the book of Joshua, God supposedly commands Joshua to evoke "the Ban," which commanded the murder of every last man, woman, and child, along with all property of all sorts. Of course, then there are the evocations of justified rape in Deuteronomy:
"When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, and seeth among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; then thou shalt bring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; and she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and remain in thine house . . . And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou hast humbled her" (Deuteronomy 21:10-14).
But hey...we can tell that there is justice here. I mean, they were allowed to "humble her" and divorce her, but they can't sell her!
But, yes, there is a shift of persecution, and the tone of Judaism changes, *especially* in post-Biblical medieval Jewish scripture. In fact, the Talmuds so rejected most of the bombasticism of the Mosaic Law that they voided it entirely; hence, why reform and conservative Judaism is looked at disdainfully by Orthodox Judaism, which still does believe in the Mosaic Law.
While I have sympathy for post-Biblical Judaism, the same courtesy I do not extend to Christianity. Was there a sense of persecution in the early Church? Yes, indeed; but that ended the minute Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and made it the state religion of the Roman Empire. Christianity switched from being the oppressed to being the oppressor; a machine of imperialism more interested in the control aspects of religion than anything. I mean, how else could imperial Europe keep the entire population enslaved for 1000 years in feudalism? Guilt. Telling everyone that it is God's will that they are serfs, and, equally, that it is God's will that certain people are wealthy and powerful; hence, you would be sinning against God to defy this classification. A complex system of controlling every aspect of living, telling them that pleasure is sinful and misery is godliness. Then there's the Inquisition. Oh my...you should read some of the torture techniques they used. Hanging someone upside down and systematically sawing them in half, starting from the most "sensitive" parts of our bodies. The glory of Christianity!
Of course, the Protestant Reformation comes, and we get new oppression. John Calvin, the ideological founder of most American Protestant sects, rather than set a new example when he conquered Geneva, Switzerland, sets up a counter-Reformation and kills everyone who won't convert to his religion. Rather than reject the modes of control that the Catholic Church constructed to stay in power, they just crank it up a notch to consolidate their own control. How can we culturally forget Jonathan Edwards' famous "fire and brimstone" sermon?
Hell, damnation...does man seemingly do anything right? Oh wait...we supposedly live in an *especially* evil time. At least, that's what the Christians tell me. Even more evil than 1000 years of enslavement; a Church run entirely by the royalty that practiced especially gruesome torture; a religious doctrine that made everyone believe that sex, even in procreation, was a sinful extension of lust; the Bubonic Plague that killed 1/3 of Europe; and smallpox that would kill most of its victims and leave the rest horribly disfigured, if not blind. Heh...whomever said people were ever good at history?
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Of course, let me allay any confusion: I am a devout Christian, but--maybe I was from another planet in another dimension--all these ideas of guilt, self-loathing, and general complexity was completely foreign to me until I was 18. Creationism and the ideas expoused by the Christian Coalition I believed to be long extinct, killed in the 19th century when man was able to reconcile between God and science. How wrong I found myself to be, and I have a hard time finding Jesus in all this mess. Of course, the response I get from some Christians is "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34). And all I can say to that is that Jesus would never have had to come at all; we've always done a great job of killing ourselves and each other.
Hatred...anger...guilt...power...control...elitism...
Melon