In truth though, while Bad Guys have to (re)interpret passages of scripture that say things like love one another or turn the other cheek, modern Christians have to perform similar feats of interpretation on bibical stories such as the many genocides.
Both the (OT) Bible and the Qur’an seem to take the line “If another tribe is doing something you don’t approve of – KILL THEM ALL”, with no exceptions made for how culpable particular individuals are. If you’re a Canaanite child who doesn’t even realise another tribe claims ownership of your land…well, that’s too bad.
What I am saying is not that the Qura’an contains passages telling people to kill those they disapprove of, but rather to refrain from killing unless these people attack…an eye for an eye but it is better to forgive is what the Qu’an says.
Surrah 109, (The disbelievers)Al Kafirun :
1- Say: O disbelievers
2- I worship not that which ye worship;
3- Nor worship ye that which I worship’
4- And I shall not worship that which ye worship
5- Nor will ye worship that which I worship
6- Unto you your religion, and unto me religion.
the repetion in this verse is to re enforce the words clearly.
What I stated was that some one like Osama Ben Laden, who was armed & backed financially by the west and asked to step into Afghanistan to rid it of “the evil of the communist Russians” according to their twisting of the scriptures to make it viable,then the west turned on him and gave him the excuse to extract half passages from Qu’anic verses, twisting the meanings to give him the right to lash back at the west which had backed and armed him then betrayed him. But the twisting of Qu’anic passages out of sheer ignorance has created an unprecedented fear of a religion for both Moslems and non Moslems who have not taken the time to read and understand. Moslems know that the religion of Jesus pbu was not meant to be violent, he spent his life between Palestine and Egypt, hiding out from Romans and Jews; the Romans twisting his words, and the Jews, twisting the Torah and denying his existance altogether as the Messiah as they deny that Mohamed pbu is also in the Torah. If they do not believe in all the Messengers and prophets of God, then Moslems may not claim Islam as their religion.
I’m sorry, are you trying to argue that Torquemada was not a Christian, that Richard the Lionhearted was not a Christian, that Bush is not a Christian, etc? I’m pretty certain that the vast majority of historians etc would disagree with you. By all accounts these folks were sincere in their beliefs and believed that their actions were acceptable to those religious beliefs. If you think their interpretations of Christianity are wrong, that is your perogative, but you don’t get to kick them out.
Wait, what?
Well, you are certainly welcome to hold that interpretation, but how do you get to be right about God’s message over any one else? The Bible certainly has passages where God sends the Hebrews out to slaughter their enemies, laying waste to whole villages, killing every male and all married women and little children, then slaughtering all the livestock in the village as well because it is apparently unclean just by being owned by those infidels.
Okay, I thought that was what you implied. This whole topic is of course a wide hijack from the thread, so we should probably start a new thread to discuss. What I’m getting from your statements is that America was at fault for betraying Bin Laden and that is why he turned against the West. I would really like to see some more detailed explanation of that statement, because it is dramatically counter to my understanding that Bin Laden turned against the West first. He didn’t need to be betrayed, the fundamentalist extremist version of Islam that led him to fight the Soviets was also the same set of ideas that made him anti-West and the immorality it represents.
As far as behavior as an indicator of belief, think of it this way:
The Kingdom of God requires nothing more than simple reliance on the tenets as espoused by a certain Jesus as proof of citizenship.
However, Item One of Line One of said tenet says, guess what, Jesus is now your Boss. So if you truly believe, you’d better be prepared to live out the life that Jesus says to live.
The sticking point gets to “well, what exactly did Jesus mean by ‘turn the other cheek’ and all that jazz”?
Whether or not Hitler got into Heaven is not something we’ll know for sue until we get up there ourselves. This answer is probably easier for the atheist: of course he didn’t since the afterlife doesn’t exist. As a Christian, I’m leaning on the “no” side, because his actions do show a pretty consistent pattern of thumbing his nose at almost everything Jesus said in the Bible (except a very few statements that he took out of context to serve his own agenda).
Ditto Bush, or Obama, or every other President for that matter. They’ll be called on to answer for their actions, both personally and as heads of State. Whether or not they are Christian or claim to be such, we can still call them to the carpet if we think they’re just using their professed faith as a paper-thin excuse for their actions.
I don’t think that distinguishes sufficiently among those who profess to be Christian because, for nearly 2,000 years, Christianity has been Flavor of the Week, those who profess to be Christian because it’s an excuse to feel superior, those who do have genuinely Christian convictions, but lack the courage or the determination to follow through, and the similar ones who also have Christian convictions, but find themselves in a casuistic dilemma.
I think the question of whether Hitler was a Christian places too much importance on Hitler’s responsibility for the antisemitism in Nazi Germany. When the question is asked, it’s usually really a question about whther Christianity itself was responsible for the Holocaust. That racist ideology was not created by Hitler, though, so his own religious self-identification is immaterial. Antisemitism in Germany – and all over Europe – was a product of centuries of antisemitic preaching from Christian pulpits. Pogroms were a long-standing tradition long before Hitler got there. He just exploited what already existed. He stoked the fire, but he didn’t start it. Christianity started that fire almost from its outset and kept it burning for 2000 years. Denying Hitler’s Christianity does not let Christianity off the hook.
Yet many Christians spoke out against antisemitism. For every antisemitic Christian there was one who opposed that. Plus none of the antisemite Christians actually advocated total racial extermination.
He can only know that if someone had done a proper search for just such data and failed to come up with anything. Such a paper, peer reviewed, would satisfy me. My feeling is that as a religious apologist he just saying it because he feels it ought to be true of his cherished religion, but we shall see.
This is bullshit. The sentiment among the vast majority of Christians for most of the history of Christendom has been decidedly antisemitic. Jews were ghettoized for centuries, the blood libel was widely believed and pogroms were routine. This anti-Jewish hostility is built right into Christian theology and is present in Christian scripture itself. Antisemitism exists because of Christianity.
That would have been an unrealistically ambitious goal in pre-modern times, but it didn’t stop pogroms, the Inquisition, etc. You can’t extricate Christianity from its role in antisemitism and for all those centuries of anti-Jewish hatred being taught, sanctioned and institutionalized by the Church culminating in the ultimate pogrom under Hitler.
Well, it could be argued accurately that there were no Muslims at all when the Synod of Elvira, in 306 AD, prohibited intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Christians and Jews, and prohibited them from eating together.
There were no Muslims at all in 529-534 when the Justinian Code was promulgated. A section of the code negated civil rights for Jews. Once the code was enforced, Jews in the Empire could not build synagogues, read the Bible in Hebrew, gather in public places, celebrate Passover before Easter, or give evidence in a judicial case in which a Christian was a party.
There were no Muslims at all when the Councils of Orleans (533-541) prohibited marriages between Christians and Jews and forbade the conversion to Judaism by Christians.
That’s because Muhammad started receiving his revelations from God/Allah in 610. Before that time, legal, social, and Christian religious precedent had already been established penalizing and discriminating specifically against Jews. That’s at least one passable definition of antisemitisim.
So it’s historical fact that anitsemitism was established as a practice – by Christians – before Muslims per se walked the planet. Whether that has anything to do with Muslim prejudices is of course a separate debate.
To my mind, the pinning of responsibility on Christians for the Nazi Holocaust is a bit of a red herring. Certainly, the Nazis made Jew-hating a central plank of their platform because of cultural anti-Semitism, which descended ultimately from the legacy left by Christianity (though it had been absorbed by the 1930s by many who were not in the least Christian) … but that only influenced their choice of one target (or perhaps two targets, as one could also argue that cultural homophobia ultimately has Christian roots). They also targeted Roma, certain Slavs, the mentally challenged, Communists, etc. about all of whom the cultural legacy of Christianity had nothing to say whatsoever.
It was not the cultural legacy of Christianity that made them murderous, it simply influenced to an extent their choice of victim. Arguably, absent that legacy they would not have killed Jews, but the better argument is they would still have killed, on the same scale; killing undesireables was a central part of the Nazi creed, as it evolved through the war.
I ddin’t say all antisemites were Christian, I said antisemitism wouldn’t exist without Christianity. Islamic hostility towards Jews is far more political than religious anyway. How much Muslim hostility towards Jews was there before the creation of Israel?
That’s probably the subject of another thread: suffice it to say that Muslim Jew-hatred existed prior to the modern era, and was justified on occasion by the text of the Koran, but it was uneven and not generally as virulent as in Christendom. In some places (Islamic Spain is often cited) Jews rose to positions of prominence; but there were also anti-Jewish riots and progroms.
While there are all sorts of social and cultural reasons for ethnic tensions in both cases, the religious justification is that Jews, like Christians, rejected the new revelation of Mohammed and the hatred comes from pretty much the same source as that of Christian Jew-hatred: that the early Muslims were competing with Jews for religious prominence, just like the early Christians were.
This lead the early Christians to emphasize the “negative” characteristics of Judaism (their competitors) and to pin the “blame” for the cruxifiction of Jesus on ‘the Jews’, just as Mohammed had reason to dislike the Jewish-Arab tribes of Medina (and eventually had them all killed or exiled) - they were, at least originally, the competition, and had more serious religious legitimacy (that of primacy). They had to be taken down or denegrated, for the new religion to expand.
Of course, one the new religion (be it Christianity or Islam) was established, this purpose evaporated, but the legacy remained imbedded in the texts.
Roman attitudes towards Jews were no different than Roman attitudes towards any other non-Romans. They didn’t like it if Jews wouldn’t honor the state gods, but there was no antisemitism as such. Jews were allowed to be Roman citizens and observe Jewish law (Paul was a Roman citizen). The Roman government was really pretty indifferent to them, though some writers commented on the weirdness they perceived in Jewish customs, dietary habits and religious rules. Jews were not persecuted in Rome. They were actually treated pretty well for a conquered people.
The subject of the treatment of Jews under the Romans is worthy of yet another thread - and I know little about it.
But aside from the obvious conflicts created by the Jewish revolt(s), didn’t the Emperor Claudius exile the Jews from Rome itself? What were his reasons for that?
