Why doesn't christians hate pizza store owners for the fact they killed Jesus?

Great Debates
41

I didn’t expect you to. I was pointing out that **APB ** did, and you declined to respond the his/her points by appealing to the fact that this thread is a joke.

A fact which neither advances your proposition, nor refutes anyone else’s. I could mention that the Holocaust was propogated by people who were, if anything, pagans, which would balance out your inquisition cite without advancing the argument either; so I won’t.

You’re probably right that much persecution would not have occurred in the absence of the New Testament charge against all Jews. But as APB has pointed out, persecution of the Jews did occur prior to Christianity, and the Holocaust reminds us that anti-semitism does not require Christianity to flourish.

I’m sorry, I can’t make sense of this; could you rephrase it in some way?

42

Off, I meant off, not of. aRGH. Let’s imagine that someone wants an object that belongs to a jew. He wants back up so he lists the reasons why the jew deserve to be robbed. Tries to enrage a crowd, but can’t find a big enought claim to make them really good and angry. They wander off. That is the image in my mind. Nieve? Perhaps.

Also, I find no reason for your claims that the holocaust was started by non-christians. Where in the blue blazes did that come from?

43

He’s probably referring to Nazism’s roots in Teutonic mythology. I’m not sure if you’d call Nazis pagan, but calling them Christian would not be accurate.

44

Dead-on, Marley23; thanks.

45

::boggles::

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nazi+%2Bchristian&btnG=Google+Search

I found the following:

“My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow my self to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice… And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows . For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.” –Adolf Hitler, in a speech on 12 April 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939, Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20, Oxford University Press, 1942)

“National Socialism is not a cult-movement-- a movement for worship; it is exclusively a ‘volkic’ political doctrine based upon racial principles. In its purpose there is no mystic cult, only the care and leadership of a people defined by a common blood-relationship… We will not allow mystically- minded occult folk with a passion for exploring the secrets of the world beyond to steal into our Movement. Such folk are not National Socialists, but something else-- in any case something which has nothing to do with us. At the head of our programme there stand no secret surmisings but clear-cut perception and straightforward profession of belief. But since we set as the central point of this perception and of this profession of belief the maintenance and hence the security for the future of a being formed by God, we thus serve the maintenance of a divine work and fulfill a divine will-- not in the secret twilight of a new house of worship, but openly before the face of the Lord… Our worship is exclusively the cultivation of the natural, and for that reason, because natural, therefore God-willed. Our humility is the unconditional submission before the divine laws of existence so far as they are known to us men.” -Adolf Hitler, in Nuremberg on 6 Sept.1938 "Adolf Hitler.

http://www.nobeliefs.com/images/ChildrenCross.jpg

Page from the anti-Semitic German children’s book, “Der Giftpilz” (The Poisonous Mushroom)

The text reads, “When you see a cross, then think of the horrible murder by the Jews on Golgotha…”

(see 1 Thessalonians 2:14-15, “…the Jews: Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men”

46

I don’t think the Nazis own words about themselves is the best source for this.

47

Boggle away: This site doesn’t agree with your site

We could probably play dueling-googles all day, throwing website of unknown character at each other. But that ain’t the point I was driving at. Let’s get back to the original topic, the one that you introduced. I’ll try to paraphrase your OP: “For much of history, people have hated the Jews because the Bible was written to make them do so. Bible-based hatred of the Jews is now discredited; why then has the hatred formerly reserved to the Jews not fallen on the modern-day descendants of Jesus’s real killers, the Romans?”

**APB’s ** response was that hatred (or at least persecution) of the Jews pre-dates Christianity, and that most early Jew-hating Christians probably used the Biblical injunctions as a convenient excuse for their hatred. The fact that anti-Semitism persists is an indication that real, systemic anti-Semitism probably was not driven entirely by the New Testament.

**APB ** called you on a simplistic analysis; you responded that your original post was a joke. The point of my post was that it’s not fair play in Great Debates to introduce a topic and then refuse to actually debate on it.

And now you want to hijack your own thread. . . why don’t you try finishing one conversation before starting another? There’s the potential for at least a couple really good discussions here, if you can keep yourself focused on your original thesis.

48

Sorry, there was supposed to be more there. I’m not Nazi expert, but Hitler despising the occult? PUH-LEASE! The Nazi symbol was an occult sign, and I’ve heard it said he was obsessed with that kind of stuff.

49

Why am I not surprised that you appear to be sufficiently ignorant of history as to confuse Hitler’s self-promoting claims to identify with Christianity (since Christians made up the bulk of his audience) with an actual belief in Christianity. Even your own quotations demonstrate that Hitler was using some Christian imagery twisted to his own formulation rather than actually following Christianity.

It is clearly a shameful episode in Christian history that so few Christians resisted the Nazis and that, even outside Germany, too few Christians actively attempted to stop or interfere with the extermination of Jews. It can also be noted that anti-Jewish rhetoric found a welcome among Christians whose leaders had provided anti-Jewish rhetoric and regulations in the manner of Pope Paul IV and Martin Luther.

However, attempting to claim that Hitler, himself, promoted a “Christian” tradition or that the Nazis were not enamored of the idea of supplanting (Christian) religion with their own neo-Teutonic paganism demonstrates an appalling lack of historical awareness for someone who wishes to post on the topic.

50

The Straight Dope Staff Report Was Hitler a Christian?

51

Damn those vegetarians!

52

At least he wasn’t vegan. Where would the Nazis have been wthout those spiffy boots?

53

But seriously, Tom… May I call you Tom? Inpost 41 it was claimed (as far as I can understand) that nazism was without influence of the Christians. I suspect that if a Blond, Blue Eyed Doper went back in time, and asked a nazi, if he was a good christian, said nazi would respond yes. I also believe that the existence of children’s books from Germany as I say at the Holocaust museum in Wash. D.C. promoting Christianity, as well as a lack of response from the pope when Jews were slaughtered, leads one to believe that christianity was not without blame in the Holocaust. That is not to saw that Gypsies, jehovah’s witlesses, homosexuals, and countless other groups where not also killed.
As for the main topic, give me a minute. I have a strange sense of humor, and the idea of that the holocaust was without christian influence has set me off. In fact, give me a day. I will respond to the original thesis tommorow or the next day, but I have been neglecting to read new threads in other forums, and I should sign off in a while.

54

Yes, but that’s not who Genghis was talking about. The architects of that tragedy were not your average German or even your average German soldier. He referred to the people who “propagated” the Holocaust, not all the individuals who carried it out. Said Nazi could lie, as Hitler and the Nazi leadership often did to make themselves seem less off-the-charts crazy.

55

It seems that your understanding is flawed. The point was that the Final Solution was initiated by people who were not Christian. Certainly, Christians had to have participated in it and it was a general anti-Jewish aspect of a society dominated by Christianity that allowed it to proceed. The point was simply that laying all the evil at the foot of Christianity (which was what your posts to that point seemed to do) missed out on other aspects of the situation.

One may well argue that Pope Pius XII was ineffective in protesting the Final Solution and that he should have striven much harder. However, a claim that there was a “lack of response” is false.

56

The inquisition had no juridiction over the Jews. People weren’t prosecuted because they were Jews, but because despite being christians they were suspected, rightly or wrongly, to still hold Jewish beliefs or follow Jewish customs.

So, the church justifications for the inquisition had nothing to do with its views regarding the Jews.

57

I’ve heard it said that religious fanatics are often harder on people who share their faith, but not strongly enough, than they are on outsiders.

58

The last person who claimed to inherit power from a “Holy Roman Emperor” was the Austrian monarch who retired the title in 1806. Popes claim to have inherited their authority from St. Peter. Remember, the Holy Roman Empire was secular, German and relatively free of vassal kings (i.e. “neither holy nor Roman, and not an empire”).

As for pizza store owners: The last Italian-owned pizzeria I remember seeing was sometime in the 1970s. I’m sure there are some somewhere, but most pizzerias I’ve encountrered since then have been Greek- or Asian-owned, or some chain like Pizza Hut or Dominos (who, BTW, I do indeed blame for killing Jesus*).

*Joke. I just really don’t like chain-store pizza.

59

I have been accused of not taking the discussion seriously. That is probably true. Others in this thread have all posted good reason why things happened the way they did. None of my posts explained why the Christians didn’t just stop hating Jews at some point and start hating some other group, and that is because I hope if a group can give up hatred of one group, they will not seek out a replacement target.

Now, I will give my own answer of what I think would happen. Please note however that this is just hypothetical, and besides which, I don’t believe it is a good answer despite have thought about it for the last few days.

Let’s say the Christian bible was written in such a way that the ones blamed for Jesus’ death were individuals, such as the governor at the time, as opposed to the roman Government. Then, the idea that Jesus had to die, to redeem the world would be there. As other had said, it is necessary to have an opposition, and so I believe that the opposition list would be shifting and changing all the time. Another possibility is that when the Roman empire fell, (never mind that it was not some sudden event) the Christian move far away, to Jewish controlled lands, erase the part about the Jewish high priests “causing” the death of Jesus, and when christians get political power, they start hating the geographical descendants of the Romans.

60

"The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life–only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.” — Jesus (John 10:17-18)