@FCfromSSC comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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FCfromSSC Nuclear levels of sour 1yr ago

St. Paul, the OG "fellow white people, you must love your enemy and accept Jesus or else suffer eternal damnation by the wrath of Yahweh."

St. Paul was preaching tolerance of Gentile Christians to Jewish Christians almost exclusively. The discrimination at the time was overwhelmingly coming from Jewish Christians who believed either that Gentiles couldn't be saved, or that they had to convert to Judaism in order to do so. Hence the arguments over circumcision, foods, the law, etc, etc.

Context

SecureSignals Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine FCfromSSC 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

And that's the genius of Paul, he accomplished the integration of the Gentiles into the Judaic pantheon without required subservience to Jewish law, which would have been a complete roadblock to the cult proliferating the way it did among the Greco-Romans. And Paul, despite never having met Jesus, attained the status of apostle in Christian thought.

It is the entire reason Paul deserves his status among the greatest mythmakers of human history, and shows the political power of intelligently crafting myth. He figured out a religious pathway for converting the Gentiles to the Jewish god.

Think of how much foresight Paul had compared to "the Goy can't become Christian unless he gets circumcised," Christianity would have gone nowhere in the latter case...

The notion that Jesus would have been ok with Christians completely abandoning Jewish law as Paul suggests is absurd, as we read in the Book of Matthew. It's Paul's innovation which was a lynchpin to the entire religion.

FCfromSSC Nuclear levels of sour SecureSignals 1yr ago

Is the argument that Christianity is clearly just repackaged Judaism? That certainly would be news to the Jews, then and now. And if it's not repackaged Judaism, then why does it matter if the Gentiles are converting to a "Jewish God"? What does it even mean to convert to a "Jewish God" in a form that Jews vehemently refuse to recognize, requiring none of the rules that Judaism consists of?

If Judiasm and Christianity are essentially the same, why the conflict? If they're essentially seperate, how is Paul converting Gentiles to Judaism? Why is converting Gentiles to Christianity a bad thing, and what would be preferable?

I don't accept that you have any insight into what Jesus would or would not have been okay with. You're simply applying a label to your own beliefs, which is fine as far as it goes, but provides zero evidentiary value. Christians have a well-developed theory about the issue you're gesturing at; you can believe that theory is rationalization if you like, but you have no way of actually proving it, and Christians like myself will observe that our version appears to pay rent in the form of an intellectually coherent faith, and yours does not.

I don't accept that you have any insight into what Jesus would or would not have been okay with. You're simply applying a label to your own beliefs, which is fine as far as it goes, but provides zero evidentiary value. Christians have a well-developed theory about the issue you're gesturing at; you can believe that theory is rationalization if you like, but you have no way of actually proving it

Matthew 5:17:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

But the Greco-Romans would not have converted if it entailed following Jewish law: circumcision, strict dietary restrictions, etc. Of course Christians have a theory for why they don't have to follow Jewish law, that theory was created by Paul who was motivated to convert them. Without Paul, there's no Christianization of the Greco-Romans or Europe.

What does it even mean to convert to a "Jewish God" in a form that Jews vehemently refuse to recognize, requiring none of the rules that Judaism consists of?

To say the least, the Jewish attitudes towards Christianity are complex and vary. Many see Christianity as a root cause of antisemitism and view it as a hostile faith. Others, like Ben Shapiro, emphasize "Judeo-Christian values" as being some foundation for Civilization.

But other Jews do have a more sophisticated interpretation of Christianity. Marcus Eli Ravage was a Jewish immigrant who wrote a 1928 essay against antisemitism:

Your loose, contradictory charges against us are not a patch on the blackness of our proved historic offense. You accuse us of stirring up revolution in Moscow. Suppose we admit the charge. What of it? Compared with what Paul the Jew of Tarsus accomplished in Rome, the Russian upheaval is a mere street brawl.

You make much noise and fury about the undue Jewish influence in your theaters and movie palaces. Very good; granted your complaint is well-founded. But what is that compared to our staggering influence in your churches, your schools, your laws and your governments, and the very thoughts you think every day? ...

If you really are serious when you talk of Jewish plots, may I not direct your attention to one worth talking about? What use is it wasting words on the alleged control of your public opinion by Jewish financiers, news paper owners and movie magnates, when you might as well justly accuse us of the proved control of your whole civilization by the Jewish Gospels?

But we did not leave you alone. We took you in hand and pulled down the beautiful and generous structure you had reared, and changed the whole course of your history. We conquered you as no empire of yours ever subjugated Africa or Asia. And we did it all without armies, without bullets, without blood or turmoil, without force of any kind. We did it solely by the irresistible might of our spirit, with ideas, with propaganda. We made you the willing and unconscious bearers of our mission to the whole world, to the barbarous races of the earth, to the countless unborn generations. Without fully understanding what we were doing to you..

Only after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans did the new creed come into prominence. Then a patriotic Jew named Paul or Saul conceived the idea of humbling the Roman power by destroying the morale of its soldiery with the doctrines of love and non-resistance preached by the little sect of Jewish Christians. He became the Apostle to the Gentiles, he who hitherto had been one of the most active persecutors of the band. And so well did Paul do his work that within four centuries the great empire which had subjugated Palestine along with half of the world, was a heap of ruins. And the law which went forth from Zion became the official religion of Rome.

This was the beginning of our dominance in your world. But it was only a beginning. From this time forth your history is little more than a struggle for mastery between your own old pagan spirit and our Jewish spirit. Half your wars, great and little, are religious wars, fought over the interpretation of one thing or another in our teachings. You no sooner broke free from your primitive religious simplicity and attempted the practice of the pagan Roman learning than Luther armed with our gospels arose to down you and reenthrone our heritage...

Is it any wonder you resent us? We have put a clog upon your progress. We have imposed upon you an alien book and an alien faith which you cannot swallow or digest, which is at cross-purposes with your native spirit, which keeps you everlastingly ill-at-ease, and which you lack the spirit either to reject or to accept in full.

In full, of course, you never have accepted our Christian teachings. In your hearts you still are pagans. You still love war and graven images and strife. You still take pride in the glory of the nude human figure. Your social conscience, in spite of all democracy and all your social revolutions, is still a pitifully imperfect thing. We have merely divided your soul, confused your impulses, paralyzed your desires. In the midst of battle you are obliged to kneel down to him who commanded you to turn the other cheek, who said “Resist not evil” and “Blessed are the peacemakers.” ... You Christians have never become Christianized. To that extent we have failed with you. But we have forever spoiled the fun of paganism for you.

So why should you not resent us? If we were in your place we should probably dislike you more cordially than you do us...

Some heavy words, it's a scathing critique of the cognitive dissonance of Christian antisemitism. But the analysis here would not be news to Eli Ravage (who was beat to the punch by Nietzsche), nor many of his more sophisticated co-ethnics who believe this but don't say the quiet part out loud. This critique also doesn't work as well when an increasingly larger number Europeans are indeed outright rejecting Christianity.

For what it's worth, I don't think Paul conceived of destroying Roman civilization or anything, it suffices to assume he genuinely believed he was bringing gentiles into the fold of a more spiritually truthful doctrine, although that motive also underlies most important social revolutionaries, including the social justice advocates of our own age.

Eetan SecureSignals 10mo ago

To say the least, the Jewish attitudes towards Christianity are complex and vary.

The Jewish attitudes towards Christianity are not complex - Jews, even the most secularized and assimilated ones with no interest in Jewish religion, see Christianity as enemy and conversion to Christianity as the ultimate treason.

People peddling "Judo-Christian values" Prager University style are speaking for gentile audience, Jews see them universally as, at best, hacks and fraudsters.

This is not surprising, no one should expect old religion having good feeling towards newer successor religion that claims the old religion is false and obsolete, Christians were historically never too fond of Islam either (nor were Muslims friendly towards Baháʼí faith)

Surprising are the completely unrequited warm feelings American Christians feel towards Jews.

SecureSignals Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine Eetan 10mo ago · Edited 10mo ago

There was an e-debate on Rumble yesterday with Nick Fuentes on one side and a Jew teamed up with Christian Zionist Gavin McInnes on the other side. Gavin's reaction to the news that it is common for Jews to hate Christianity more than Islam was hilarious. Pretty funny Gavin's own debate partner admitted to preferring Islam to the Christian Zionist's religion.

But there's a deeper level, some Jews properly understand Christianity as Judaism for Gentiles (and Islam too, for that matter). Christianity is the only reason Judaism exists today, owing to the station and mythological power that the Christian religion concedes to the Jewish people by accepting the Torah and Covenant as divine truth. Christianity was also the force which clashed with the idols and myths- indeed, the fabric of civilization, of pagan Europe. There are Jews who like Christianity for the role it has played in this dynamic and understand how crucial the adoption of Christianity has been for the station of Judaism.

This is fully mainstream Jewish position and always had been.

The present legal status of Christianity is presented in this chapter. Maimonides views Christianity together with Islam. For Maimonides, Christianity and Islam are related to Judaism. Maimonides's practical view of Christianity was usually assumed to be negative and he regarded Christianity as a form of proscribed polytheism, even for gentiles. In his code of Jewish law, Mishneh Torah, Maimonides basically restated his judgment about the idolatrous status of Christianity without repeating the reasons he gave in his earlier works. As a theologian, he took regularly strong exemption to Christian Trinitarianism. Maimonides ranked Islam superior than Christianity on theological grounds. For him, Christianity is the prime example of the error of such anthropomorphism in its original doctrine of the Incarnation and in its associated doctrine of the Trinity.

...

But there's a deeper level, some Jews properly understand Christianity as Judaism for Gentiles (and Islam too, for that matter). Christianity is the only reason Judaism exists today, owing to the station and mythological power that the Christian religion concedes to the Jewish people by accepting the Torah and Covenant as divine truth.

Does not conclude. Jews survived for centuries in pagan Roman Empire (once they stopped revolting) and for millenia in India. One can easily imagine that in alternate timeline where monetheism never caught on in Roman empire, Jews will be still there.

One cannot easily imagine that at all. From the Roman destruction of Judea to the Zionist project, international Jewry has only survived and been molded by its symbiosis with Aryan civilization (with Israel revealing the contradictions of Jewish Nationalism, owing to that fact). Assuming that Judaism, an extremely peculiar type of religion which is a rote race worship that is nearly extinct in the modern era, would still exist without European adoption of Christianity is an extremely tall order. It very much helps that the entire Western world came to accept the Jewish framing of their own identity and even allowed them to live among them as foreigners. Without Christianity I do not think Judaism has a chance of existing because the myths that congeal Jewry together have a lot less potency if 99% of the world doesn't believe them, or treats them as superstitious, supremacist, and hostile, and a lot more potency when everybody is convinced of the truth of those myths.

It's easy to feel like you are Chosen when the entire world civilized world accepts that as true.

FCfromSSC Nuclear levels of sour SecureSignals 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

Matthew 5:17

I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

The Christian understanding is that Jesus's self-sacrifice indeed fulfilled the law, with his final words being "it is finished". This is consonant with Jesus's teachings recorded in the Gospels, where he constantly clashes with the Pharisees and teachers of the law, arguing that the purpose of the law was never to inculcate legalism, but to help people understand the nature of evil and sin. Jesus violates his contemporaries' traditions about and understandings of the law repeatedly, and affirms his disciples doing so as well. Christians do not recognize a discontinuity between Jesus's teachings and Paul's. Maybe we are wrong in that assessment, but you have not demonstrated any reason why your own opinion is obviously more correct.

But the Greco-Romans would not have converted if it entailed following Jewish law: circumcision, strict dietary restrictions, etc.

Indeed not: what they converted to was not Judaism as it was practiced and understood by Jews, then or now. Jews don't actually think that Christianity is Judaism, and Christians don't think Christianity is Judaism. They both think they are talking about the same God, but their respective understandings of that God are quite different, and largely unreconcilable. From the outside objective view, there is nothing useful conveyed in the claim that Christianity worships the Jewish God; this claim is only relevant once one accepts the axioms of the faith, which are flatly incompatible with your claims for other reasons.

But other Jews do have a more sophisticated interpretation of Christianity.

I don't see what makes this view "sophisticated" or even colorable. It does not seem to be engaging in good-faith communication, which is about what I'd expect from a communist radical.

Suppose we admit the charge. What of it? Compared with what Paul the Jew of Tarsus accomplished in Rome, the Russian upheaval is a mere street brawl.

The Christians did not seize control of the government and then exterminate a significant portion of the Roman population. They converted the romans peacefully, quite often through their own mass-martyrdom, until a tipping point hit and mundane ingroup-outgroup mechanics enacted by a "cultural Christianity" cemented the new normal. Rome continue on under Christianity for more than a millennium, and smoothly transitioned to the post-Rome west that has built every comfort you've ever enjoyed.

But what is that compared to our staggering influence in your churches, your schools, your laws and your governments, and the very thoughts you think every day?

But we did not leave you alone. We took you in hand and pulled down the beautiful and generous structure you had reared, and changed the whole course of your history.

This was the beginning of our dominance in your world.

Who's "we", kemosabe?

Again, Christianity split with the Judaism he's appealing to from the start. Jewish contemporaries to the first generation of Christians were actively working to stamp them out with extreme prejudice, a process that continued until the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, at which point the Jewish community was busy merely trying to survive, forming insular communities with minimal contact with or influence over a Christianity which was busy conquering the world. None of that history is compatible with his pretense that Christianity, which my guess is he has nothing but contempt for, owes anything at all to the "Judaism" he claims to speak for.

This isn't evidence for your position, it's a radical jackoff arguing in bad faith in an effort to shock and offend. You're repeating his lies because they're convinient to you, but that doesn't make them less obviously stupid.

In full, of course, you never have accepted our Christian teachings.

Or could it be that people like him have never understood my church's Jewish teachings? That claim would have equal basis, it seems to me.

In your hearts you still are pagans. You still love war and graven images and strife. You still take pride in the glory of the nude human figure. Your social conscience, in spite of all democracy and all your social revolutions, is still a pitifully imperfect thing.

Yeah, this guy has no idea what Christianity even is, and I'll reiterate that you don't either if you thought an argument this bad was compelling. And that's fine! Just don't expect actual Christians to be persuaded by insights that don't actually engage with anything we believe.

What is this place?

Why are you called The Motte?

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