Who are the natural branches that are not spared
They are not spared insofar as they are currently severed from the "tree," which doesn't necessarily indicate their eternal separation.
The phraseology explains that the verdict on Israel is more severe, hence “fear, for if God did not spare natural branches he will not spare you”,
I'm not sure it indicates the verdict on Israel is more severe. It's the same verdict, separation, it's just that God presumably has a higher threshold for "cutting off" his chosen people than he does for cutting off gentiles.
We are now back to talking about the grafted in Israel, the Israel by faith, which was defined two chapters ago.
It doesn't make any sense for the Israel onto which the gentiles are grafted to be the "Israel of faith." There has to be a preexisting tree for a branch to be grafted into, but the "Israel of faith" did not even exist prior to the birth of the Gentile church, so the Israel onto which they are being grafted is by necessity the only Israel that did exist prior, the ethnic Israel. Hence it is not the voiding of the old covenant and the creation of the new, but the inclusion of gentiles in the old covenant, so they are now counted as children of Abraham.
“It is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel”. This makes no sense in your theology because it necessarily implies that not all of born-Israel are saved.
A corporate salvation of Israel at the end of time is not unique to Paul. It is a very common belief among "traditional" Christians, both Catholic and Protestant. It's even part of the catechism (CCC 674) It does not does not imply the salvation of literally every single Jew, but it does indicate that the Jews still have some special role to play in God's plan, and that all distinction between Jew and gentile has not been obliterated to make Jews just another ethnic group like any other. After all nobody is talking about the corporate conversion of the Afghans or the Japanese.
So which ones aren’t?
This first result on google from "catholic.com" seems a satisfactory explanation elucidation:
... corporate conversion of the Jewish nation to Christ, either involving every single Jewish individual alive at the end or at least a sufficient number that the nation as a body can be regarded as Christian.
I have no idea if Paul had in mind 100%, 99%, 95%, 90%...
Then why does he specifically mention a remnant?
Those are the Jews who believe in Christ during this parentheses God has opened in which he has blinded Israel as a whole to make time for the gentiles. Paul believed it would be a very brief parentheses, but it's lasted quite a while.
To_Mandalay
19d ago
When Paul says "all Israel will be saved" he is referring to ethnic Israel, since in the sentence immediately preceding he explicitly contrasts "Israel" with "the gentiles." This does not necessarily mean every single Jew but it does mean corporate Israel, not just a small remnant. Paul doesn't seem to think that God has voided his contract with the Jews, but that he is including gentiles in the promises to Abraham, which is different from creating a new covenant where the distinction between Jew and gentile is entirely obviated. Paul obviously doesn't think this since he states that when/if Israel is "grafted back in" it will be much easier for them who are "natural" branches than for the gentiles who are not. The mission to the gentiles is framed largely in reference to God's dealings with the Jews, "Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so also they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, [the Jews] may receive mercy."
If every Jew is saved at the end of days, then there is no reason to convert to Christianity as a Jew or to preach to Jews (which the original apostles did).
"What's the point of evangelism if God already knows who will and who won't be saved" is a general problem for the coherence of Christianity, not just in this particular instance.
The mass conversion of the Jews at the end of days is an ancient Christian eschatological belief that endures to this day.
To_Mandalay
19d ago
Paul appears to believe that in his infinite mercy, God blinded the Jews and caused them to reject Jesus en masse so that the gentiles would have time to believe and be saved before the imminent judgment. But this apparently was only supposed to be temporary, until "the fullness of the gentiles" had come in, and then "all Israel" would be saved. Paul even says in Romans that an important goal of his ministry is to make Israel jealous of the gentiles and thus spur their repentance.
To_Mandalay
19d ago
Depends on how "traditional" you want to get. St. Paul was pretty clear that God had not abandoned his covenantal promises to Israel.
To_Mandalay
25d ago
Here on some others. Some of the links are dead, but I found the scans of the relevant documents:
To_Mandalay
26d ago
I'd also argue that it was considered for at least a decade or two after the war to be a death camp.
Considered by who? Not the inmates or the guards, who never claimed Dachau to have been a "death camp" if by "death camp" we mean a camp where people were systematically murdered in gas chambers.
And once more, no Dachau guard was ever executed on the basis of later repudiated gas chamber allegations.
To_Mandalay
26d ago
The idea that a pedigreed Catholic like Hosenfeld would explain the evil of the world in terms of forgetting commandments is comically insane — that is a purely Jewish construct that isnt just missing from Christianity but repudiated.
Here's Mit Brennender Sorge:
To hand over the moral law to man's subjective opinion, which changes with the times, instead of anchoring it in the holy will of the eternal God and His commandments, is to open wide every door to the forces of destruction. The resulting dereliction of the eternal principles of an objective morality, which educates conscience and ennobles every department and organization of life, is a sin against the destiny of a nation, a sin whose bitter fruit will poison future generations.
Also a Jewish forgery, no doubt.
This is an example of what we can call gish "yiddish gallop". When there is a discussion on the holocaust, the mainstream narrative supporter can copy and paste some quotes he found within a few minutes on the first page of Google.
I've read all the books I cited here, though naturally I had to go back to excerpt the precise quotes and page numbers since I don't have a photographic memory.
In short, this exchange has been:
"Provide some contemporaneous letters about the extermination of the Jews."
"Here are a few."
"Gish gallop. Also those are fake."
To_Mandalay
26d ago
When I said "Dachau was not presented as an extermination camp with gas chambers," I did not mean "no one or any document claimed gassings at Dachau," since I mentioned that at least one (Blaha) did. I meant that murder by gassings at Dachau were not part of any official charges against anyone, and no Dachau guard was ever accused of or executed for gassing prisoners, nor did any ever admit to it. Likewise, there were no "hundreds of jews who testified to American detectives about the killings," assuming that by 'killings' you mean 'gassings.' There was a single eyewitness who claimed one small-scale gassing at Dachau. It is not comparable to a place like Treblinka, where every single eyewitness, wither victim or perpetrator, was in accord that it was an extermination facility, and where every guard who ever spoke on the matter admitted to the fact.
To_Mandalay
26d ago
No SS guard was ever accused, tried for, convicted, or executed for gassing people at Dachau. No SS guard ever admitted to having gassed anyone at Dachau, under duress or otherwise. Dachau was not presented as an extermination camp equipped with gas chambers at Nuremberg, revisionist mythology to the contrary aside. The only Dachau inmate to claim there had been a functioning gas chamber at Dachau at the time (there were two or three many decades later, and to my knowledge all were gentiles, like the Polish priest Father Alexis Lechanski or the Turkish journalist Nerin Gun) was Franz Blaha, a gentile Czech doctor who claimed at the trial of Commandant Martin Weiss not systematic gassing, but that a dozen prisoners had once been gassed 'experimentally,' under his supervision.
It's entirely incomparable to camps like Treblinka, Sobibor, or Auschwitz-Birkenau where all testimony, without exception, regardless of whether it came from guard or prisoner, or whether it was delivered in or outside of a courtroom, confirmed their function as extermination facilities.
According to the modern scholarship which is in dispute, which has no primary documents or primary evidence of the deaths at this time, and which does no archaeology to determine deaths.
Contemporary Nazi documentation records that Poland had been almost entirely cleared of Jews by the end of 1943. The destruction of the Jews in the USSR is also copiously recorded in contemporary documents. These are the Jews in question; Jews that died in Dachau or Buchenwald towards the end of the war are a tiny fraction of the total that must be explained.
You misread what I wrote. If you find pre-WWII population estimates of Jewry in Europe, published pre-WWII, as for instance in a Jewish encyclopedia, the numbers are lower than today’s estimates of pre-WWII Jewry in Europe. IIRC, by millions.
This is not true. The Polish government recorded more than 3,000,000 Jews in Poland alone in the mid-1930s. At the end of the war, there were not even 100,000. No other population in Europe suffered in anywhere near a similar proportion. There are numerous revisionist excuses for this collapse (Polish overcounting, emigration to Israel and the United States, deportation into the USSR) but none of them work. We can go into further detail there if you want, but you have to be absurdly charitable to the revisionist case at every turn for the numbers to even begin to come out the way deniers want them to.
With hundreds of thousands of participants, we should certainly find letters which speak to the organized and systemic campaign of killing Jewish women and children. Can you find these letters for me?
Within the actual 'death camps' (Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, later Auschwitz) there was only a very small staff assigned to conduct the extermination at each camp, hundreds at the most, including Jewish prisoners forced to work as auxiliaries. It doesn't take that many armed men to murder unarmed civilians in the thousands.
Stuff still leaked though:
Here's one letter from the book (page number is from the epub; here's a link to a free download if you want to read it yourself.
“On the ‘Aryan’ side of the city, the German captain in the garrison, Wilm Hosenfeld, wrote home on 23 July, the second day of the deportations from Warsaw, telling his wife that the ‘ghetto with its half-million Jews is to be emptied’ on Himmler’s orders: ‘History has no real parallel. Perhaps, cavemen ate each other, but to simply butcher a nation, men, women, children, in the twentieth century, and that it should be us, who are waging a crusade against Bolshevism, that is such a dreadful blood-guilt to make you want to sink into the ground with shame.” (page 302)
Here's one, cited in Saul Friedländer's Years of Extermination (page 400):
Wilhelm Cornides, a Wehrmacht noncommissioned officer, was stationed in Galicia in the summer of 1942. According to his diary entry of August 31, while he was waiting for a train at the railway station in Rava Ruska, another train entered the station: It carried Jews in some thirtyeight cattle cars. Cornides asked a policeman where the Jews came from. “ ‘Those are probably the last ones from Lvov,’ the policeman answered. ‘That has been going on now for five weeks uninterruptedly. In Jaroslav, they let only eight remain, no one knows why.’ I asked: ‘How far are they going?’ Then he replied, ‘To Belzec.’ ‘And then?’ ‘Poison.’ I asked: ‘Gas?’ He shrugged his shoulders. Then he said only: ‘At the beginning, they always shot them, I believe.’ ”
A consul of neutral Sweden in Stettin, Karl Inge Vendel, learned about the exterminations in 1943 from his contacts with dissident figures in the German regime:
“In a city, all the Jews were assembled for what was officially announced as ‘delousing.’ At the entrance they were forced to take off their clothes; the delousing procedure, however, consisted of gassing and, afterward, all of them would be stuffed into a mass grave. The source from which I obtained all this information on the conditions in the General Government is such that not the slightest shade of disbelief exists concerning the truthfulness of my informant’s descriptions.”
(Years of Extermination, page 460)
In 1942, OK Ostrow reported in its war diary that:
the Jews in Treblinka are not adequately buried and as a result an unbearable smell of cadavers pollutes the air.
The mass shootings of Jewish civilians in the east, since they took place over a broad expanse of territory rather than in a few discrete locations, did directly involve thousands to tens of thousands of people, and thus produced many more letters and personal accounts:
On June 18, 1942, Wehrmacht private HK wrote home from BrestLitowsk: “In Bereza- Kartuska, where I stopped for lunch, 1,300 Jews had just been shot on the previous day. They had been brought to a pit outside of the town. Men, women and children had to undress completely and were then liquidated with a shot in the back of the neck. The clothes were disinfected and used again. I am convinced that if the war goes on much longer, the Jews will be turned into sausage and served to Russian war prisoners and to the Jewish specialized workers. . . .”
(Years of Extermination, page 426)
The Italians knew what was going on:
In early 1943 Ciano was appointed ambassador to the Vatican and the Duce himself took over foreign affairs. A few days beforehand Mussolini and Ciano had seen the cable sent on January 3 by the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Dino Alfieri: “Regarding the fate of [deported German Jews], like that of Polish, Russian, Dutch and even French Jews, there cannot be much doubt. . . . Even the SS talk about the mass executions. . . . A person who was there recalled with horror some scenes of executions by machine guns of nude women and children lined up at the mouth of a common ditch. About the tales of torture running the gamut I will limit myself to the one told to my colleague by an SS official who confi ded that he hurled babies of six months against a wall, shattering them, to give an example to his men, tired and shaken by an execution that was particularly horrible because of the number of victims.”
Here's another:
On July 6 Pvt. Franzl also recorded the events at Tarnopol, for the enjoyment of his parents in Vienna. The discovery of the mutilated corpses of Volksdeutsche and Ukrainians led to vengeance against the local Jews: They were forced to carry the corpses from the cellars and line them up by newly dug graves; afterward the Jews were beaten to death with truncheons and spades. “Up to now,” Franzl went on, “we have sent approximately 1,000 Jews to the other world, but this is by far too little for what they have done.” After asking his parents to spread the news, Franzl ended his letter with a promise: “If there are doubts, we will bring photos. Then, no more doubts.”74 (Years of Extermination, page 214)
I don't know if Franzl ever took any pictures, but
Then there are the Einsatzgruppen reports themselves, which helpfully catalogue the murdered by "men, women, and children."
We don’t generally consider confessions made under torture to be reliable, such as the Nuremberg testimony.
This is mostly a meme. Few of the Nuremberg defendants were tortured. None of the defendants in later trials, such as Kurt Franz or Franz Stangl, commandants of Sobibor and Treblinka, were tortured. Nor did they have any incentive to lie, since they received the maximum penalty of life imprisonment under German law. None of this accounts for Nazis who admitted to the exterminations outside a courtroom setting.
I'll ask again:
Adolf Eichmann spoke openly about the physical extermination of the Jews while he was a free man in Argentina. Why do you think he did that?
To_Mandalay
26d ago
calling that evacuation is a typical SS thing
To wit, there are surviving Nazi documents where "shooting" or "execution" is literally crossed out in red pen and replaced with "resettlement" or "evacuation." Other documents say comical things like "the local Jews were resettled to a large pit outside of town."
To_Mandalay
26d ago
Jews died of typhus and starvation en masse near the end of the war, in the same way that 200-400k Germans died of starvation in the final months of the war and the months that followed.
This doesn't work. Most of the Jews who were killed in the Holocaust died in 1942 - '43, well before supply lines began to collapse and starvation set in. The Nazis recorded that by this time, the General Government had been cleared of Jews.
Jewish population figures were actually accurate prior to WWII
There is absolutely no grounds for assuming the governments of Eastern Europe overcounted Jewish population to the extent that would be necessary to explain the complete disappearance of eastern European Jewry post-1945. Revisionists can say that the numbers are "uncertain" or "unreliable" but it isn't true. These are not population estimates of some ill-recorded migration 2000 years ago, this is Europe in the 20th century. The degree of uncertainty required simply does not exist.
Well that’s the thing, in my opinion even the most virulent 20th century European racist would not gas family after family of downtrodden Jews.
Says who? Do you doubt Bolshevik atrocities also?
This is inexplicable when you consider (1) there were no camp whistleblowers, not even a friend or family member of a camp member who was confided in, which is improbable
This is not true. Rumors of what was going in the east were everywhere in Germany. There is a book called The German War by Nicholas Stargardt which has a long chapter going into depth on what the Germans knew about the Final Solution as it unfolded.
(2) the elderly camp guards put on trial in Germany who have entered the “honest old people” phase of dementia more often than not assert that the holocaust didn’t happen.
This is also not true. I've never heard of a old Nazi in Germany denying the Holocaust happened. Moreoever, plenty of Nazis admitted to it when they had no actual motive to admit to it. Adolf Eichmann spoke openly about the physical extermination of the Jews while he was a free man in Argentina. Why do you think he did that?
To_Mandalay
27d ago
You'd think if out of 80 million dead in ww2, 6 million were jews, you'd get like 5-8% of time dedicated to it... just proportionately?
Some 40% of WWII dead were Chinese. Do Churchill, De Gaulle, and Eisenhower devote 40%. of their writing to Chinese war dead?
Eisenhower does actually mention a holocaust in crusade in europe. Specifically a "Bomber's Holocaust", carried out by the allies against the germans. But nothing about a mass extermination of jews, only that when released from the work camps they and all the other prisoners were starving from lack of food, largely because German logistics had collapsed.
Then the answer is no, you haven't examined any of the evidence for the Holocaust one way or the other beyond memes.
To_Mandalay
27d ago
He was a US Intelligence Officer of the Rank of Lieutenant-Colonel during WW2, wrote the reports on Decrypted Germans Cyphers, briefed Generals...
I know, I read the book a long time ago, but I didn't remember him saying much about the Holocaust, which you just confirmed for me.
And a half Dozen US Generals wrote glowing reviews saying it was the most important book of the 1950s and exactly captures the truth of the Second world war.
There were thousands of US generals during the Second World War. Who cares if six of them signed off on Beatty's book?
Likewise Eisenhower, Churchill, and De Gaulle make no mention of the holocaust or final solution in their thousands of pages of works on ww2.
Beyond the fact that this meme isn't even true (I don't know where it came from. I think the first time I saw it was in Ron Unz's "American Pravda." Did he make it up?), and Churchill at least does mention the mass killings of millions of Jews, so what?
Most people, even western Jews, did not actually care that much about the misfortunes of Jews in eastern Europe. Not even the Soviets particularly cared. I think most of Curtis Yarvin's stuff is stupid but he's right when he says that Hitler was the only person of note during the war itself who actually thought massacring millions of impoverished Polish and Belarusian shtetl Jews was some kind of epic world-historical battle between light and darkness rather than a mostly irrelevant sideshow.
You'd think if out of 80 million dead in ww2, 6 million were jews, you'd get like 5-8% of time dedicated to it... just proportionately?
Why? Did you painstakingly go through the works of Churchill, Eisenhower, and De Gaulle, find that every instance of mass death during the Second World War which you agree happened is mentioned in direct proportion to its share of the total 80 million dead, and note a glaring exception in the case of the Jews?
Nope. Nothing. In the 1950s they didn't act as if the camps were opened and the revelation of the greatest crime in history had just been revealed. The Holocaust only entered public consciousness in 1967 after the 6 day when the US pivoted to Israel.
So what are you actually arguing? The Holocaust was made up in the 60s? That isn't even the "steelman" denier position, which acknowledges that the bulk of the evidence emerges during the war itself and soon afterwards, they just find increasingly creative ways to insist it's fake or otherwise doesn't matter.
Have you tried assess the evidence for the Holocaust, whether through reading historical books on the topic or denier literature, or preferably both? Or are you just kind of squinting and going "idk seems made up."
Your brand is "based right wing edgelord who makes leftists mad" so I fully expect that if you ever do get around to reading the Castle Hill, Mattogno, Graf, stuff you will be very eagerly and easily convinced by their arguments, but at least do that before going "Holocaust fake because Churchill didn't mention in this book."
To_Mandalay
27d ago
I think it's kind of true.
The Nazis, or European reactionaries in general, didn't just randomly pick Jews to hate which admittedly is the impression you get from the most dumbed-down version of pop history, but the Jews did become scapegoats for the sins of modernity. The case against the Jews; they are responsible for social revolution, the dissolution of pre-industrial community and the family, the victory of soulless commerce over blood and soil, atheism and the death of God, so on and on, is false. The Jews were latecomers to the European revolutionary movement, and all of the seeds of later bolshevism which were and are often put down to some inherently 'Jewish' character, were found in the very gentile French Revolution. Modern financial capitalism was likewise pioneered gentiles, as was the initial 17th - 18th century rationalist assault on established religion, etc. Jews did however become very prominent in all of those scenes for a variety of reasons, and therefore became the most obvious target for a violent reaction modernity in general, which is what Nazism and to a lesser extent other fascist movements were. It's like genocidal shadowboxing.
Since you've posted it again, you may recall a couple months ago we had a long and boring argument over Himmler's October speeches which I'm pretty sure lasted like a week. You took the position that when Himmler talks about killing Jews at Sonthofen and Posen, he is referring exclusively to partisans, partisan reprisals, and collateral damage. I said that the clear and sensible interpretation of his speeches is that he is speaking about the physical extermination of the Jews in the German sphere.
Last year CODOH finally published its magnum opus "Holocaust Encyclopedia," which has an entry on Himmler's speeches. I found it pretty interesting that authors, who obviously have every incentive not to, apparently agree with my position, and don't even attempt to argue that Himmler meant anything but the killing of all Jews in Germany's power. They just say that he was...lying. To himself, I guess:
While Himmler’s orders to his subordinates demanded ever-increasing efforts to save the lives of the Jews and to put everyone to productive work, in his speeches he ranted about having killed, by the end of 1943, each and every single Jew in the German sphere of influence his henchmen could lay their hands on. Himmler was a grandiloquent liar! Or perhaps just a typical politician.
(Though it should be noted that, as usual, the CODOH gang is being a little dishonest when they put the claim into Himmler's mouth that "each and every single Jew in the German sphere of influence had been killed" when he doesn't actually say that, and in the excerpt reproduced in this very same entry he clarifies that the Jewish question "will be solved by the end of the year" and that "remainders of odd Jews who managed to find hiding places will be left over.")
To_Mandalay
27d ago
The Holocaust barely even rated as wartime propaganda. The extermination of eastern European Jews was almost entirely absent from newspapers, films, and broadcasts in the Western Allied countries. The bombings of Rotterdam and London and the Lidice Massacre had a vastly greater presence in the minds of the Allied public than Treblinka or Majdanek or even Auschwitz, let alone the Einsatzgruppen shootings. If the Holocaust was spun by "the exact same institutions" to gin up war fever they did a pretty shitty job of it.
as well as reading "Iron Curtain Over America" by Beatty
What exactly in Beatty's book made you think the Holocaust didn't happen? IIRC he barely even talks about this. It's mostly your standard issue Bircher stuff but with the anti-semitism made explicit.
To_Mandalay
27d ago
It might be going viral and become the next forbidden knowledge now that HBD is being digested by the Twitter intelligentsia.
This kinda went the other direction for me, back in the day. I remember watching Ryan "AlternativeHypothesis" Faulk videos in high school and thinking "wow, this guy sure seems smart." Then his more recent and embarrassing foray into WWII made me think "huh maybe his videos were this ridiculous and wrong the whole time and this is a Gell-Mann Amnesia situation."
To_Mandalay
27d ago
One is constraining what you can think and the other what you can do no?
There are probably thoughts human minds cannot think, though obviously I can't think of any. I don't think it really makes a big difference though. Why would constraining thought be an unacceptable restriction on free will but not constraining action? When it comes to human government, thought-control is considered especially bad (hence Orwell), because controlling what someone thinks is impossible for a human dictatorship, so one that even attempts it is proving itself to be insanely megalomaniacal. But for God, who already controls everything, there doesn't seem to be much of a difference.
To_Mandalay
27d ago
Imagine for a second that you have no choice but to worship a deity, is that actual worship?
If the Deity had created us such that we would always freely choose to love and worship the Deity, it wouldn't be an impingement on our free will, anymore than the Deity creating us without the ability to teleport is robbing us of our right to "choose" not to teleport.
Walt's videos were big in 2016, to the point they were even referenced in left-wing countermemes. I think it would have been hard for someone around the alt-right "scene" at that time whether on reddit, 4chan, or twitter, not to have at least passing familiarity with his stuff.
To_Mandalay
1mo ago
But there was nothing like your typical Muslim “because your congregation is liberalizing I will commit an attack” ideology. That’s novel to Islam. Protestants didn’t blow up a building when someone started teaching girls how to read.
They didn't have suicide belts yet but angry mobs of Catholics/Protestants going around attacking each other and destroying buildings for religious reasons were extremely common during the Wars of Religion.
Catholicism is even more legalistic than Protestantism and it isn't doing much better. So is your argument that Islam is just far enough on the hyper-legalism spectrum that it will manage to endure?
To_Mandalay
1mo ago
It isn't great when for your religoon
At first I thought this was a 'coomer' joke ("aaahhhh im religoooooning!") but on second glance I'm pretty sure it's just a typo.
To_Mandalay
1mo ago
Because Islam requires knowledge of Arabic and because the required pilgrimage is Mecca, the growth of Islam aids the growth of Arabs in a way that doesn’t apply to Protestant missionaries.
It empirically isn't doing much for the growth of the Arab population right now. Most Muslims are not Arabs.
The center of Protestant Christianity was never an area plagued by religious terrorism, although it has a history of political terrorism, because the center has been a singular church or a collection of hands-off church collectives.
Northwestern Europe was ravage by religious warfare for hundreds of years. A lot of people died over this. At that time, "political" and "religious" was not a very firm distinction.
Protestant Christianity is a faith-based religion that promotes orthodoxy about perhaps one dozen facets of faith
De jure yes, but de facto Protestantism was extremely orthorpraxic. Calvinists insist that good works do not purchase salvation but are instead a product of salvation, but in practice this is a purely semantic distinction. There's a reason 'puritanical' is shorthand for 'rigid scrupulosity.'
There are plainly substantial reasons why what happened to Christianity may not happen to Islam.
It's already happening. Even Saudi Arabia, the financial powerhouse behind the spread of Wahabbism, is liberalizing rapidly. The Iranian mullahs can't even keep their country from periodically exploding into anti-regime protests. MENA fertility rates have more than halved in the past half-century.
Many, if not most, Christian theological and doctrinal disputes are easily resolved as soon as one accepts the Bible was written by dozens (at the very least) of people over thousands of years who very often have wildly different and even flatly contradictory conceptions of faith, God, and just about everything else. When you try to force it all to cohere is when you run into trouble.
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