To_Mandalay
19hr ago
They have been holding 'LGBTQ+ for Hamas' rallies since October 8th.
Very few if any leftists have expressed support for Hamas' political, religious, and social program while also being pro LGBT+ which would actually be contradictory. A portion of them will express support for Hamas insofar as they fight the IDF without supporting their social program, which is a consistent position. A greater part of them will refuse to say either way, because they view calls to condemn Hamas as bad-faith attempts at distraction (the standard line being "I'll condemn Hamas when my government sends them billions of dollars").
Entirely from the correctness or incorrectness of the political views themselves, there's no real contradiction between "I support LGBT+/feminism/whatever" and "I am against Israel's actions in Gaza."
To_Mandalay
1d ago
This isn't really true. Christianity expects the rejuvenation and perfection of the physical world after the Second Coming and the Resurrection. Progressivism is a secularized millennarianism. It's very Christian. What you're describing is more Gnostic.
To_Mandalay
1d ago
I doubt there are very many people who were angry about Trump disrespecting the troops and are now actively pro-Hezbollah.
To_Mandalay
1d ago
He did not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfill them. The novelty of Jesus's teaching is entirely in the nature of Grace, not specific ethical teachings.
If that's the case, he wasted a lot of time delivering ethical teaching. I tend to think Jesus believed 'works' were a lot more essential to salvation than most Protestants (even most Catholics) would like.
Wait a second, why do twelve disciples have swords three years into Jesus's ministry if Jesus actually teaches unconditional pacifism like the literal words suggest?
They didn't. Jesus told them to go buy some swords earlier that same week, explicitly so that he could fulfill the prophecy that he would be 'counted among the transgressors,' and then forbids them from using the swords when he's arrested. There's not a single place in the New Testament where violence against one's enemies is encouraged or even sanctioned. Divine violence on the other hand is all over the NT, you might even say it's the whole point, but that's a very different matter.*
*I would say the pacifism of the early Christians is inexplicable without the apparently ubiquitous belief that Jesus was going to come back very soon to establish the kingdom and destroy Rome and the nations; in other words, earthly Christians didn't need to do any killing because God was about to do it for them. When this didn't pan out naturally doctrine had to evolve.
To_Mandalay
2d ago
You are not "steelmanning" the anti-Christian reactionary argument, which would be something like, "Christianity's inherently egalitarian and destructive elements were held in check by the natural ethnocentrism and aristocratic spirit of Europeans, but eventually the poisonous seed flowered, and resulted in democracy, socialism, egalitarianism, etc." The question to ask would not be "were Christian Europeans Based™?" but "Were Christian Europeans more or less Based™" than they would have been in a counterfactual where Europe was never Christianized.
To_Mandalay
2d ago
It goes back to Celsus:
They say to each of their hearers:—Believe, first of all, that he whom I introduce to thee is the son of God, although he was shamefully bound, and disgracefully punished, and very recently was most contumeliously treated before the eyes of all men. Believe it even the more, on that account. If these bring forward this person, and others, again, a different individual, while the common and ready cry of all parties is, ‘Believe, if thou wilt be saved, or else begone,’ what shall those do who are in earnest about their salvation? Shall they cast the dice, in order to divine whither they may betake themselves, and whom they shall join?
They declare the wisdom that is among men to be foolishness with God. The reason of this has been stated long ago: their desire to win over by means of this saying the most ignorant, servile, or uninstructed of mankind. These sorcerers flee away with headlong speed from the more polished class of persons, because they are not suitable subjects for their impositions, while they seek to decoy those who are more rustic.
To_Mandalay
2d ago
Three 19th century American Presidents were Irish, but they were Protestant Irish.
That's not really 'Irish,' though. Scots-English Yeomanry from Ulster vs Celtic peasantry from County Cork.
This sort of interpretation tends to strip Jesus' preaching of anything particularly novel or interesting. "Well when he said turn the other cheek he didn't mean you should let your enemies kill you, he just meant, you know, don't go off half-cocked, control your anger," "Well when he said 'it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye...' he didn't mean it's bad to be rich, he just meant don't love money too much." This is all stuff any Greek Pagan would have happily nodded along with. What was so hard or so shocking about the path Jesus offered?
I think Jesus' message probably was radically ascetic and self-denying. The story of Lazarus and the Rich Man is also interesting in this regard. It's from a different author than Matthew's gospel, so it's not necessarily going to agree on everything, but in the story, the rich man never actually appears to do anything wrong. You could kind of argue his sin was not being more charitable to Lazarus, but the text never actually says this. And when the rich man is being tormented in Hades and asks Abraham for a cup of water, Abraham tells him no, because "remember that during your lifetime you received your good things and Lazarus in like manner evil things, but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony." That's it. In other words, the rich man went to Hell just for being rich. It had little to do with his or Lazarus' deeds in life, but with a cosmic imbalance that had to be corrected. The story is kind of a didactic one even if it isn't literally a parable so it doesn't necessarily mean Luke thought every rich person was going to Hell and I'm sure he didn't think every poor person would have a share in the kingdom but the overall view of earthly wealth is very dim.
This is somewhat supported by what is known of the early church, it's self-imposed poverty and the lack of any violent resistance to persecution. People being what they are, this didn't last long and pretty soon theologians and church fathers were spinning all sorts of justification for why you can actually
To_Mandalay
2d ago
Of course there was no mass immigration in 1500. Mass immigration didn't happen because there was a "do mass immigration" button just sitting there that nobody bothered to press until 1960, it happened because A) travel became unprecedentedly easy in the 19th - 20th centuries B) for a variety of reasons the politics of the west in the 20th century made western states fairly accepting of that influx.
The nuanced view is that Christianity ultimately is at the root of post-enlightenment left and liberal politics, which I think is pretty unambiguously true (and that's a good thing, thank you Christianity).
To_Mandalay
6d ago
Jack Chick theory of politics.
To_Mandalay
6d ago
It is a familiar theme in the conversation and heart of the faithful, that in the last days before the judgment the Jews shall believe in the true Christ, that is, our Christ, by means of this great and admirable prophet Elias who shall expound the law to them.
(There is a list at that link of various church authorities over the centuries who have spoken of a corporate conversion of the Jews at the end of time, including Origen.)
And there’s 200 years from Melito to Augustine where there is never mention of corporate salvation
at His last coming He will favour with His acceptance and blessing the circumcision also, even the race of Abraham, which by and by is to acknowledge Him.
To_Mandalay
7d ago
It is not found in the church fathers. Read what Melito or Origen have to say. Hence, it is not found in traditional or historic Christianity, per my post.
Augustine talks about the corporate conversion of Israel at the end of the age. I don't think it gets much more Church father than Augustine.
When Paul speaks about mysteries they always defy a literal understanding, for instance —
I'm not sure how the following defies a literal understanding. He's just talking about the resurrection and the transformation of believers when Christ returns. It's a "mystery" because it's strange and incomprehensible to the pagans of the time.
To_Mandalay
8d ago
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.
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
8d 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
8d 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
8d 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
15d ago
Here on some others. Some of the links are dead, but I found the scans of the relevant documents:
To_Mandalay
15d 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
15d 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
15d 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
15d 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
15d 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."
Somebody could easily hold that a homophobic, misogynist, Islamist party ruling Gaza is a preferable to Gaza being wiped off the face of the earth.
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