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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31015 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Oof. As much as I enjoy your razor-sharp insight, it cuts deep because it is true. I have eschewed grouping myself with my biogroup because of the ugliness of those who do. In doing so I have consciously denied a power to be grasped.

For separate reasons, I still strive for something more excellent, the coming of the kingdom of God, which brings all the lost children of Noah into one great family. I could be paranoid about the originators of my faith being Jewish, but I think that blackpill is poison.

For if the dead do not rise neither did Christ rise, and if Christ did not rise your faith is futile and your sins have never been forgiven. Moreover those who have died believing in Christ are utterly dead and gone. Truly, if our hope in Christ were limited to this life only we should, of all mankind be the most to be pitied!

Christianity is interesting on ethnic groups.

The Jewish people were obviously their own ethnic group, but one thread found in Acts and several of the epistles is the broadening of that to all nations. See Ephesians, for example:

11 Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— 12 remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14 For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility 15 by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, 16 and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. 17 And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. 19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God,

Ethnic tribalism is antithetical to Christianity, at least at this point in redemptive history.

It is the household of God, as the quote I put ends, that we should identify with instead.

Touching on your comment, @DuplexFields, I suppose I don't see why Christ's Judaism is a problem.

One of my dad’s favorite jokes goes something like this: Two men from the same small town, an African-American Baptist pastor and a Scots-Irish Presbyterian minister, were good friends. Sometimes when they had lunch together, the subject turned to whether Jesus was Black or white. The arguments got heated on occasion, and one day on their way home from a conference, the two men were arguing the topic when they died together in a car accident. On their way up to Heaven, one turned to the other and said, “I guess now we’ll find out who was right all along.” Finally, they floated up through the topmost cloud. Saint Peter asked their names, checked the book, nodded, and let them in. Immediately they beheld a glorious figure approaching. They squinted because of the brightness of the light as their new eyes started adjusting. It was clearly Jesus, but they couldn’t quite make out His features. He opened His arms wide, and in a big, booming voice, said "Buenos dias, amigos!"

The Logos, the second person of the Trinity, ineffable and infinite mind of God, devised a perfect plan outside of spacetime before He created the world. As part of that plan, God chose the people descended from Abraham the faithful, Isaac the obedient, and Jacob the trickster as His priesthood here on Earth, and also as the wetware which would house the human mind of the Son of God. That man, Jesus of Nazareth, was superbly Jewish in all three ways: by genetic descent, by His religion, and by culture. The God of Christianity is inseparable from Judaism, and that’s how He had always planned it. This is not a problem for me and my faith.

People who care a bit much about “the Jewish question” one way or the other are usually atheists or have some twisted religious beliefs about blood and/or covenants. I have some opinions on why God did it that way, but this really isn’t the thread for it.

But that quote and the philosophy behind it is about a future happy hunting ground with no connection to this world. Saying the great hope is that you’ll be in heaven is abandoning this world and your responsibility to and for this world.

Is this quote supposed to inspire hope, or further bitterness and derision?

"But consider this: if I lied to you, then you won't get everything I promised! Wouldn't you be better served to keep believing me instead?"

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