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Who is Thor? If you ask the average person, they will not relate a Germanic tribal deity who was, at one time, a religious symbol of resistance to Christianization. They will say "Oh I love Thor, the last movie where he joined the Guardians of the Galaxy to save humanity from aliens was epic." Stan Lee, who was also Jewish, was a particularly effective mythmaker and storyteller precisely because he appropriated a base of existing myth and archetypes in the creation of a new Pantheon that memetically captured the imagination of Gentiles. The interpretatio romana likewise incorporated non-Roman deities into the Roman pantheon, which served a cultural and civic function. A talent for mythmaking specifically entails appropriating existing symbols and integrating them into a particular cultural and religious consciousness.
Christianity and Islam both belong to the Judaic pantheon, which is deeply meaningful in spite of localized "DLC" to the pantheon, so-to-speak. There is an incomprehensible mishmash of deities in the Hindu religion inspired by local interpretations and "new characters", and likewise Stan Lee hired gentile writers to create new characters and stories for his pantheon, but ultimately it's his universe.
If all prevailing followers of Abrahamic religion (including Jews themselves) worshipped the god Apollo from Greek myth instead of the Jewish god from the Hebrew bible, but also formulated their own innovations- heroes and myths, under the auspices of His Image, we would properly regard the cult of Apollo as the most successful religion. Even if globally influential cults emerged which worshipped some derived heroes like the martyred son of Apollo or warrior-prophet of Apollo... They would still, at the end of the day, be worshipping a European god who is the embodiment of a race of people as the master of the universe. Christians and Muslims worship a Jewish god, so their religions must be considered mythological "success" of the Judaic pantheon in the same way.
Of course, the earliest Christians were Jewish and St. Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles - the Stan Lee of his day - was a Jewish pharisee.
Abraham and Moses are heroes in the Judaic pantheon, this is like saying "we don't know the genetic profile of Iron Man so we can't say anything about his behavior in that regard", the storytellers are the Jews themselves who keep these myths alive and propagate them among themselves and others with their rituals and behavior. This often takes esoteric form in modern culture, where a film like Spartacus functions as a mythological homage to Exodus and inspires audiences to root for the slave revolt against Roman civilization. This is sophisticated storytelling, and the Jews are better at it than anyone. They are also able to pick up on it whereas gentiles remain oblivious to deeper esoteric meaning to myths like these (FWIW I agree with the author here that Zach Snyder's Superman is less Jewish and more Apollonian than in the written canon, while the Nietzschean-Übermensch Lex Luthor is more Jewish in Snyder's work).
In order to calibrate our baseline perspectives, would you accept the proposition that HBD provides explanatory power for why Jews tend to be more successful lawyers than non-Jews? I am suggesting that this holds for culture-and-myth-creation, and the cognitive traits that explain this go beyond simply IQ.
You don't see how the global-memetic spread of a myth body, and its survival as a diaspora for thousands of years, is evidence for the power of its storytelling?
Secondly, we should dispense with the absurd claim that the Aleinu is not supremacist, if a group of white people all cited some refrain proclaiming that the master of the universe chose them as his favorite people and made them differently from everyone else, and all else will bow under the yoke of the Creator who made Europeans his chosen people, you would unambiguously call that supremacist. I think the Aleinu is in fact similar to cultural rhetoric like Manifest Destiny or the British Empire which saw itself as the light unto the world, bringing civilization to the savages. Of course it's supremacist.
Judaism is an ethnically supremacist religion, and I don't mean that as a criticism, it is the entire reason it has survived under hostile conditions for thousands of years. Their god is their race, and their race is their god. I have heard Jews, in the wild, say "us being God's chosen people doesn't mean we are superior, it in fact means we are mandated greater responsibility for the world", which is not much different that you would hear from some European colonizer in Africa, we have a responsibility to civilize these savages because of our unique gifts bestowed by God. It is supremacist.
Christianity is a personal salvation cult. There are many theories for why it spread. The decline of Rome undoubtedly played a part, but I think there were also some micro-phenomena, like women being dazzled with the Gospel and then insisting that their pagan husbands convert as a condition for marriage. Bio-Leninism and Nietzsche provide a different explanation. I don't claim to know the how, but there is no question that they were successful at spreading because of their memetic potency. Concluding that the memetic potency is related to the people that created the pantheon, and relates to dynamics in modern-day culture, would be well-supported by taking HBD seriously as more than just "IQ-realism."
I think you're muddling quite a few things here.
For a start, I want to clarify exactly which standards you're using. The global spread and popularity of biblical narratives does indeed seem like evidence that those narratives have some merit. But what I would challenge you on is that there's any particularly unique about those narratives, which implies anything sinister about Jews as people.
After all, you mention other highly successful ancient narratives. I suspect most people on the street who recognise the name 'Thor' do know that he's an ancient Norse god, and Thor is actually a pretty weak example because the surviving corpus of religious Scandinavian literature is so small. But I invite you to consider, say, the enduring recognisability and popularity of Hercules. Consider the enduring narrative power of the Iliad and the Odyssey - even when the entire religious culture those stories were embedded in faded away. People may not specifically worship Zeus any more, but even in the Superman comics you reference, Perry White continues to swear by Zeus! ("By Jove!") This seems like an enduring hold on the imagination by these ancient writers. The power of Greek mythological narratives is such that they've even successfully hopped across cultures - you can find the Greek gods popping up even in Japanese media, for instance.
What I want to suggest is that the existence of an extremely successful narrative or set of images doesn't necessary imply anything nefarious about race. Certainly the success of Greek mythological narrative suggests that at some point in history something creatively fecund was going on in Greece, but leaping from this to the assertion of a unique, genetic Greek talent for myth-making that continues to the modern day and makes Greeks a powerful conspiracy manipulating non-Greeks to their advantage is simply ludicrous. As with Greeks, so too with Jews.
I think you're also tending to single out the involvement of any Jew in any creative endeavour as evidence that the whole thing is somehow Jewish, or part of this cross-historical Jewish myth-making scheme. In practice, however, Jewish influences are often only one of many involved in creating the narratives that you're describing. I was just talking about Greeks, after all, and we have to grant that Judaism in the classical world was extremely Hellenised, and Christianity's early growth involved a lot of fusion of Jewish and Greek ideas. You might say that this shows the power of Jewish narrative to co-opt and absorb Greek thought, but why not the opposite? Why doesn't it show the power of Greek narrative to co-opt and absorb Jewish thought? Why are the Jews, in your telling, always the manipulators and never the manipulated?
Thus with the Superman example. The Christian and for that matter Greek influences on Superman seem pretty clear - Superman has been read as an allegory for Jesus but also as coming from the Greek heroic tradition. There is certainly something very Apollonian about him. Greek or Christian memes flowing through the minds of Jewish people are still Greek or Christian memes. A figure like Superman is pretty clearly an aggregate of diverse influences, some of which are related to the Jewish experience in America, and some of which are not.
If Jewish ideas can flow through non-Jews in a way that, to you, is just Jewish influence (as with Christianity and Islam), it seems like non-Jewish ideas can also flow through Jews in a way that retains their power. If so, perhaps we'd be better off thinking of ideas in less of a race-essentialist way.
In this case, there are some foundational ideas that originate in ancient Israel, yes - monotheism is the big one. Those ideas spread between many different peoples, mixed with different other ideas and contexts, and eventually formed several different religious traditions, including rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. At no point in this process do you need a posit a special genetic propensity for myth-making or cultural manipulation on the part of the ancient Israelites.
I'd also suggest that you use the term 'the Jews' in a very vague and general way, such that it's not clear what you refer to or why. For instance:
Who are 'the Jews' in this context?
Read 'Abraham and Moses' as shorthand for 'the people who historically came up with the core ideas and narratives of the Torah'. The point is that we cannot know anything meaningful about the genetics of the community in which the fundamental elements of Abrahamic faith were born.
I note that it is clearly the case that people like Abraham or Moses are revered by people of many different ethnicities. A specifically racialised interpretation seems weak. Muslims say explicitly that Abraham was a Muslim, and reject any significance for race. Christians also say directly that what matters is being a spiritual heir of Abraham, not one by blood (cf. Matthew 3:9, John 8:39, Romans 4:16, Galatians 3:7). Clearly Abraham is a hero and is understood as an ancestor by members of all the Abrahamic faiths - you have to go significantly against how these traditions have understood Abraham to see him as deeply racialised figure.
This even seems consistent with Jewish understandings of Abraham. Converts to Judaism are given the name ben/bat Avraham v'Sarah - son or daughter of Abraham and Sarah. The Jews themselves understand descent from Abraham to be spiritual rather than genetic!
It seems to me that the genetics of Abraham and the other originators of Abrahamic religion are firstly unknown and secondly held to be unimportant by his own heirs, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. So I think you're wrong to racialise this as much as you do.
I'm wary of and try to avoid the term 'HBD'. I think there are probably multivariate reasons why Jews are overrepresented in professions like the law.
I do dispute, however, the claim that there is a genetic propensity for myth-making unique to Jews. I don't think it's even correct to say that Jews (as in a historically distinguishable genetic community like the Ashkenazim) do have a special talent for myth-making above other peoples.
You're taking a very misleading reading of it. What the Aleinu says is that God has called and made a covenant with the Jewish people, differently to all the other nations of the world.
How would we feel if a bunch of other people said something like that? We don't have to speculate. We know, because they do. Americans say something similar to that all the time - that's American civil religion, the unique and special identity of the United States, chosen by Providence to be a beacon of freedom to the world. Americans make this claim all the time.
Judaism is an ethnoreligion, certainly - it is a religion associated with a particular people (though as I have indicated Jews understand Jewish peoplehood to not be reducible to race or genetics). That's not the same thing as being a supremacist religion - as you just admit in the next line, Jews speak very clearly about Jews not being superior to other people.
Moreover, you're taking an interpretation of Judaism here that almost no Jew would agree with. The God of the Jews, as Jews understand him, is the most high and the creator of the universe. They understand God to be a real being, and a different being to they themselves. They have this in common with every other Abrahamic religion.
I would encourage you to consider how the people you're talking about understand themselves. If nothing else, I'd like to suggest that Jews themselves might understand what Judaism is better than you do. Listen to them.
Let me clarify my point, regarding Stan Lee and Thor. My point was that just because Stan Lee used a large body of preexisting symbols and myths to craft them into contemporary cultural signals for receptive audiences does not mean he isn't a talented mythmaker, so your point "Judaism borrows from these other myths so we can't give them credit" doesn't hold. It's the mark of a talented mythmaker to take a symbol, change its meaning in subtle ways, and deliver it to the audience in a way that's compelling.
I don't doubt the success of Greek mythology, and it is another example of the sort of culture-creation I am talking about. I am not saying the Jews are the only ones capable of doing it. Greek mythology was intelligently formulated with a race consciousness. Modern Gentile mythology, like say George Lucas, can be potent and influential but it is not created with a race consciousness compared to, say, Superman whose creators crafted these myths with a Jewish race consciousness that someone like Hlynka could not understand. So the clueless Goy Zach Snyder makes Superman more Apollonian because he isn't in tune with the racial undertones of the character as understood by its creators and fellow, perceptive Jewish audiences. In contrast, with Wonder Woman, who is a Jewish Golem, the racial undertones in her character are much more closely adapted in her films.
I would view Greek mythology as the race-conscious counterpart to both ancient and contemporary Jewish mythology. There are some examples of race-conscious contemporary gentile mythology: Conan the Barbarian, 300, etc.
Can you imagine a world where Jews denounced the Hebrew god as a false demon, all the old laws as superstitious pagan nonsense and then zealously forced all their fellow Jews to convert to the worship of Apollo? I don't think you can imagine that. Even trying to fathom this alternate outcome shows who absorbed who. Of course there are Greek elements in Christianity, but they worship a Jewish god. In this alternate universe where Jews decided to denounce the Torah as Pagan sacrilege in submission to the true master of all Apollo, that cult would also likewise retain some Jewish elements, but there would be no mistake regarding who absorbed who. And the Jewish people, as a genetically identifiable people, would not exist today.
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."
There is basically no distinction between the two. Their spiritual status is a blood covenant and membership is inherited. There was no knowledge of genetics in the ancient world, but the phenomenon was captured conceptually with a blood covenant and inherited ingroup status. It is exoterically "spiritual" but esoterically genetic, a similar pattern exists in Greek myth.
The notion that America was just conceived as some idea open to the entire world, rather than a people, is another example of a clever 20th century mythological revision. Americans make that claim you describe precisely because they have long been denied the ability to assert an ethnic particularity as Jews do. They instead have to embrace a conception of America as an idea rather than a people. I've already compared the sentiment to the rhetoric of the British Empire, which did assert an ethnic particularity and it is universally regarded as supremacist. The Aleinu asserts an ethnic particularity and supremacy, I am going to believe my lying eyes.
I guess that puts you in an odd position because you are left to explain the peculiarly disproportionate representation of Jews in these areas of culture creation, which cannot be explained only by IQ. I am suggesting that this is driven by merit, they are good at crafting these myths, propaganda, and social narratives and they often do so with a race-consciousness that most gentiles do not perceive.
Some certainly do, but others who think "Judaism is not about genetics it's about spirituality", no I actually do understand Judaism better than them and they are fish who cannot tell they are in water. They say that Tikkun Olam means dismantling whiteness and fiercely protecting Jews from any measure of criticism or negative sentiment, no actually, I understand Tikkun Olam better than they do. Believing your own myths doesn't mean you understand them, it usually means the opposite. Someone who truly believes "America has succeeded because it is an idea open to the whole world" does not actually understand the meaning of that myth consciously designed to separate American exceptionalism from racial connotations.
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.
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.
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.
Matthew 5:17:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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