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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 Baháʼà 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.
This is fully mainstream Jewish position and always had been.
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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.
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