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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Since religion is also part of culture wars, it is time for sharing some latest religious culture war battles, this time on Judeo-Christian front, originating from the crucified bird site.

1/ Case of Lizzie Marbach

Lizzie Marbach, Republican and anti abortion activist from Ohio, person with 7k followers and otherwise not notable, posted this.

There's no hope for any of us outside of having faith in Jesus Christ alone.

This is Christianity 101, this is exactly what Christian is supposed to say and believe. There is no reason for anyone to be surprised.

Except Max Miller, Jewish Republican representative of Ohio with 52k followers who was not amused.

This is one of the most bigoted tweets I have ever seen

Mega dead bird storm ensued, and many people came to Lizzie's side to support her.

Including Ilhan Omar.

Things went so far that Max Miller was forced to apologize.

GOP lawmaker apologizes for ‘religious freedom’ tweet

But, nevertheless, Lizzie Marbach lost her job.

Pro Life Advocacy Group Fires Comms Director After GOP Rep Called Her A ‘Bigot’ For Sharing Her Faith

By sheer coincidence, Miller’s wife, Emily Moreno Miller, sits on the board of Ohio Right to Life.

This thing will continue, and it is not looking good for official GOP.

2/ Case of Darryl Cooper, rather lighter one.

Darryl Cooper, known as Martyr Made on the interwebs, substacker, podcaster on several sites and dead birder with 173k followers.

So this is rather important person, in internet terms, who suddenly decided that this is the time, of all things, to preach to Jewish people and convert them to Christianity.

It turned out that lot of his followers are Jews who do not appreciate being evangelized, especially by such D- apologetic piece. Massive dead bird storm ensued, and DC doubled, quartupled and octupled his efforts.

Darryl Cooper himself seems to be rather unorthodox Christian of somewhat Marcionite tinge. This makes the whole thing more confusing, what exactly are his Jewish followers supposed to convert to?

What have these cases in common? They illustrate the difficulty of actual interfaith cooperation between sincere believers in different faiths. If you really believe in truth of your religion, it is realy hard to desist from preaching and evangelizing, and even harder to do not take offence if you are (or perceive to be) preached at and evangelized by your fellows.

I'm a little bit surprised that Ilhan Omar came to Marbach's defense.

Optimistically, I'd like to think she actually believes that stuff about freedom of religion.

Cynically, I suspect she is just anticipating a fight over what her religion believes about LGBT folks.

Even more cynically, I wonder if she just saw an opportunity to slag a Republican Jew.

But I am often surprised that people are surprised that yes, orthodox Christians do in fact believe you (yes, you) are going to go to hell if you do not accept Jesus Christ. Yes, that means they literally believe every last atheist and Muslim and Jew and pagan and Hindu and Buddhist is going to burn in hell forever. (And a lot of the Protestant denominations include Catholics, Mormons, and JWs in that bucket.)

It's almost as amusing as watching liberals in Virginia discover recently that mainstream Muslims are mostly not, in fact, "queer-friendly."

Mainstream Christians of any description do not like to talk about the salvation of Jews, but the bounds of catholic doctrine on the subject isn’t notably different from other denominations despite what liberal catholic apologists would like to pretend.

It is notably different, there is no salvation for those to deny Jesus according to the church, except for the Jews, and the reason for that is a "mystery." It's not really a mystery, though.

That the Jews are participants in God’s salvation is theologically unquestionable, but how that can be possible without confessing Christ explicitly, is and remains an unfathomable divine mystery.

It is notably different, there is no salvation for those to deny Jesus according to the church, except for the Jews, and the reason for that is a "mystery." It's not really a mystery, though.

It is not notably different. You hear very similar language from many Protestant denominations. (Many other Protestant denominations also say very clearly that Jews will go to hell - as have many Catholic theologians historically.) There isn't some special carve-out here somehow engineered by the Elders of Zion.

I meant Jews are regarded differently than the other groups you mentioned, I am aware that is the case across denominations, particularly among evangelicals.

There is a special carve-out, absolutely. And it was engineered by the Elders of Zion, AKA the Prophets of the bible who declared Jews to be God's Chosen people and then convinced the Gentiles to accept that proposition as part of their own religion. So it leads to these contradictions like, Jews knowingly reject Christ but they still go to heaven, obviously Christianity is going to digest that contradiction just fine because the religion itself is basically worshipping the Jews and their tribal god.

Your understanding of the history of Judaism and Christianity seems pretty lacking. Christianity began as a Jewish splinter sect. The "Elders of Zion" didn't "convince" the Gentiles to accept anything; the beliefs of early Christians were obviously informed by the fact that initially they considered themselves Jews who followed the promised Messiah. Since then, the situation has become vastly more complicated, with two thousand years of history and schisms and factions and subfactions, some still holding up Jews as "God's Chosen People" and some condemning them to hell for being Christ-killers.

I know you try to fit your ZOG narrative to everything, but it does not actually fit everything.

Saint Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, was a Jewish Pharisee. And of course Jesus was a Jewish teacher. So according to the Church's own history, the messiah and apostle to the gentiles were indeed "Elders of Zion": a Pharisee and the King of the Jews. They did convince the gentiles to accept the proposition that the only real god is the Jewish tribal god Yahweh, and that all who reject him suffer eternal torture, and that he chose Jews as his Chosen People and made his son born of the Jews.

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