Tag: Christianity

This is a usefully informative theological lesson for Christians from a rabbi.

Why Don’t Jews Believe in Original Sin? This is a delicate question, as it exposes one of the fundamental differences between the Christian outlook and the Jewish one…. So what, in fact, do Jews believe?

Consider the terms tov and ra, conventionally translated, as I wrote before, as “good” and “evil.” At every stage of the world’s creation, G-d pronounced it tov before proceeding to the next stage. On the creation of mankind, He pronounced it tov me’od (“very good”), and there is no indication thereafter that He changed his mind.

Ra does not actually mean “evil” in the English sense of the word. Some glimmering of its actual meaning can be ascertained from some of the other ways that the root is used. For instance, in Psalms II, 9 King David beseeches G-d to deal with his enemies: Tero‘em beshevet barzel (“You should smash them with an iron rod”), or in Isaiah XXIV, 19 the prophet begins his description of an earthquake: Ra’o hithro‘a‘a ha’aretz (“the Earth is completely shaken”). From these, we can see that it means something like “unstable, broken, dysfunctional” and therefore “bad.”

Human beings come into this world innocent of anything, but possessed of a capacity for good (commonly termed the yetzer hatov) as well as a destructive capacity, commonly termed the yetzer hara. The yetzer hara presents all the physical urges, the needs and wants, of the physical body which, like everything else in the physical realm, is subject to entropy — that is, it wears out and falls apart. But he is also provided with a soul, whose highest purpose is to control those urges and channel them into positive actions.

To this end, children are provided with parents and other mentors, whose job it is to teach them right from wrong and self-control, so that his soul is capable of taking charge and leading a proper, sanctified life. Until that moment when he is capable of taking over, any “sins” that the child commits are the responsibility of the parent.

So when does a Jewish individual begin to sin? At the age of bar or bath mitzva. These terms mean “son or daughter of the commandments” because on reaching that age, they become subject to the 613 commandments in the Torah, and their parents are no longer responsible for their actions. This landmark occurs when a boy is 13 years old and a girl is 12. One of the most emotional moments of the bar mitzva ceremony comes when the boy’s father pronounces the blessing, baruch sheptarani me‘onsho shel ze (“Blessed is He who has exempted me from this one’s punishment”).

What is the Jewish concept of the satan? Well, we agree with the Christians that he is a mal’ach, conventionally translated “angel,” but there’s nothing “fallen” about him. He works for the same Divine Boss as all the other mal’achim. Think of the satan (the word means “adversary”) as the proctor of an exam. The proctor isn’t actively rooting for you to fail the test; to the contrary, he wants you to pass. But he administers a tough test, to be certain that it tests all your capabilities and that you’ve mastered the material, i.e. the life lessons available from one’s parents and other mentors. If you manage to pass the test, no one is happier than the satan.

Now, my dear Christian reader, combine this doctrine of a very good, unfallen world that has been harmed by the destructive capacity of Man with the mandate of healing the world under the guidance of the angelic proctor with the ultimate aim of bringing it together, and perhaps you will begin to understand what Jesus was talking about and why the concept of Judeo-Christianity is not merely a contradiction in terms, but offensive to Jews and Christians alike.

I’ve never been impressed by WATYF’s incessant posturing, but since he usually remained within more or less within the boundaries of the rules. I mostly ignored him. However, seeing how he was blatantly misrepresenting my positions at John Wright’s blog, I am now banning him from commenting here.

It’s really rather remarkable how dishonest so many self-professed Christian conservatives are about the Alt-Right, particularly the Christian Alt-Right, which they prefer to pretend does not even exist. Because they cannot rationally or scripturally defend either their theological positions or their commitments to various forms of equality, they usually resort to lying about us when they can’t simply ignore us. I’ve indicated WAYTF’s false statements in bold text and his omission of the necessary context in italics.

WATYF
To be fair, Vox’s emphasis on Christianity is just a bit offset by the fact that he says Christ preaches hatred as a virtue and that murder is totes OK (because war).

Benjamin Wheeler
Care to quote him on that? Or did you just think that because he says that not all men are equal that he preaches hatred? That, because he hates war, he wants to prevent it? I didn’t realize that peoples who never meet each other still war.

WATYF
No, I’m not misunderstanding him nor am I drawing an inference from something he said. He has said directly and with no equivocation that hatred is morally good (according to Christianity) and that murder is permissible because we’re in a culture war.

Here is the latest “hatred is good” post where he invokes God to justify his position. Remember, this isn’t just “we should oppose this view”, it’s “we should actively hate these people”.

Benjamin Wheeler
Strange, because all I got from that was the hatred of sin. The rhetoric is merely a vehicle. “I am proud of my wife for refusing to respect Jack and the social mores enforced by his little Safety Council. What is better than a hot blonde hater? Hate is human, and hatred is a human right. God hates deceit, God hates the wicked, and so should we.”

I didn’t realize I shouldn’t hate evil. I should start loving it! Thank you! I didn’t realize how wicked I was not hating sin.

WATYF
Yeah, your rhetoric isn’t going to work on me so don’t bother. I’m obviously not saying anything in your last sentence.

If all you got from that was the hatred of sin then you should read more carefully. He observably *isn’t* just saying, “hate evil”. He’s saying, “hate these PEOPLE because they do evil (or rather, belong to a group that is disproportionately likely to do evil)”. It’s right there in the text you quoted.

Benjamin Wheeler
I know. I’ve got so long to go before I can match Vox.

WATYF
His doesn’t work either. Rhetoric is generally only useful on the stupid and those who can’t control their emotions. It also makes the user stupider the more they use it.

So as I was saying, Vox openly advocates for a version of Christianity that preaches the hatred of entire groups (and individuals) as well as some other rather unchristian “virtues”. Yes, he repeatedly points out how Christianity is a pillar of Western Civilization (which I agree with), but I wouldn’t go to him to find out exactly what Christianity is.

Benjamin Wheeler
Right, but he gets a reaction out of you, since you’re both emotionally offended by him and unable to think past his rhetoric to any points underneath. I’m pretty sure you ignore any dialectic because it’s easier to paint him with a brush thanks to rhetoric.

WATYF
Are you reading anything I’m writing? I’m trying to figure out if you’re still trying to use rhetoric or if you just can’t understand the argument.

I’m not “reacting” to what he’s saying. I’m analyzing it (rather coldly and dispassionately). I’m quite able to “think past his rhetoric” which is why I can present the points underneath, and the points are explicit. People have asked him directly on his own blog to clarify and he has. At first, I assumed it must be some kind of tactic involving irony or whatever, but after enough times where he said it, explained his defense of the position, and confirmed it to people who asked, I saw no utility in assuming the opposite of what was obviously true.

But if you like, you can keep telling yourself that “God says it’s OK to hate people” doesn’t actually mean “God says it’s OK to hate people”. That just strikes me as a decidedly self-deluded way to approach the matter.

You’re not “pretty sure” of anything here. Nothing you’ve said has actually addressed anything I’m actually saying. I started reading Vox over a decade ago when he mostly avoided rhetoric and engaged in dialectic debates on a regular basis. That’s what attracted me to it. Now, it’s almost non-stop rhetoric, all day every day. It’s his blog, so whatever, but the change in the quality of the commenters there is a pretty good indicator of how that shift has affected his readership.

It’s amusing that WATYF claims that it is non-stop rhetoric here. That’s simply not the case. As for the intellectual quality of the commenters, it has naturally gone down as the readership has grown from 3,000 daily to 100,000 daily, but due to my consistently weeding out posers, gammas, trolls, and liars, it is a considerably more honest discourse than one will find elsewhere.

I would much rather have 10 honest commenters of average intelligence than 100 highly intelligent dissemblers and deceivers all trying to push their false narratives on the readers here.

As usual, WATYF is flat-out wrong. God does not just hate sin. God does not just hate wickedness. God hates the wicked. The wicked are clearly people, a subset of the human race set apart by their thoughts and their actions. Now, to the best of my understanding, the wicked are individuals who are not merely sinful, who are not merely weak, who have not merely given into temptation, but are those who have actively and purposefully set themselves against God and hate Jesus Christ. They are described as liars and deceivers and slanderers, among other things.

Should the Christian hate the wicked or should he love them? That is the question that I have yet to see a Churchian answer directly, without equivocation or dissembling or substituting words. And I also have an important follow-up question: is there a difference between sin and wickedness?

Peter Hitchens highlights the sacrifice of a new Christian who became a martyr for the faith:

Last week saw one of the noblest acts of human courage in modern times. Yet it has been given far less attention than it should have been. We often hear it said of soldiers and others that they ‘gave their lives’ in battle. This is true in a way, though many actual soldiers will smile at the expression and mutter that they probably did not have much choice in the matter.

But the French police officer, Arnaud Beltrame, consciously and deliberately did give his life to save another. When the drug abuser, petty crook and jailbird Redouane Lakdim burst into the Super U supermarket at Trèbes, in southern France, he wasted no time in showing that he was capable of murder. He shot dead two people, and was said to have laughed as he killed them. Then he took several hostages.

He was persuaded to release all but one, a terrified woman.

Arnaud Beltrame calmly offered to change places with her. I believe that he knew as he did so that this might well cost him his life, and that by stepping forward he faced the strong possibility of a horrible and lonely death. Nobody ordered or asked him to do it. It would have been perfectly normal and acceptable for the police to have surrounded the mad killer and waited for him to give in, or kill himself, with the strong possibility that he would also kill his hostage.

Arnaud Beltrame went miles further than he was required to go by the normal rules of life, or even the normal rules of duty and bravery. The daily bargain, under which we behave decently to others and hope for the same in return, wasn’t enough for him. Most of us couldn’t have done what he did. Most of us will never be asked to.

But I very much doubt whether our civilisation would have reached the heights that it has reached if nobody had ever been ready to make such a sacrifice. I believe very deeply that Christian societies are different from non-Christian ones, precisely because all of us know that such selfless courage is the ideal of what we all should be. And I think that Lieutenant Colonel Beltrame did what he did because of the specifically Christian saying ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’. This Eastertide it is worth noting that these words are recorded as having been spoken by Christ, shortly before he (knowing what was coming) was dragged off to face a mocking show-trial, torture, beatings and a savage public death. For Arnaud Beltrame had come, quite recently, to embrace Christianity.

Beltrame’s noble sacrifice demonstrates once more that Christianity is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition of Western civilization.

If you read here regularly, you’ve probably encountered me dismissing those prone to attempting to divide everything into very simple conceptual poles. This is not to say that pure right and wrong do not exist, or that it is always inappropriate to apply Abelard’s straightforward heuristic of “It is so or it is not so”, merely that one cannot reduce all complex matters to such a simple binary equation.

So, it was interesting to discover, when re-reading a relatively new translation of Siddhartha, to see Herman Hesse portraying the protagonist referring to a concept that is not entirely dissimilar.

I have found a thought, Govinda, that you will think neither a joke nor foolishness, it is my best thought. It says: the opposite of every truth is just as true! For this is so: A truth can always only be uttered and cloaked in words when it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided that can be thought in thoughts and said with words, everything one-sided, everything half, everything is lacking wholeness, roundness, oneness. When the sublime Gautama spoke of the world in his doctrine, he had to divide it into Sansara and Nirvana, into illusion and truth, into suffering and redemption. This is the only way to go about it; there is no other way for a person who would teach. The world itself, however, the Being all around us and within us, is never one-sided.

Now, I certainly disagree with the surface meaning of the original thought; the opposite of every truth is simply not true or it would not be the opposite. But while that particular meaning is obviously incorrect, I think the subsequent statements are true in a slightly different sense than Hesse may have intended… or perhaps the translator messed it up somehow. I will have to review the original German to reach an opinion one way or the other. Regardless, that is neither here nor there, the point is that the world observably contains both the truth and the falsehood; to speak of what is necessarily implies the conceptual existence of what is not.

This is the true multiverse; it is conceptual, it is not material. There may be various levels of reality, there may be multitudes of realities in the way that even in our single material reality contains millions of simulated sub-realities and we are no more capable of proving that ours is the bottom turtle any more than an AI-controlled character in World of Warcraft can. But this conceptual whole is relevant for deeper understanding, for just as one cannot understand the concept of white when one has no ability to perceive the not-white of black, one cannot understand the concept of truth unless one is familiar with the not-truth of falsehood.

In the same way, we cannot grasp the essence of grace without an awareness of the not-grace of being sinful, and we cannot understand the importance of Jesus Christ or the reason for his sacrifice without an awareness of evil, both our own and the world’s. This need to know both the truth and the various not-truths in order to understand something is why binary thinking is not merely limited, it is crippling.

And, as he warned, the world continues to hate him and those who follow him.

As Christians around the world prepare to observe the holy weekend of Easter, many will be asked at their services to pray for the persecuted around the world. After years of advocacy groups raising awareness, the plight of the Christians of the Middle East, particularly in the former Islamic State territories, has become common knowledge among American Christians. Yet they are far from the only group that will celebrate Easter this year in defiance of state persecution, mob violence, and repressive cultural norms imposed by groups threatened by the spread of the Christian faith.

Below, six countries where Christians struggle to practice their faith freely against systematic institutional and cultural pressure.

China: Xi Jinping has led a systematic crackdown on “unauthorized” Christianity that has worsened year after year since he became “president” in 2013. Xi has led a movement to “sinicize” Christianity, forcing the legal Christian churches to deliver sermons extolling the virtues of his regime. “Unauthorized” Christianity is deemed a “national security threat,” and Christians who dare worship in their homes face severe law enforcement reprimand.

Venezuela: Dictator Nicolás Maduro and his subordinates have struggled for years to submit the Christian faith to their whims – publishing socialist Christmas carols, identifying their policies with the Gospels, and proclaiming that “Christ is Chavista.”

India: In India, the repression faced by many Christians is not at the hands of the government, but at the hands of violent Hindu nationalist mobs. According to Open Doors, an organization that tracks the persecution of the Christian faithful worldwide, the permissive attitude of a Hindu nationalist government has allowed for the exacerbation of violence against these communities, some of the oldest Christian congregations on earth. In one incident this year, a mob tortured and hanged a Christian pastor after six months of loudly disturbing Sunday services. Local police ruled the death a suicide, triggering thousands to protest for justice.

Nigeria: Nigeria’s population is 40 percent Christian, with many practicing freely in the nation’s south. In the north, however, Christians face severe persecution from jihadist groups like Boko Haram and violence by the majority-Muslim Fulani herdsmen against Christian farmers. The herdsmen are believed to be conducting raids targeting Christians and have killed an estimated thousands of civilians.

Sudan: Sudan, a nation run by Muslim tyrant wanted for genocide, is one of the most repressive states in the world, a Muslim-majority tyranny where Christians face destruction of property and arbitrary arrest if they are too visible. Open Doors ranks Sudanese Christians in the top five most persecuted Christian nationalities in the world.

Indonesia: Indonesian Christians are under growing public scrutiny. While Christians have long coexisted in the world’s most populous Islamic country, they have increasingly fallen victim to radical Islamic mobs.

Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s sake.
– Luke 6:22

Many, if not most Christians have been extremely dubious about the legitimacy of the so-called Pope Francis. Now there are serious questions, even among Catholics, that concern whether the man is even a Christian at all:

Scalfari: “What about bad souls? Where are they punished?”

Bad souls “are not punished,” Pope Francis is quoted, “those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”

On the first Holy Thursday, Judas betrayed Christ. And of Judas the Lord said, “Woe to that man by whom the Son of Man shall be betrayed; it were better for him if that man had never been born.”

Did the soul of Judas, and those of the monstrous evildoers of history, “just fade away,” as Gen. Douglas MacArthur said of old soldiers? If there is no hell, is not the greatest deterrent to the worst of sins removed?

What did Christ die on the cross to save us from?

The Vatican swiftly issued a statement saying the pope had had a private conversation, not a formal interview, with his friend, Scalfari.

The Vatican added: “The textual words pronounced by the pope are not quoted. No quotation of the aforementioned article must therefore be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father.”

Sorry, but this will not do. This does not answer the questions the pope raised in his chat. Does hell exist? Are souls that die in mortal sin damned to hell for all eternity? Does the pope accept this belief? Is this still the infallible teaching of the Roman Catholic Church?

This is not Christianity. These are not Biblical teachings. In fact, this is not even religion. This is John Lennon’s Imaginism elevated and amplified by an extremely silly and not particularly intelligent man who has accidentally revealed his true thinking.

The Vatican’s attempt to sweep these uncomfortable opinions under the rug as being non-ex cathedra personal discourse on the part of an individual who merely happens to be the Bishop of Rome is not conclusive, but it certainly is damning by faint and evasive defensiveness.

Pat Buchanan is absolutely right to note the central question this raises. After all, if there is no Hell and there is no sin, then there was never any need for Jesus Christ to die on the cross. And yet, we observe daily the ways in which people are sinful, that evil exists, and that Man needs Jesus Christ.

That being said, don’t even think about trying to divert this into Protestant vs Catholic, Round 475,838. Any commenter who attempts to do so will be summarily spammed.

Robert Kagan explains that the principle of democracy requires that NATO bring the hammer down upon countries whose anti-democratic voters have anti-democratically elected themselves governments that he, personally, doesn’t like.
– Steve Sailer

Europe has not yet learned how to be multicultural. And I think we are going to be part of the throes of that transformation, which must take place. Europe is not going to be the monolithic societies that they once were in the last century. Jews are going to be at the center of that. It’s a huge transformation for Europe to make. They are now going into a multicultural mode, and Jews will be resented because of our leading role. But without that leading role, and without that transformation, Europe will not survive.
– Barbara Lerner Spectre

We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers for ever. Nothing that you do will meet our needs and demands. We will destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which it is not in your nature to build. Beyond all temporary alliances with this or that action lies the ultimate split in nature and destiny, the enmity between the Game and God.
– Maurice Samuels

The thing that makes Judaism dangerous to everybody, to every race, to every nation, to every idea, is that we smash things that aren’t true, we don’t believe in the boundaries of nation-state, we don’t believe in the ideas of these individual gods that protect individual groups of people; these are all artificial constructions and Judaism really teaches us how to see that. In a sense our detractors have us right, in that we are a corrosive force, we’re breaking down the false gods of all nations and all people because they’re not real and that’s very upsetting to people.
– Douglas Rushkoff

So, we are informed that Judaism means trying to redefine things to mean their opposite, attacking everyone else’s faith, and actively trying to destroy every race and nation in order to build a new world that is contrary to human nature. I don’t know about you, but that sounds literally Satanic with a capital S to me. I wonder if that might be a better explanation for all those historical expulsions from Christian nations than universal envy of their good looks and success. Regardless, it should suffice to make it abundantly clear that while Christians and Jews may share the Pentateuch, they do not worship the same God.

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
– Jesus Christ

Remember, Jesus Christ is the Way, the TRUTH, and the Life. And he has said that no one will come to the Father except by him.

The defiant song of the Russian national hockey team is a brave symbol for nationalists around the world:

In a surprise overtime victory in the finals of the Olympic men’s hockey tournament, the Russians defeated Germany, 4-3.

But the Russians were not permitted to have their national anthem played or flag raised, due to a past doping scandal. So, the team ignored the prohibition and sang out the Russian national anthem over the sounds of the Olympic anthem.

One recalls the scene in “Casablanca,” where French patrons of Rick’s saloon stood and loudly sang the “La Marseillaise” to drown out the “Die Wacht am Rhein” being sung by a table of German officers.

When the combined North-South Korean Olympic team entered the stadium, Vice President Mike Pence remained seated and silent. But tens of thousands of Koreans stood and cheered the unified team.

America may provide a defensive shield for the South, but Koreans on both sides of the DMZ see themselves as one people. And, no fool, Kim Jong Un is exploiting the deep tribal ties he knows are there.

Watching the Russians defiantly belt out their anthem, one recalls also the 1968 summer Olympics in Mexico City where sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood on the podium, black gloved fists thrust skyward in a Black Power salute, asserting their separate racial identity

Western elites may deplore the return of nationalism. But they had best not dismiss it, for assertions of national and tribal identity appear to be what the future is going to be all about.

The shallow, saccharine falsity and Orwellian emotional manipulation of the Olympics is symbolic of the shiny, secular, and satanic New Babel that the globalists are attempting to construct. But just as the Russian hockey players drowned out the Olympic anthem, the nations of the world will defeat the latest attempt to chain them, control them, and rule over them.

God does not will the rule of the New Babel. We know this. He created the nations and He will inspire and defend them. He has even vowed the preservation of one specific nation. So, to deny and oppose nationalism is to deny and oppose God Himself.

“The GREAT Billy Graham is dead. There was nobody like him! He will be missed by Christians and all religions. A very special man.”
– President Trump

The world’s best-known evangelist, the Rev. Billy Graham, died Wednesday. He was 99. From the gangly 16-year-old baseball-loving teen who found Christ at a tent revival, Graham went on to become an international media darling, a preacher to a dozen presidents and the voice of solace in times of national heartbreak. He was America’s pastor. 

I once heard Billy Graham preach in person in a football stadium. It was… utterly uninspiring. But the experience was also one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever seen. Because, you see, when he finished, I was thinking to myself, well, that was certainly a bust.

But then people started coming forward. First dozens, then hundreds. In the end, thousands of people came forward in response to the call. It was totally inexplicable. I had seldom been more astonished in my life, before or since.

A few years later, I read something Billy Graham said about his crusades. He said that before he goes anywhere to preach, he asks thousands of Christians in the area to commit to pray for the events, to pray for God to prepare the hearts of those who will be attending. These volunteers pray for months ahead of time. Then, Rev. Graham explained, he shows up, tells the crowd little more than, “God loves you and you need Jesus Christ,” and the Holy Spirit does the rest.

Now, I can’t prove that is what happened with science, but all I can say with absolute certainty is that whatever it is that made Billy Graham such an astonishingly powerful preacher of the Gospel, it wasn’t his eloquence, his rhetoric, or his logic. But he was a true servant of God and follower of Jesus Christ. May his reward be great indeed.

Christianity just happens to be Man’s last hope as well:

Hungary’s Prime Minister has claimed that ‘Christianity is Europe’s last hope’ after accusing politicians in Brussels, Berlin and Paris of causing the ‘decline of Christian culture and the advance of Islam’.

During his annual state of the nation speech, Viktor Orban said his government will oppose efforts by the United Nations or the European Union to ‘increase migration’ around the world. In a passionate speech, he claimed that Islam would soon ‘knock on Central Europe’s door’ from both the west and the south.

Orban, who is seeking a third consecutive term in April’s elections, called for a global alliance against migration. In his speech, he insisted that Western Europe is being overtaken by Muslims, before claiming that ‘born Germans are being forced back from most large German cities, as migrants always occupy big cities first.’

He made the claims as his right-wing populist Fidesz party began campaigning for an April 8 election in which it is expected to win a third consecutive landslide victory.

He’s absolutely right. Christianity is the only hope for both Christendom and Mankind. The false and wholly secular Judeo-Islamo-Churchianity that celebrates migration and global government, and promises that men will be like gods because science, is the long-predicted evil straight out of Hell.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Judeo Christ is Antichrist. Immigration and inclusivity are his weapons.

And there is nothing Christian about the Churchians that have taken over and converged the formerly Christian churches of the West. Merely talk to one of those self-professed “Christian” priests or pastors and it won’t take five minutes before the stink of sulfur begins to assail your nostrils. It’s remarkable to see how many of them are made visibly uncomfortable by the name of Jesus Christ and how they try to avoid using it.