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LadyEllen -> RE: God on Trial (11/18/2008 10:02:14 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: hardbodysub
quote:
ORIGINAL: LadyEllen
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- after all, if no Jewish God then no Christianity ...
No Jewish God, then no Christian or Muslim God either. It's the same one for all three religions.
Yes. But the point is that the holocaust only occurred as the culmination of centuries of Church teachings that the Jews killed Jesus because of their refusal to recognise him as the Messiah and thence that the Jews were no longer the chosen people and in fact were subhuman at best, evil at worst.
Without that revolutionary idea of the Jews, that there is one God only, and thus only one way, none of this would have happened. With pluralistic interpretations of the divine, there is room to be and to do with validity a whole range of ways. Disagreements, confrontations and violence over "one true way" are unlikely to occur in such scenarios, where it is understood that there is no one true way.
That this approach produces problems can be seen in the history of the Jewish people recounted in the Bible - the leading civilisations of the Middle East and later Rome for centuries saw the Jewish people as a problem in themselves because of their one God, and persecuted and suppressed them and their idea as far as they were able, recognising the danger of the idea.
When the idea is then spread across the ancient world by way of a new religion called Christianity, the seeds are sown for a future characterised by violence as the means to settle what is the one true way. Add into that the factors described about the Jews receiving the blame for the execution of Jesus and the holocaust was inevitable, being only the most recent example of a theme recurrent in European history and arising from them.
The Jews, seen as the evil culprits in all this, hoist on their own petard by way of their idea of one God and one true way, were bound to become the pariahs and thence the victims.
Meanwhile, had the idea never been thought up, had Christianity been confined to its original population, Jews would just have been another foreign people with nothing to mark them out as being in any way special or warranting any special treatment.
That similar factors are coming into play with regard to Islam and Muslims is interesting in our modern world. But the same revolutionary idea is one which we see played out from time to time even here, with the "one twue way" threads - the cultural shift from plurality of approach to duality of approach infects us from top to bottom, and is exerted upon all our relationships with the world around us due to the cultural domination of the west over the world.
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