redolent of the Nazi era
Judaism began with a people, and then became a congregation, and eventually a religion, Rosenzweig argues. Christianity began with a congregation into which it then selected its people, the "new Israel". Islam, he avers, was concocted as an institutionalized religion to begin with, as a parody of Judaism and Christianity. This, however, had dreadful consequences. "Mohammed took over the notion of Revelation from the outside, which left him stuck with the pagan idea of creation as a matter of course," Rosenzweig wrote. Allah merely is the apotheosized image of an Oriental despot, emphatically not the Judeo-Christian God of love. Rosenzweig altogether repudiates the notion of Islamic culture. As a caricature, Islam is entirely sterile: "Islam never created an Islamic art, but rather took into its service pre-Islamic art ... The pre-Islamic state, namely the Oriental state in its Byzantine form, made Islam into its state religion; the pre-Islamic spirit of the Koran adopted either pre-Islamic rationalism or mysticism and orthodoxy. In Europe, by contrast, in Christian Europe, there arose something new: Christian art, and a Christian state."
Marc Erikson/Asia Times Dec 2, 2003
-
Here's a page of quotes from Erikson's journalism over the last 4 years, at Asia Times. There's a consistent tone that's present in a lot of Zionist writing that carries an assumed commonality that's deceptive, inasmuch as the commonality is what's being tried for, worried about, attempted. The tone is smug and arrogant yet at the same time shrill and desperate, it's the accent of the not-quite-behind-the-scenes not-quite-yet-in-control.
This is the money quote though, because it's explicit in its conflation of the Old Testament God with the Father of Christ, what Erikson calls the "Judeo-Christian God of love." The only love exhibited by the God of the Old Testament is for the Jewish people. The New Testament, by being attached without any other linkage than editorial placement to the Old, becomes a confirmation of that exclusive relationship. The actions of the God of the Old Testament are nowhere acts of love for anything or anyone outside that special, exclusive relationship.
Agape is not an Old Testament practice, though it was I'm sure a practice of many Jews then, as it is today. But it's not official, it isn't in the book. The book is about doing what you're told, obeying the law. Compassion is a New Testament thing, compassion even when it's against the law. The story of Christ is exactly that, and the actions of the most genuine Christians today is exactly that.
The seamless joining of the Judeo-Christian religions, as though they were consistent with one another, is what's created a force for intolerance and bigotry in America, a vicious and angry cloud of righteousness that elevates ignorant obedience and blesses itself as privileged.
Self-love is not what Jesus meant by "Love one another." That was not an endorsement of exclusivity.
This is dangerously close to blasphemy - it is blasphemy really, and it's hard for me to write, not only because I was thoroughly indoctrinated by Christian schooling when I was too young to think for myself, but because I have been, in my personal life, marked out and watched for years by vigilant witnesses, searching for signs of the end times, and this will make me even more vulnerable to them. The causes of that are beyond the scope of this writing.
So at the same time I cut myself free from the early comfort of faith, I expose myself to powerful and vicious zealots whose morality is only their own benefit. Even saying that means a commitment to a reality that seems too fantastic and paranoid to be real, but these are strange fantastic times, and it's what I believe is the truth.
The earliest Christians were persecuted, Christianity began with persecution as its landscape and atmosphere. Somehow between the death of Christ and the Council of Nicea 300 years later Christianity became an organized political force, and the Bible became what it is today, an abridged version of Jewish holy scripture, the curiously edited story of the life of Jesus Christ, organizational memoranda from the beginnings of the Church hierarchy, and the stunningly psychedelic visions of Revelations that with their complete absence of mercy and compassion fit more easily with the retributive majesty of the Old Testament than with the forgiving and compassionate Christ of the New Testament.
The earliest Christians did not have Bibles. The earliest Christians were persecuted by Jews. That will read like classic anti-Semitist nonsense to some, but tomorrow I'll do a piece on Paul, the founder of Christianity as a political and social force that I think will disprove that charge.
As part of this series I wanted to do a piece today on so-called "Christian" names, the first names many of us were given at birth. It was part of an attempt at structure. From circumcision to naming, then on to schooling, the alphabet and the english language. But I got sidetracked by Erikson, and followed the impulse. So it goes.
Selah.
