Posted on 03/10/2004 4:10:11 PM PST by Pharmboy
William Safire, The New York Times' in-house "conservative" -- who endorsed Bill Clinton (news - web sites) in 1992, like so many conservatives -- was sure Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ" would incite anti-Semitic violence. Thus far, the pogroms have failed to materialize.
With all the subtlety of a Mack truck, Safire called Gibson's movie a version of "the medieval 'passion play,' preserved in pre-Hitler Germany at Oberammergau, a source of the hatred of all Jews as 'Christ killers.'" (Certainly every Aryan Nation skinhead murderer I've ever met was also a devoted theater buff and "passion play" aficionado.)
The "passion play" has been put on in Germany since at least 1633. I guess 1633 would be "pre-Hitler." In addition, Moses walked the Earth "pre-Hitler." The wheel was invented "pre-Hitler." People ate soup "pre-Hitler." Referring to the passion play as "pre-Hitler" is a slightly fancier version of every adolescent's favorite argument: You're like Hitler!
Despite repeated suggestions from liberals -- including the in-house "conservative" and Clinton-supporter at the Times -- Hitler is not what happens when you gin up Christians. Like Timothy McVeigh (news - web sites), the Columbine killers and the editorial board of The New York Times, Hitler detested Christians.
Indeed, Hitler denounced Christianity as an "invention of the Jew" and vowed that the "organized lie (of Christianity) must be smashed" so that the state would "remain the absolute master." Interestingly, this was the approach of all the great mass murderers of the last century -- all of whom were atheists: Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.
In the United States, more than 30 million babies have been killed by abortion since Roe v. Wade (news - web sites), vs. seven abortion providers killed. Yeah -- keep your eye on those Christians!
But according to liberals, it's Christianity that causes murder. (And don't get them started on Zionism.) Like their Muslim friends still harping about the Crusades, liberals won't "move on" from the Spanish Inquisition. In the entire 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition, about 30,000 people were killed. That's an average of less than 100 a year. Stalin knocked off that many kulaks before breakfast.
But Safire argues that viewers of "The Passion" will see the Jewish mob and think: "Who was responsible for this cruel humiliation? What villain deserves to be punished?"
Let's see: It was a Roman who ordered Christ's execution, and Romans who did all the flaying, taunting and crucifying. Perhaps Safire is indulging in his own negative stereotyping about Jews by assuming they simply viewed Romans as "the help."
But again I ask: Does anyone at the Times have the vaguest notion what Christianity is? (Besides people who go around putting up nativity scenes that have to be taken down by court order?) The religion that toppled the Roman Empire -- anyone?
Jesus' suffering and death is not a Hatfields-and-McCoys story demanding retaliation. The gist of the religion that transformed the world is: God's only son came to Earth to take the punishment we deserved.
If the Jews had somehow managed to block Jesus' crucifixion and He had died in old age of natural causes, there would be no salvation through Christ and no Christianity. Whatever possible responses there may be to that story, this is not one of them: Damn those Jews for being a part of God's plan to save my eternal soul!
Gibson didn't insert Jews into the story for some Machiavellian, racist reason. Christ was a Jew crucified by Romans at the request of other Jews in Jerusalem. I suppose if Gibson had moved the story to suburban Cleveland and portrayed Republican logging executives crucifying Christ, the left would calm down. But it simply didn't happen that way.
Of course, the original text is no excuse in Hollywood. The villains of Tom Clancy's book "The Sum of All Fears" were recently transformed from Muslim terrorists to neo-Nazis for the movie version. You wouldn't want to upset the little darlings. They might do something rash like slaughter 3,000 innocent American civilians in a single day. The only religion that can be constantly defamed and insulted is the one liberals pretend to be terrified of.
Free thought in public schools has been dead for 44 years.
A second variety of the Inquisition was the infamous Spanish Inquisition, authorized by Pope Sixtus IV in CV1478. Pope Sixtus tried to establish harmony between the inquisitors and the ordinaries, but was unable to maintain control of the desires of King Ferdinand V and Queen Isablella. Sixtus agreed to recognize the independence of the Spanish Inquisition. This institution survived to the beginning of the 19th century, and was permanently suppressed by a decree on July 15, 1834.
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Lets see. 1834 - 1478 = Tada! 356
You'd do well not to question Ann on any historical references without thorough research.
Particularly around here.
Jesus saying, HEY YOU.!. EVERYBODY lives forever SOMEWHERE.. you are now CHOOSEING you're eternal holiday.. read the fine print before signing by the way I'm offering a DISCOUNT...
Its the USED JESUS salesman and RETAILERS that hate Jesus...
You got me there, hotshot. I should have just "Inquisition" or "Inquisition in Spain," both of which have much broader connotations than "Spanish Inquisition." Nonetheless, I note you didn't address the main question, the matter of 30,000 people allegedly killed by it.
Afraid I don't follow. I've always considered the channeling of electricity through a large number of microcircuits, where "on" equals 1 and "off" equals 2, to be plain old physics, not quantum physics. Same with the concentration of a narrow spectrum of light across a beam, in terms of the barcode scanner. Nothing really quantum about the base technology.
I know work continues in the so-called "quantum computer" space, but my understanding is that it's really just the addition of more states than simply "on" and "off", amounting to "on and on", "on and off", "off and off", "off and on," and so forth up the multidimensional tree. There's also a theory that the human brain is actually an electrochemical "quantum" computer which processes data across multiple dimensions, else the candlepower of it can't be fully explained.
I think the current quantum theory is evolving within a simultaneously too-rigid and too-fantastical supposition, and that actual reality is simpler. Multiple dimensions that the human mind perceives as three, for example. Seems easier to digest to me.
It isn't so much a limitation as an acceptance of the Biblical statement that God is One (in three "persons"). I don't imagine a God that deins to exist in an infinite number of states of Being across an infinite number of "universes," or observing from outside of that infinite number of universes. There's also the paradoxical idea that there would exist an infinite number of universes in which there IS no God, and an infinite number in which God is One, an infinite number in which there are an infinite number of Gods, an infinite number in which a particular rock or bird feather is God, and so on.
That's where the whole "infinite number of parallel universes" idea falls apart, in my mind. People tend to imagine this in macro-scale. There's a universe in which Hitler existed, and one in which he didn't, for example. The actual theory, compared to that level of simplicity, is insane. Such concepts as, for every drop of rain that falls on every square millimeter of earth, and on every earthlike planet in the universe, there are an infinite number in which that drop of rain landed a nanometer to the left or to the right of where it fell in this universe.
Really, even that is thinking in macro-scale - the reality would be that for every mere probability in, say, the track of every electron around every atom in the universe, there would be an infinite number of parallel universes in which that probability is different - and an infinite number resulting from each of those differences.
There are those who find this theory tenable. I personally don't. The only tangible evidence I've ever seen is the brief existence of antihydrogen - and I think even that is subject to different interpretations. Maybe it's the forcible extraction of the tiniest piece of "matter" one can pull from an adjacent dimension, rather than from the "antiUniverse."
I've never really been convinced of the "Many Worlds" premise from Bell's Theorem - quite the opposite, actually. Although this looks like an interesting take on it: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/0003/0003146.pdf
I do admit a ready tendency to lean towards the theological in favor of the theoretical.
You were prolly blinded by the blood gouting from the severed limbs of the liberal rabble.
Dude, I laughed out loud at 3 separate paragraphs. What more could a man ask for?
LOL! Only at FR would a Coulter cheesecake thread devolve into a discussion of quantum physics. :-)
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