[HostileTerritory]

I've read the implication of current day Christian guilt for either the Holocaust or pogroms in at least 4 reviews of the Passion so far in the last week.

I don't know who brought up "Christian guilt", but they're dead wrong. I suspect that you're mischaracterizing the argument that the anti-Semitic threads in some aspects of Christianity (in particular, the writings of Luther and much of what the Church did in the Middle Ages and such) contributed to the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust. This is not the same as "all Christians bear guilt for the Holocaust", which was your claim of equivalence with the pre-Vatican II claim of "the blood is upon me and all of my children."

I want to emphasize that Jews recognize that the Catholic Church and Lutheran Church have rejected any baggage they carried of anti-Semitism, because it was a historical relic and unconnected to Christ's message of salvation. The Lutheran Church was never anti-Semitic, there were just some problematic stuff Luther wrote about Jews.

No Jew in any position of responsibility would make the straw man argument you're making.

[Americathy]

I have read some Luther. Very intelligent but maybe a little over the top. I never got the impression he blamed the Jews (I could be wrong), but I did get the impression he didn't like them very much.

[Qwinn]

Well, for one, I never said it was Jews making that argument. Actually, it's usually leftist secularists, I have no idea what race they are. But I hear it all the time. I got into a twenty page war about the issue on the Charlie Rose boards, and -many- people, many of them who claim they are Christian themselves (all of them lefties, of course), never tired of making the point that primarily Christian Germans were to blame for the Holocaust, and it represented a failure of Christianity, and Christianity is guilty of that crime. The exact same point was repeatedly made about pogroms and how that was due to collective Christian bigotry.

And oh man, if you think that the Lutherans aren't dismissed collectively as massively anti-semitic on a -regular- basis, your eyes are REALLY closed. They're the only group I can think of that gets bashed even more than Catholics for anti-semitism, and they get it -constantly-.

Qwinn