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To: EnderWiggins
...led to the damning rhetorical stumble where you actually tried to justify the Holocaust as payback?...

Now... it was you and not me that volunteered the reputation of Jews as "Christ Killers." And yet you seem to deny that the Gospel of John could possibly have anything to do with that reputation. So, I still have to ask: If it did not come from the Gospels, where did it come from?

Thank you for seeking clarification! I would hate to think anyone thought that I was in any way trying to justify the horrific evil that was the Holocaust.

I was accepting what I thought a false premise for the sake of argument (and let me make clear: ONLY for the sake of argument). Specifically I was entertaining your notion that Christianity led to the Holocaust as if it were plausibly true.

My point was that even on your view, the motivation for the Holocaust must have been along the lines of the normal natural human animal desire for vengeance. Essentially acting from a naturalistic moral code which had evolved into the human animal. In contrast to acting on the ethical teachings that Christianity accepts as revealed by God, which demands that we forgive others and love our neighbor and so forth.

Let me help your contention that the "revealed truth" Christianity is bad for a minute. You are better served by the Spanish Inquisition, which is far easier to tie to Christianity is it not? After all it was conducted under the political and religious authority of the most prominent recognized Christian church of the time.

Even so, your desire to blame "revealed truth" in regard to Christian ethics is still frustrated...because it is very clear that the last thing the evil men torturing the Jews wanted to do was actually follow Jesus. They just wanted to claim to be Christian because it was the popular thing to be at the time (not just a good way to avoid torture, but a good way to make an easy living et al).

Now certainly, I would expect some bogus rationalizations along the "Christ killers" line crossed the mind of some of the sick-puppies running the Spanish Inquisition. And if so, it is because they are choosing to ignore what they claim they hold as "revealed truth" in regard to ethics, in favor of their own ethic based on empathy, anger, their own reasoning and their own concept of justice.

Doing evil in the name of good requires buying into a lie which justifies good as evil. The Nazis bought into a such a lie, just as those who committed the atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition bought into such a lie.

Of coarse somebody can do evil, knowing it to be evil. But people so prefer to think they are doing good, they are quite industrious with coming up with rationalizations and other bogus arguments to support the evil that they want to do as being good. Sometimes the lies are supported by bogus religious revelation. Sometimes its just bogus arguments based on cold soulless reason.

Such lies are at root falsehoods in regard to ethics, not falsehoods in regard to fact (although false facts might be believed because of a bias connected with the ethical lie).

Essentially then, man fell from grace by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They invented their own definition of good and evil in place of God's.

39 posted on 02/08/2010 5:37:13 PM PST by AndyTheBear
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To: AndyTheBear
I grow more and more bemused by your delusion that you seem to be arguing with me. The army of straw men that has populated your posts show no sign of abating.

Can you not simply answer the question? Without any help from me, you decided to portray the Jews as "Christ killers" and then use that reputation as an excuse for historic Christian anti-Semitism. You accepted that slur with complete matter-of-factness, offering no demurral or dissent. You did not frame it as if it were a controversial portrayal, but offered it as factual evidence for an argument you were making.

I am not asking you to squirm around the details of Christian history in the attempt to explain them away. I am asking you to account for your own behavior and your own ideas.

You are the one who volunteered that Jews were persecuted by Christians because they were "Christ Killers." We know exactly where the church fathers got that idea because they told us. You also had to have gotten that idea from somewhere.

So where, if not the Gospels?


40 posted on 02/08/2010 6:16:34 PM PST by EnderWiggins
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