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1bdc5e5
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I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. Christianity and Islam, theistic though they may claim to be, are both based on the fetishizing of human primates: Jesus in one case and Mohammed in the other. Neither of these figures can be called exactly historical but both have one thing in common even in their quasi-mythical dimension. Both of them were first encountered by the Jews. And the Jews, ravenous as they were for any sign of the long-sought Messiah, were not taken in by either of these two pretenders, or not in large numbers or not for long. If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be ? I myself certainly hope that it will not. The Jews have seen through Jesus and Mohammed. In retrospect, many of them have also seen through the mythical, primitive, and cruel figures of Abraham and Moses. Nearer to our own time, in the bitter combats over the work of Marx and Freud and Einstein, Jewish participants and protagonists have not been the least noticeable. May this always be the case, whenever any human primate sets up, or is set up by others, as a Messiah.
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myth
christianity
jesus
religion
marx
moses
einstein
prophets
freud
christians
muslims
muhammad
messiah
theism
atheism
islam
humans
antisemitism
jews
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Christopher Hitchens |
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b55c95f
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When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.
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irony
woody-allen
maimonides
judaism
messiah
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Christopher Hitchens |
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1266c2c
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Life will be wonderful when men no longer fear dying. When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity as life. No longer will children's minds be twisted by evil gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That's it: life is the villain to to those who preach reward in death, through grace and eternal bliss, or through dark revenge.
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life
gore-vidal
messiah
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Gore Vidal |
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8c86c38
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One notorious named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses--'may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing'--along with detailed refutations and denunciations by Abraham ibn Ezra and others. These exciting anathemas, of course, ensured that his worrying 'questions' would remain current for as long as the Orthodox commentaries would be read. In this way, rather as when Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' Jewishness contrives irony at its own expense. If there is one characteristic of Jews that I admire, it is that irony is seldom if ever wasted on them.
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irony
religion
curses
maimonides
orthodox-judaism
hiwi-al-balkhi
judaism
self-deprecation
jewishness
heretics
messiah
atheism
jews
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Christopher Hitchens |
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6eba041
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Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single passage of scripture or prophecy about the promised messiah that even hints of his ignominious death, let alone his bodily resurrection.
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scripture
messiah
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Reza Aslan |
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913950b
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El pecado de Onan. Derramar en el suelo la vieja semilla. Atar el camello. Quitarle el polvo al burro. Azotar al fariseo. Onanismo, el pecado que requiere de cientos de horas de practica para ser dominado, o al menos eso era lo que yo me decia a mi mismo. Dios mato a Onan por derramar su semilla en el suelo (la semilla de Onan, no la de Dios).
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humor
jesus-christ
messiah
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Christopher Moore |
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9c74e1b
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Young scholars, learning their historical method from Gospel scholars, often treat it as self-evident that the more skeptical they are toward their sources, the more rigorous will be their historical method. It has to be said, over and over, that historical rigor does not consist in fundamental skepticism toward historical testimony but in fundamental trust along with testing by critical questioning...
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myth
christ-myth
ecstatic-visions
jesus-myth
jewish-messiah
messiah
paul-s-visions
unreliable
visions
christ-myth-theory
historicity-of-jesus
historicity-of-the-gospels
jews
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Richard Bauckham |