Posted by sigismund on November 19, 2011, at 21:53:56
In reply to What events in the Bible mean to me, posted by hyperfocus on November 17, 2011, at 23:44:35
IMO, you are thinking in an either/or way, and it might make more sense to think of both/and.
Ideas are important. The history of Marxism shows how poisonous ideas have poisonous results. And the history of Christianity shows the same. The Christianity I grew up with was clearly antiesemitic, but I was good at compartmentalisation, so it never occurred to me that the Jews of the Bible were the same people as the Jews of WWII. I was looking at the art in the Prado and could not fail to think that so much martyrdom must inevitably lead to revenge. The depictions of the Jews in some paintings are particularly awful. I was left feeling that the art was a slice of the history.
It is only in the last 30 years and in the US that Christianity has not been antisemitic, mostly that soft antisemitism that I grew up with, but not always, and anyway, one suspects that it has simply been displaced onto the other semitic people (who live above the oil).
poster:sigismund
thread:1002966
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/faith/20101230/msgs/1003158.html