It’s a pretty safe bet most of us didn’t notice that Saturday,
November 9th marked the 75th anniversary of the beginning
of what is arguably the worst case of religiously inspired genocide ever
recorded on the planet.
Seventy-five years ago in Nazi Germany, persecution of the Jews became officially sanctioned genocide when brown shirted Nazis and like thinking German civilians smashed windows of Jewish businesses’ (hence the name “glass night,” or more succinctly The Night of Broken Glass), burned seven thousand Jewish businesses to the ground as well as one-thousand synagogues, and destroyed Jewish homes and belongings; culminating in the death of at least ninety-one innocent German Jews.
The government of Germany did more than fail to prosecute the perpetrators of this supposedly impromptu, but well organized, act of antisemitism against their own citizens; they actually rounded up 30,000 Jews and sent them off to concentration camps. Kristallnacht marked the transition from Jewish persecution to Jewish extermination. And so began the Holocaust.
Wait. Did I say that began the Holocaust? I misspoke. No, the beginnings of the Holocaust can be traced back almost 1,800 years before Kristallnacht, and laid right at the feet of the creators of anti-Jewish thought: the Catholic Church and their doctrine of collective Jewish guilt for the supposed death of their make believe Man-god.
The New Testament is rife with anti-Jewish sentiment. Paul, realized the Jews weren’t buying the Messiah-ship of Jesus and weren't going to be the source of growth of the new cult. Thus, in his effort to recruit pagan Romans to Christianity, he shifted blame from the Roman execution of a seditious Jewish monarchist onto the Jews themselves and away from the Romans, thus removing direct responsibility for Jesus’ death from his prime recruiting target. The rest is, as they say, history.
Shortly thereafter, with the growth of Christianity, Jewish lives were worth less than Christian lives. During the crusades Jewish lives were barely more valued than Muslim’s lives. Good Christian knights slaughtered Jews wholesale as they rode to the Holy Land. Jews were blamed for plagues. They were banned from craft guilds; barred from Europe’s universities; forced out of their places of birth upon threat of death or torture; taxed for their Judaism; forcibly converted to Christianity on pain of death; herded into ghettos. Spontaneous cases of pogroms, Jewish persecutions and killings, became the norm throughout Christian Europe for centuries. The list of atrocities and injustices is mind bending.
That’s not to say The Catholic Church was the sole
guilty party. The Reformation bred
protestant cults that hated the Jews just as much, or more… they used the same
Bible after all. Martin Luther, the founder of Lutheranism, was a rabid
anti-Semite and fanned the flamed of Jew hating.Seventy-five years ago in Nazi Germany, persecution of the Jews became officially sanctioned genocide when brown shirted Nazis and like thinking German civilians smashed windows of Jewish businesses’ (hence the name “glass night,” or more succinctly The Night of Broken Glass), burned seven thousand Jewish businesses to the ground as well as one-thousand synagogues, and destroyed Jewish homes and belongings; culminating in the death of at least ninety-one innocent German Jews.
The government of Germany did more than fail to prosecute the perpetrators of this supposedly impromptu, but well organized, act of antisemitism against their own citizens; they actually rounded up 30,000 Jews and sent them off to concentration camps. Kristallnacht marked the transition from Jewish persecution to Jewish extermination. And so began the Holocaust.
Wait. Did I say that began the Holocaust? I misspoke. No, the beginnings of the Holocaust can be traced back almost 1,800 years before Kristallnacht, and laid right at the feet of the creators of anti-Jewish thought: the Catholic Church and their doctrine of collective Jewish guilt for the supposed death of their make believe Man-god.
The New Testament is rife with anti-Jewish sentiment. Paul, realized the Jews weren’t buying the Messiah-ship of Jesus and weren't going to be the source of growth of the new cult. Thus, in his effort to recruit pagan Romans to Christianity, he shifted blame from the Roman execution of a seditious Jewish monarchist onto the Jews themselves and away from the Romans, thus removing direct responsibility for Jesus’ death from his prime recruiting target. The rest is, as they say, history.
Shortly thereafter, with the growth of Christianity, Jewish lives were worth less than Christian lives. During the crusades Jewish lives were barely more valued than Muslim’s lives. Good Christian knights slaughtered Jews wholesale as they rode to the Holy Land. Jews were blamed for plagues. They were banned from craft guilds; barred from Europe’s universities; forced out of their places of birth upon threat of death or torture; taxed for their Judaism; forcibly converted to Christianity on pain of death; herded into ghettos. Spontaneous cases of pogroms, Jewish persecutions and killings, became the norm throughout Christian Europe for centuries. The list of atrocities and injustices is mind bending.
Is it any wonder then that most of the monarchies of Europe, then Hitler saw Jews as just another pestilence worthy of extinction? Hitler after all was raised in the Catholic Church. He knew the Church doctrine well. Thus, no coincidence that when the time came to purify Germany and cultivate the Aryan Race the Jews were the prime target.
In a recent poll of US Christians, 27% blame the Jews for “killing God.” I’m surprised it’s that low. In fact, I highly doubt that even scratches the surface. While Pope Francis and some recent popes have professed Jewish collective guilt to be wrong; and the Lutheran church is embarrassed by Luther’s call for Jewish expulsion and persecution and murder - they can’t undo what the Christian bible says, and what the Church has so effectively implanted and cultivated in the minds of Christians and the world for nearly two-thousand years.
Until the New Testament is purged of the fable and hate it promotes (and while they’re at it they can fix the scientific fallacies and contradictions) the remaining 27% of Christians who openly admit they blame and hate Jews, and the perhaps the other 50% who are just too embarrassed to openly admit it, are the “True Christians.”
I hope its 2,000 years more before the Jews forgive the Christians for the horrors and misery their mindless cult caused the Jewish people. Even then, it would be too soon. It would do us all well to never forget Kristallnacht for it is proof of what religion brings.
7 comments:
Never, never forget. Some people already have or spin it to less that it was.
I am sure that same 27% also denies the holocaust ever occurred. "Holocaust? What holocaust?"
I bet that some of the Xtians that don't openly blame the Jews still do, but they have a facade to maintain while they openly support Israel in the hopes they destroy the Palestinians, there by reclaiming the not-so-Holy lands. Then Jeebus will have a place to land when his golden helicopter descends from the sky, because he can't land anywhere else but Palestine, and those pesky Muslims won't leave.
Ironically, those same Xtians that won't openly blame the Jews also deny the fact Hitler was a Catholic, and the Vatican, under Pope Pius XII during WWII, never condemned the Nazis. They like to say Hitler was an atheist because a god Xtian boy would never kill million's of Jews, gypsies, and other minorities.
How does that saying go, those that forget the past are soon to repeat it.
I loathe religions and their Hippocratic bullshit
Bob / Mike:
Thanks..Yes denial, denial, denial is the watch word of Xtians.
They even lack the intellectual hoesty, and education necessary to understand that regardless of Hitler's religious perspective at the time of the attrocity, Christianity is responsible for the persecution of Jews thru the ages. Denial makes it "someone elses fault..like that 'atheist' Hitler, or Muslims."
Such crap. Hypocracy at its finest.
Seems the Jews have learned from this lesson; since 1948, Israel has relentlessly stolen the land of the Palestinians and decimated its population.
If you removed the "fable and hate" and the "scientific fallacies and contradictions" from the Bible, what would be left? The page numbers?
Hitler was very explicit in basing his anti-Semitism on the Bible, as Richard Dawkins has shown.
Don't forget, too, the centuries of persecution of Jews by Muslims, rooted in the same kind of ancient bigotry and stories frozen into immutable dogma.
When the latest outrage from the Roman Catholic Church hits the news cycle, My Lady teases me. "Oh, you Catholics."
Inside joke. I haven't been a practicing Catholic for going on 40 years, and am a confirmed atheist since 2000, and she knows this.
The litany of horrors you cite are a major reason I finally called it quits with the Church and theism in general. I'm aware church scribes were instrumental in preserving what was left of Greek and Roman knowledge. I also know that Christians were responsible for the destruction of 90% of that knowledge.
I'm pissed off at the Church for tolerating clerics who buggered altar boys with impunity for centuries. I'm more pissed off that the Church set Western civilization back a couple of thousand years.
And I can no longer say and mean it, God DAMN them." And that is frustrating.
Another spot on posting that goes to the heart of the Christian faith, it not only exposes its foundational dogma and creed for what it is, but it forces the Christian to engage in all kinds of verbal contortions to explain away the indefensible and the truly immoral .The damning evidence is unavoidable. Slavery, genocide, ethnocentrism it is all in the pages of its holy book, the sooner this dangerous human created mythology passes into the trash bin of history the better for humankind.
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