Christian Right: Kill Muslims to Purify the Earth

[aps45819 (Premo)]

Originally Posted by tommyjones

my assuption is that is just one documented instance of christians working to erradicate an entire race. (btw this was just a small portion of the native americans that were eliminated)

What church or Christian group was in charge of eradicating the indigenous population?

[tommyjones]

Originally Posted by RadioPatrol

Sigh ...... Nazis aka National Socialist German Workers Party was a Political Party not a branch of Christianity.... however Hitler did co opt certain fringe Christian thinking of the day:

Nazism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

oh, i get it, if you are a christian and you do something wrong, you are no longer representing christianity, but if you are a muslim EVERYTHING you do represents islam. now its crystal clear


funny, the nazis considered themselves christian, and they used christianity to justify their atrocities

[RadioPatrol]

Positive Christanity:

Positive Christianity (German: Positives Christentum) is a term adopted by Nazi leaders to refer to a model of Christianity consistent with Nazism.

Adherents of Positive Christianity argued that traditional Christianity emphasized the passive rather than the active aspects of Christ's life, stressing his sacrifice on the cross and other-worldly redemption. They wanted to replace this with a "positive" emphasis on Christ as an active preacher, organizer and fighter who opposed the institutionalized Judaism of his day. At various points in the Nazi regime, attempts were made to replace orthodox Christianity with its "positive" alternative.

Origins of the idea
Positive Christianity grew out of the Higher Criticism of the nineteenth century, with its emphasis on the distinction between the historical Jesus, and the divine Jesus of theology. According to some schools of thought, the saviour-figure of orthodox Christianity was very different from the historical Galilean preacher. While many such scholars sought to place Jesus in the context of ancient Judaism, some writers reconstructed a historical Jesus who corresponded to anti-Semitic ideology. In the writings of such anti-Semites as Emile Burnouf, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Paul de Lagarde, Jesus was redefined as an "Aryan" hero who struggled against Judaism. Consistent with their origins in Higher Criticism, such writers often either rejected or minimized the miraculous aspects of Gospel narratives, reducing the crucifixion to a tragic coda to Jesus's life rather than its prefigured culmination. Both Burnouf and Chamberlain argued that the population of Galilee was racially distinct from that of Judea. Lagarde insisted that German Christianity must become "national" in character.

In Nazi ideology
Such ideas were eagerly seized upon by the Nazi movement, which circulated them in its journals such as Der Stürmer and Völkischer Beobachter, both of which stressed the "Nordic" character of Jesus. However, the party was careful to stress that Positive Christianity need not contradict the traditional theologies of established churches. As early as 1920 the Nazis proclaimed in their manifesto that,

"The Party as such takes its stand on a positive Christianity but does not tie itself in the matter of confession to any particular denomination. It fights the spirit of Jewish materialism inside and outside ourselves."[1]

Despite this, a number of Nazis openly challenged the established churches. Alfred Rosenberg, editor of Völkischer Beobachter, developed a radical version of Positive Christianity in The Myth of the Twentieth Century, in which he argued that the Catholic and Protestant churches had distorted Christianity in such a way that the "heroic" and "Germanic" aspects of Jesus's life had been ignored. For Rosenberg, Positive Christianity was a transitional ideology that would pave the way to the revival of fully Aryan religions. Its symbol was the orb of the sun in the form of a sun cross.

Hitler distanced himself from Rosenberg's more radical ideas, wishing to retain the support of the conservative Christian electorate and social elite, but he emphasized the desirability of Positive Christianity. The German Christians led by Ludwig Müller were the principal agents in Hitler's early attempt to Nazify Christianity in Germany by uniting the Protestant churches under Müller's leadership, but this proposal met with resistance, as it was rejected by many Christian pastors under the leadership of Martin Niemöller. Following this failure, Hitler backtracked on attempts to directly Nazify the churches.

The German Faith Movement founded by Jakob Wilhelm Hauer adopted a more thoroughly Aryanized form of the ideology, claiming to represent the essence of the "protestant" spirit by mixing aspects of Christianity with ideas derived from "Aryan" religions such as Vedic Hinduism. They attempted to separate Nazi officials from church affiliations, banning nativity plays and calling for an end to daily prayers in schools.

With the fall of the Nazi regime in 1945, Positive Christianity as a movement, fell into obscurity. It continues to be espoused by some Christian Identity groups,[2] but has been rejected by mainstream Christian churches.

[tommyjones]

Originally Posted by RadioPatrol

Positive Christanity:

interesting that "christianity" is the underlying theme here.....

i see it as no different than baptists and catholics, maybe even as less different.

[RadioPatrol]

Higher Criticism

Higher criticism is a name given to critical studies of the Bible that treat it as a text created by human beings at a particular historical time and for various human motives, in contrast with the treatment of the Bible as the inerrant word of God. The phrase "lower criticism" was used for attempts to interpret Biblical texts based only on the internal evidence from the texts themselves. The Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466? - 1536) is usually credited as the first to study the Bible in this light,[1] although many of his methods are also found in the much earlier writing of Saint Augustine (354 - 430).[citation needed]

The higher criticism "studies the biblical text in the same fashion as it would study any other ancient text and comments upon it as an expression of human discourse".[2]

The phrase "the higher criticism" became popular in Europe from the mid-18th century to the early 20th century, to describe the work of such scholars as Jean Astruc (mid-18th cent.), Johann Salomo Semler (1725-91), Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752-1827), Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), and Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918).[3] In academic circles today, this is the body of work properly considered "the higher criticism", though the phrase is sometimes applied to earlier or later work using similar methods.

Lower criticism

None of the original books of the New Testament have survived to modern times. All that exists are copies of the original documents. Lower criticism was developed in an attempt to find out what the original looked like.

For example, Josephus employed scribes to copy his Antiquities of the Jews. As the scribes copied the Antiquities, they made mistakes. The copies of these copies also had the mistakes. Each generation of copies contained errors, but not necessarily more than the previous generation as errors would be fixed when caught by scribes.

When an error consists of something being left out, it is called a deletion. When something was added, it is called an interpolation.

Today, none of Josephus' original work survives, but different families of texts have survived. Lower Criticism studies these surviving families, particularly the differences among them. Scholars are then able to piece together a good idea of what the original looked like. The more surviving copies, the more accurately they deduce information about the original.

Higher criticism

Once lower critics have done their job and we have a good idea of what the original text looked like, higher critics can then compare this text with the writing of other authors.

Scholars try to understand whether the author is an eyewitness, or whether he is basing his work on primary or even secondary sources. They also try to understand the bias of the writer, which will give us hints to why he focuses on one subject but omits another. Higher criticism is divided up into sub-categories, including primarily source criticism, form criticism, and redaction criticism.

An example of higher (source) criticism at work would be the study of the Synoptic problem. Higher critics noticed that the three Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, were very similar, indeed, at times identical. The dominant theory to account for the duplication is called the two-source hypothesis. This suggests that Mark was the first gospel to be written, and that it was probably based on a combination of early oral and written material. Matthew and Luke were written at a later time, and relied primarily on two different sources: Mark and a written collection of Jesus's sayings, which has been given the name Q by scholars. This latter document has now been lost, but at least some of its material can be deduced indirectly, namely through the material that is common in Mathew and Luke but absent in Mark. In addition to Mark and Q, the writers of Mathew and Luke made some use of additional sources, which would account for the material that is unique to each of them.

The documentary hypothesis, which attempts to chart the origins of the Torah, is another key issue in higher criticism.

Roman Catholic view

Pope Leo XIII (1810 - 1903) condemned secular biblical scholarship in his encyclical Providentissimus Deus;[4], but in 1943 Pope Pius XII gave license to the new scholarship in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu: "[T]extual criticism ... [is] quite rightly employed in the case of the Sacred Books ... Let the interpreter then, with all care and without neglecting any light derived from recent research, endeavor to determine the peculiar character and circumstances of the sacred writer, the age in which he lived, the sources written or oral to which he had recourse and the forms of expression he employed." [5] Today the modern Catechism states: "#110 In order to discover the sacred authors' intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current. For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression."

Snip

[Xaquin44]

Originally Posted by This_person

That there is a time limit to going back and judging the actions of a group.

For example, I don't think you can judge all monkeys today by the action of one monkey tens of thousands of years ago (yes, I probably had too few "great"s in there). Nor can you judge all Christians by what history reports from hundreds of years ago about a small group of people who happened to be Christian doing barbaric things. Nor can you judge the descendants of those wronged people by the barbaric actions their ancestors also performed. Nor can you judge Christianity by what some nutcase who happened to have been in charge of a country 70 years ago did. Nor can you judge all Muslims by the actions of a handful of nutcases today. Okay, more than a handful, but still.

Bringing up old problems of one group to justify the current actions of another group is assinine. Judging all Muslim people by the actions of a large group of current Muslims is bigotted. Take each person individually, and handle them as responsible for their own actions.

That's what I'm saying.

well yes, but we have people here judging 1/5th of the worlds population like they are all one and the same, all the while trumpeting the supposed acts of over 1 billion people (yes I know some muslims have commited terrible acts that rival even christians for the 'worst' catagory) while implying (or outright saying) that their religion or lifestyle would never do such things.

I bring up past examples just to show that it's been done and while current (and past) acts are (and were) terrible, that you shouldn't judge an entire culture by the acts of the very very few.

[RadioPatrol]

Part II

Protestant Christian view

Martin Luther, leader of the Protestant Reformation, believed strongly in the literal truth of scripture. He wrote, "All the articles of our Christian faith, which God has revealed to us in His Word, are in presence of reason sheerly impossible, absurd and false." But at other times, he accepted the authority of reason, so long as it did not contradict scripture. "Unless I am convicted by the testimony of Sacred Scripture or by evident reason... my conscience is captive to the Word of God." He even used some of the methods that would later be called "higher criticism" in his study of the Bible. He wrote, "The discourses of the Prophets were none of them regularly committed to writing at the time; their disciples and hearers collected them subsequently. ... Solomon's Proverbs were not the work of Solomon."[6]

Around the end of the 18th century Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, "the founder of modern Old Testament criticism", produced works of "investigation of the inner nature of the Old Testament with the help of the Higher Criticism". Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher also influenced the development of Higher Criticism.

A group of German biblical scholars at Tübingen University formed the Tübingen school of theology under the leadership of Ferdinand Christian Baur, with important works being produced by Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach and David Strauss. In the early 19th century they sought independent confirmation of the events related in the Bible through Hegelian analysis of the historical records of the Middle East from Christian and Old Testament times.[7][8]

Their ideas were brought to England by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, then in 1846 George Eliot translated David Strauss's sensational Leben Jesu as the Life of Jesus Critically Examined, a quest for the historical Jesus. In 1854 she followed this with a translation of Feuerbach's even more radical Essence of Christianity which held that the idea of God was created by man to express the divine within himself, though Strauss attracted most of the controversy.[7] The loose grouping of Broad Churchmen in the Church of England was influenced by the German higher critics. In particular, Benjamin Jowett visited Germany and studied the work of Baur in the 1840s, then in 1866 published his book on The Epistles of St Paul, arousing theological opposition. He then collaborated with six other theologians to publish their Essays and Reviews in 1860. The central essay was Jowett's On the Interpretation of Scripture which argued that the Bible should be studied to find the authors' original meaning in their own context rather than expecting it to provide a modern scientific text.[9][10]

Today, some Protestants oppose the methods of the higher criticism, and hold that the Bible is divinely inspired and incapable of error, at least in its original form.[11]

Response to the higher criticism

Many Christians reacted toward the so called "higher criticism" with hostility, and there are a number of Christian books still in print today designed to refute the claims of higher critics.[12] However, most serious Christian scholars accept many of the methods and conclusions that were so shocking when they were first introduced.[citation needed]

As an example, consider the treatment of Noah's Ark in various editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In the first edition, in 1771, the story of Noah and the Ark is treated as essentially factual, and the following scientific evidence is offered, "...Buteo and Kircher have proved geometrically, that, taking the common cubit as a foot and a half, the ark was abundantly sufficient for all the animals supposed to be lodged in it..., the number of species of animals will be found much less than is generally imagined, not amounting to an hundred species of quadrupeds... ." By the eighth edition, however, the encyclopedia says of the Noah story, "The insuperable difficulties connected with the belief that all other existing species of animals were provided for in the ark are obviated by adopting the suggestion of Bishop Stillingfleet, approved by Matthew Poole...and others, that the Deluge did not extend beyond the region of the earth then inhabited..." By the ninth edition, in 1875, there is no attempt to reconcile the Noah story with scientific fact, and it is presented without comment. In the 1960 edition, in the article Ark, we find the following, "Before the days of "higher criticism" and the rise of the modern scientific views as to the origin of the species, there was much discussion among the learned, and many ingenious and curious theories were advanced, as to the number of animals on the ark..."[13]

[aps45819 (Premo)]

Originally Posted by tommyjones

oh, i get it, if you are a christian and you do something wrong, you are no longer representing christianity, but if you are a muslim EVERYTHING you do represents islam. now its crystal clear


funny, the nazis considered themselves christian, and they used christianity to justify their atrocities

Funny how when you blow yourself up in a crowded area while screaming "DEATH TO THE INFIDELS" some left wing coward will claim it has nothing to do with his religion.

Hitler was the spiritual leader of the Nazis. He based his beliefs on a mixture of Christianity and Germanic mythology.

[tommyjones]

Originally Posted by aps45819

Funny how when you blow yourself up in a crowded area while screaming "DEATH TO THE INFIDELS" some left wing coward will claim it has nothing to do with his religion.

Hitler was the spiritual leader of the Nazis. He based his beliefs on a mixture of Christianity and Germanic mythology.

its just like all these right wingers saying that the nazis weren't christian.

either they both represent their faith, or neither do.......

[RadioPatrol]

Originally Posted by Xaquin44

well yes, but we have people here judging 1/5th of the worlds population like they are all one and the same, all the while trumpeting the supposed acts of over 1 billion people (yes I know some muslims have commited terrible acts that rival even christians for the 'worst' catagory) while implying (or outright saying) that their religion or lifestyle would never do such things.

I bring up past examples just to show that it's been done and while current (and past) acts are (and were) terrible, that you shouldn't judge an entire culture by the acts of the very very few.

Nothing in my post suggest that anyone should eradicate all Muslims, in fact I believe I went out of my way to state that the Islamofacists were the ones in need of killing - not all Muslims - because there was no negotiation with the likes of Al Q, Hamas, Hezbollah etc .........