JUDEO-CHRISTIAN
54. Aug 6, 1:32 pm
Newsgroups: alt.politics.democrats, alt.politics.usa.constitution,
alt.politics.usa.republican, talk.politics.libertarian, alt.education,
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From: -
Date: Sat, 06 Aug 2005 13:32:30 -0400
Local: Sat, Aug 6 2005 1:32 pm
Subject: Re: Sabbath and "blue laws"
c...@afone.as.arizona.edu (Cary Kittrell) wrote:
:|I always suspected that if I were a Jew, the term "Judeo-Christian"
:|might rankle me in much the same way as "Christo-Moonie" or
:|even "Christo-Mormon" would rankle the more conservative Christians.
It does rankle many of them
From: "Koshercook" <auswitzfits[delete]
Newsgroups:
soc.culture.jewish,alt.politics.nationalism.white,alt.politics.white-power,soc.culture.russian,alt.religion.christian
Subject: Judeo-Christian?
Date: 17 Dec 1998 20:36:52 GMT
The Rabbis of Judaism understand this just as do the leaders in the
Christian movement. Rabbi Moshe Maggal of the National Jewish Information
Service said in 1961 when the term Judeo-Christian was relatively new,
"There is no such thing as a Judeo-Christian religion. We consider the two
religions so different that one excludes the other." (National Jewish
Information Service, 6412 W. Olympic Blvd. L.A. CA).
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From: msaroff.123456[delete]
Newsgroups:
soc.culture.jewish,alt.politics.nationalism.white,alt.politics.white-power,soc.culture.russian,alt.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Judeo-Christian?
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1998 19:06:08 GMT
"ATypical" <peter...@dsinw.com> wrote:
Koshercook wrote in message <75bq14$...@bgtnsc02.worldnet.att.net>...
The Rabbis of Judaism understand this just as do the leaders in the
Christian movement. Rabbi Moshe Maggal of the National Jewish Information
Service said in 1961 when the term Judeo-Christian was relatively new,
"There is no such thing as a Judeo-Christian religion. We consider the two
religions so different that one excludes the other." (National Jewish
Information Service, 6412 W. Olympic Blvd. L.A. CA).
I've always heard the adjective term "Judeo-Christian" as being applied to
ethics and morality, not religion. No doubt that the several sects of
Judaism are very different from the numerous sects of Christianity.
Hi,
I would argue that ethically and spiritually, Judaism is
closer to Islam than Christianity. The term "Judeo-Christian" in
terms of ethics REALLY means "white people".
Look at who tends to use it in a positive way, Pat
Robertson, Jerry Fallwell, etc.
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From: saleen@[delete]
Newsgroups: alt.religion.christian
Subject: "Judeo-Christian" is a misnomer.
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 02:11:27 GMT
Why do people use the term "Judeo-Christian" as if the two religions
were somehow compatible? Judaism is anathema to Christian theology.
Judaism negates the foundational teachings and beliefs which form the
structural basis of Christianity. Judaism rejects the doctrine of the
Holy Trinity, denies the deity of Christ and does not accept salvation
through the redemptive blood of Christ. Judaism and Christianity are
not synonymous; and they damn sure do not go together.
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http://hereticalideas.com/index.php?p=932
Comment by Bobby A-G — 7/31/2003 @ 5:59 pm
Original sin is NOT a Judeo-Christian concept – it’s solely a Christian
belief. Judaism utterly rejects the notion of Original Sin. Quoting from
JewFaq (a very useful and accurate site), “According to Judaism, a child is
born pure, completely free from sin.”
I’ve researched the history of the term Judeo-Christian here. The term
gained popularity during the Holocaust when Christians realized how
ludicrous it sounded to complain that the Nazi atrocities perpetuated
against violated Christian decency.
But Judaism and Christianity are very different religions, and it does a
disservice to both to conflate them like that.
The notion that we are all sinners is not a Jewish concept, so it’s
incorrect to refer to it as a Judeo-Christian tradition.
Please don’t tar us with that brush.
Thank you.
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Results 1 - 10 of about 502 for JewFaq judeo christian. (0.31 seconds
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=++JewFaq+judeo+christian&btn...
Just one from the above URL
Judeo-Christian, I don’t think so! By Dr. Ken Matto
http://www.scionofzion.com/judeo-christian.htm
[excerpt]
(1 Th 2:14-15 KJV) For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of
God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like
things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: {15} Who both
killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and
they please not God, and are contrary to all men:
In recent years many Christian broadcasters and pastors have begun to use
the term Judeo-Christian when referring to things like ethics, even
attaching this erroneous moniker to the ethics of the founding fathers of
this nation. It seems this description is being used at an increase rate
when speaking of things Christian. The ignorance of those Christians who
use this term to try and please the Christian Zionists and the ignorant
Christian population at large is endemic. The attempt to amalgamate
Christianity and Judaism is akin to trying to amalgamate Islam and Judaism
or Hinduism. I have never heard terms like Judeo-Islam or Judeo-Hindu. That
is because all these religions stand on their own. The attempt to force
Judaism on Christianity is another attempt by Satan to lessen the impact of
Christianity and to neutralize it. The bottom line is that Judaism is the
enemy of Christ and Christianity and is totally antithetic to Judaism.
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SOME DIFFERENCES
http://www.jewfaq.org/sex.htm#Attitudes
Kosher Sex
Level: Intermediate
Note: This page addresses issues of Jewish law that may not be
appropriate for younger readers. In places, it discusses sexual behavior in
plain and frank terms. Please exercise appropriate discretion.
Jewish Attitudes Towards Sexuality
In Jewish law, sex is not considered shameful, sinful or obscene. Sex is
not a necessary evil for the sole purpose of procreation. Although sexual
desire comes from the yetzer ra (the evil impulse), it is no more evil than
hunger or thirst, which also come from the yetzer ra. Like hunger, thirst
or other basic instincts, sexual desire must be controlled and channeled,
satisfied at the proper time, place and manner. But when sexual desire is
satisfied between a husband and wife at the proper time, out of mutual love
and desire, sex is a mitzvah.
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http://www.jewfaq.org/sex.htm#Abortion
Abortion
Jewish law not only permits, but in some circumstances requires abortion.
Where the mother's life is in jeopardy because of the unborn child,
abortion is mandatory.
An unborn child has the status of "potential human life" until the majority
of the body has emerged from the mother. Potential human life is valuable,
and may not be terminated casually, but it does not have as much value as a
life in existence. The Talmud makes no bones about this: it says quite
bluntly that if the fetus threatens the life of the mother, you cut it up
within her body and remove it limb by limb if necessary, because its life
is not as valuable as hers. But once the greater part of the body has
emerged, you cannot take its life to save the mother's, because you cannot
choose between one human life and another.
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55. Gray Shockley Aug 13, 1:52 am
Newsgroups: alt.politics.democrats, alt.politics.usa.constitution,
alt.politics.usa.republican, talk.politics.libertarian, alt.education,
alt.atheism, alt.religion.christian, alt.politics.greens
From: Gray Shockley <grayshock...@cybercoffee.org> -
Date: Sat, 13 Aug 2005 00:52:29 -0500
Local: Sat, Aug 13 2005 1:52 am
Subject: Re: Sabbath and "blue laws"
There's an intermingling which most people miss.
Jews see the "Old Testament" as their past;
fundamentalist Christians see it as their future.
Gray Shockley
----------------------------------
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
(1) By contrast, historian Garry Wills sees no mistake. "The framers of the
Constitution," he concludes, stitched together ideas from "constitutional
monarchies, ancient republics, and modern leagues... but we (the U.S.)
invented nothing, except disestablishment... No other government in the
history of the world had launched itself without the help of officially
recognized gods and their state connected ministers."29. . . [p. 84]
29. Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics, Simon and
Schuster, 1990. p. 383.
(2) Conclusion
Since this book is about religion in American politics, it has dealt
primarily with Protestant, and especially evangelical, Christianity. The
influence of that form of religion has been so preponderant that only
recently has the notion of America as "a Christian nation" become rightly
suspect. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor caused a flurry of criticism when she
endorsed that notion in 1989.1 Yet the Supreme Court referred to "this
Christian nation" in nineteenth-century cases.2 Abraham Lincoln regularly
used the term.3
To understand why the term is now offensive we must recognize exactly
what it meant through most of our history. It did not mean that
"JudeoChristian heritage" people invoke when they want to defend civil
religion of Tocqueville's sort or try to shoehorn prayer back into the
schools. The dominant Christianity of America tolerated when it did not
encourage anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism. The "Judeo" part of the
mythical Judeo-Christian heritage was a Protestant reading of its "Old
Testament" as if that were the Jewish Scripture. There is more genuine
religious vision, much of it derived from the Jewish tradition, in recent
criticism of religious symbols than in condescending praise of the Jews as
preparers of the Christian testament. The ancient prohibition on idolatry
is a healthy warning against letting "civil religion" appropriate the
attributes of God. In most of our wars, as in dubious other matters like
slavery, we have indeed "taken God's name in vain."
America was, sociologically, a "Christian (Protestant) nation" by
virtue of its dominant cultural values, so long as those values were not
effectively challenged by others. Catholics withdrew from the national
school system to escape Protestantism, not secularism. Prayers were still
said, the Bible still read, in schools that the Catholic hierarchy objected
to-only it was the Protestant translation of the Bible that was used, and
the Protestant version of the Lord's Prayer. Nineteenth-century
Protestantism was not ecumenical. Those harking back to the "good old days"
of religion in public life forget just how exclusive that religion was.
America's culture was infused with Protestantism in the same way that,
according to Cardinal Newman, British literature was culturally Protestant.
As a Catholic, of course, he did not consider this historical fact
prescriptive, the expression of what should have been or had to be or must
forever be; but he told his fellows to face it as a historical fact: "We
cannot write a new Milton or a new Gibbon.."4 There are some givens of a
historical situation-and he was speaking de facto, not de lure. Catholics
should not deny the facts, he argued. They should face the obvious: "We
cannot destroy or reverse it the Protestant character of classical English
literature; we may confront and encounter it, but we cannot make it over
again."5
In the same way, there is no denying the Protestant consensus with
which this nation began-the anti-Catholicism expressed even in the
Declaration of Independence, the long exclusion of Jews from "Christian
organizations," the nativist resistance to other cultures. A Protestant God
led armies into war against the devil-worshiping Native Americans. African
gods could not be worshiped on America's soil when slaves were brought
here. Yet the first insights into the need to separate church and state
also came from Protestants-from people like John Endecott, Roger Williams,
and the Baptists. There were Protestant critics of slavery as well as
defenders-Anthony Benezet, for instance, in colonial and revolutionary
Philadelphia, breaking the law to teach slaves how to read. We have a
double heritage, even from the Protestant background that dominated our
culture for so long.
But few, even Protestants, want that exclusive aspect of our culture to
be maintained. That is why our history has been selectively rewritten,
foisting on us a premature ecumenism and mythical amity of
"judeo-Christian" elements. But it is our task, in a society of
increasingly complex articulation, to complete the effort of Madison in
removing religion from state ceremony and proclamations. We appreciate
better than Lincoln's contemporaries did his use of religious language to
question the complacent view that God is in agreement with armies that
invoke him. We value more those who follow conscience to deny that a
once-Christian culture must have a Christian state. A modern prophet like
Dr. King makes us understand the witness of those who found the "Christian
state" ungodly in its blessing of things like slavery.
Despite the Protestant presuppositions of our culture (many of them
unspoken), we have had a professed ideal of constitutional separation. That
gave to religion an initial, if minimal, freedom from crippling forms of
cooperation with the state. That, more than anything else, made the United
States a new thing on the earth, setting new tasks for religion, offering
it new opportunities. Everything else in our Constitution-separation of
powers, balanced government, bicameralism, federalism-had been anticipated
both in theory and practice. The framers aptly defended their handiwork
with citations from Polybius and Montesquieu and Hume, and with references
to the history of constitutional monarchies, ancient republics, and modern
leagues. We combined a number of these features in a way that was suitable
to our genius, as the drafters put itto what Montesquieu called the
national esprit. But we invented nothing, except disestablishment.
No other government in history had launched itself without the help of
officially recognized gods and their state-connected ministers. It is no
wonder that, in so novel an undertaking, it should have taken a while to
sift the dangers and the blessings of the new arrangement, to learn how
best to live with it, to complete the logic of its workings. We are still
grappling with its meaning for us. But, at the least, its meaning has been
one of freedom-the free exercise of the churches, free not only from
official obstruction but from compromising favors. A burden was lifted from
religion when it ceased to depend on the breath of princes, when it had
nothing by way of political office with which to lure or tempt people into
the fold or into the ministry. Thrown back on themselves, the churches were
encouraged to search for their own essence, make their moral case on truly
religious grounds, reward people in the proper spiritual currency. The
contradictory goals of political advancement and religious vocation were
not an omnipresent problem.
Corruption of church and state is a mutual infection, whether mild or
extreme. Even in mild form, it leads to the quiet agony of Trollope's
Warden (Septimus Harding), baffled by pygmy clergy seeking preferment.At
its worst it leads to the horror of the medieval papacy Lord Acton's own
example of "absolute power [that] corrupts absolutely. "6
Our American churches have escaped the worst element of that
partnership-the effort to maintain theological consistency through changes
of political regimes; the cleansing of mud from ecclesiastical skirts after
official scandal; the labor to maintain spiritual strength in captivity,
like Samson stirring in his chains; the spectacle of disappointed clerics
who dwindle into bitter courtiers. Purity of teaching and practice is
easier to demand, and not always impossible of achievement. Mercenary
desires, though they can creep in on ministers from all other sides, are at
least not obtruded by the state. We stumble on no remnants of cuius regio
eius religio (each region its own religion), as even Queen Elizabeth II
does, obliged to change identities in moving from one realm to another:
Head of the English church south of the Scottish border, she becomes head
of the Presbyterian kirk north of it.
The fear, of course, was that a church freed of official power would be
neutered. But no careful look at our history can support such fear.
Religion has, admittedly, been a powerful force for social stability,
supporting indirectly the regime that offers free exercise to all beliefs;
but it has also been a prophetic voice of resistance to power when that is
unchecked by moral insight. The cleric in jail is an American tradition,
the conscientious objector, the practitioner of civil disobedience. The
Quaker Anthony Benezet denounced slavery to Patrick Henry, war to General
Howe, and the treatment of Arcadians to his local Philadelphia rulers.
Carrie Nation, like Ronald Reagan a Disciple of Christ, made fervent
war on saloons. The Underground Railway was run by holy criminals.
Religious radicals have extraordinary staying power-like Dorothy Day, who
went to jail for women's rights with Alice Paul in the 1920s, and with
Ammon Hennacy to protest nuclear war in the 1950s, feeding the poor and
defying the powerful, decade in and decade out. Of all the communes formed
in the wake of the 1960s, only religious ones seem to have survived into
the 1990s-Jonah House, Sojourners, the Committee for Creative Non-Violence.
The sanctuary movement offered a new underground railway for those fleeing
oppression in El Salvador and Guatemala.
The sanctuary movement of the 1980s renewed a religious drama played
out, over and over, in our supposedly secular world-the nocturnal gathering
for prayer, then the flight from police. The FBI sent bugged informers into
sanctuary churches. It paid spies like Jesus Cruz to smuggle refugees
alongide the movement's organizers, then to testify against them in the
Phoenix trial of 1985-86. 7
Jesus Cruz was an interesting name in this context, both the first and
the last name (cruz means "cross"-Jesus Cruz always wore one around his
neck). I think of him at Mass with the refugees, repeating that Last Supper
at which Jesus said the one who dipped a hand in the bowl with him would
betray him. In Cruz's case, the price was not thirty pieces of silver but
eighteen thousand dollars of tax-collected money. Here, as so often, the
church was not only separate from the state, but opposed to the state,
castigating it, breaking its laws, as Dr. King did, and Dorothy Day, and
Anthony Benezet. It is a part of our history we can be proud of, though our
elected representatives play the villains in the story. Roger Williams knew
that true religion must always be, in some measure, an underground affair.
1. Alan M. Dershowitz, "Justice O'Connor's Second Indiscretion," New
York Times, April 2, 1989.
2. People v. Ruggles (1811): "We Are a Christian people." Justice
Brewer in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States (1892): "This is a
Christian nation." Cf. Mark DeWolfe Howe, The Garden and the Wilderness:
Religion and Government in American Constitutional History (University of
Chicago, 1965), pp. 14, 29.
3. See Lincoln's order for Sabbath observance by the military, out of
"deference to the best sentiment of a Christian people," in Abraham
Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 18591865, edited by Don F. Fehrenbacher
(Library of America, 1989), p. 382. Also the resolution of slavery, as
disqualifying the South from entry "into the family of christian and
civilized nations" (ibid., p. 445-and cf. pp. 223, 433, 597, 627).
4. John Henry Newman, "English Catholic Literature," in The Idea of a
University (Oxford, 1976), p. 255.
5. Ibid., p. 259.
6. Acton's famous axiom was formulated in a letter of 1887 to Mandell
Creighton, a historian of the papacy. See Selected Writings of Lord Acton,
edited by J. Rufus Fears (Liberty Classics, 1985), vol. 2, p. 383.
7. 'Cf. Miriam Davidson, Convictions of the Heart: Jim Corbett and the
Sanctuary Movement (University of Arizona, 1988), pp. 115-17; Robert
Tomsho, The American Sanctuary Movement (Texas Monthly Press, 1987), pp.
159-67, 204-5.
Source of Information: Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American
Politics, Simon and Schuster, 1990. pp. 381-385. 383
***************************************************************
You are invited to check out the following:
The Rise of the Theocratic States of America
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocracy.htm
American Theocrats - Past and Present
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocrats.htm
The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
[and to join the discussion group for the above site and/or Separation of
Church and State in general, listed below]
HRSepCnS · Hampton Roads [Virginia] SepChurch&State
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HRSepCnS/
[Its not just Hampton Roads folks who are members, there are members from
all over the US and a couple from overseas as well]
***************************************************************
.. . . You can't understand a phrase such as "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion" by syllogistic reasoning. Words
take their meaning from social as well as textual contexts, which is why "a
page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v. Eisner,
256 U.S. 345, 349, 41 S.Ct. 506, 507, 65 L.Ed. 963 (1921) (Holmes, J.).
Sherman v. Community Consol. Dist. 21, 980 F.2d 437, 445 (7th Cir. 1992)
.. . .
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USAF LT. COL (Ret) Buffman (Glen P. Goffin) wrote
"You pilot always into an unknown future;
facts are your only clue. Get the facts!"
That philosophy 'snipit' helped to get me, and my crew, through a good
many combat missions and far too many scary, inflight, emergencies.
It has also played a significant role in helping me to expose the
plethora of radical Christian propaganda and lies that we find at
almost every media turn.
*****************************************************************
THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLE:
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
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