Some excerpts; The Greek gods of myth who lived on Mt. Olympus were defined by many things, but compassion was not high among them.

“For much of antiquity feeling the pain of others was regarded as a weakness,” John Dickson, a professor of biblical studies and public Christianity at Wheaton College, told me. This comes to full flowering in the Stoics, he said, “on the grounds that this involved allowing an external factor — the emotions or plight of another — to control your own inner life.”

Jesus’ touch was not necessary for him to heal the man of leprosy, but the touch may have been necessary to heal the man of feelings of shame and isolation, of rejection and detestation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/24/opinion/christmas-jesus-wept-compassion.html

posted by f.sheikh

I grew up in Japan, and as a kid, more than anything, I longed to be like everyone around me. Yet as the child of a Japanese mother and a British father, I was considered hafu, a term used to describe people who are ethnically half Japanese.

I spent much of my young life proving how Japanese I was. I would grow angry when people praised my impeccable Japanese. Too often I felt I didn’t belong in my own society. It was all too much. Always standing out felt so suffocating that at 19 years old, I moved to New York.

Japan was closed off from the Western world until the late 1800s. For much of the country’s history, mixed-race children were uncommon, particularly outside Tokyo. In the post-World War II era, derogatory words like “ainoko” and “konketsuji” were used to describe children born of a Japanese and foreign parent. It wasn’t until the 1980s that interracial marriages became more common.

But as Japan becomes more diverse, necessary changes in its society may come not through a reckoning with how biracial people are viewed but through an evolution of what it means to be Japanese. As much as we wish for a change in how society views us — and yes, Japan is evolving, slowly but surely — we should focus instead on how to navigate being seen as not quite Japanese, so that we don’t allow people’s views to override our identities.

Sarina Yasumoto, who is Australian and Japanese, is grateful that she gets to experience the best of both worlds. As I grew older, I started feeling the same way.

Full article

posted by f.sheikh

The war in Gaza has prompted the city, traditionally seen as the birthplace of Jesus, to tone down its Christmas celebrations.

In perhaps the most overt display of how Israel’s war in Gaza has dampened Christmas celebrations in the city seen as the birthplace of Jesus, a Lutheran church put up its crèche, but with a sad and symbolic twist. The baby Jesus — wrapped in a keffiyeh, the black-and-white checkered scarf that has become a badge of Palestinian identity — is lying not in a makeshift cradle of hay and wood. Instead, he lies among the rubble of broken bricks, stones and tiles that represent so much of Gaza’s destruction.

“We’ve been glued to our screens, seeing children pulled from under the rubble day after day. We’re broken by these images,” said the Rev. Munther Isaac, the pastor at the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church who created the crèche. “God is under the rubble in Gaza, this is where we find God right now.”

Full Article

posted by f. Sheikh

Zionism’s anti-Jewish nature: Darby, Scofield, Blackstone, Hagee, and of course Armageddon

“The Jews came to Zionism long after the Christians”, Yakov Rabkin writes in What is Modern Israel?

Christian Zionism precedes 19th-century Zionism, and is based on a particular Protestant reading of specific, violent passages of the Bible that were used to justify genocide against Indigenous people in the Americas by American settlers before being used by the 20th century Zionist movement.

US-based professor Samuel Goldman summarized some of his work on Christian Zionism in “The Real Reason Americans Support Israel”, a 2019 Tablet Magazine article.

The Christian Zionist literary story begins either late in the 1500s or early in the 1600s. The colonization of the Americas is underway and an apocalypse of disease and genocide is very much being unleashed upon the Indigenous peoples there (to get a sense of that, David Stannard’s book American Holocaust is a good starting point). The genocide in the Americas was justified in Biblical terms, using the same passages of Genesis and Joshua that Zionists find so useful.

In England, Thomas Brightman wrote the 1611 book Revelation of the Revelation, Henry Finch in 1621 wrote The World’s Great Restauration, or Calling of the Jews, and with them of all Nations and Kingdoms of the Earth to the Faith of Christ. Both men believed that for the Jews to return to Palestine would accelerate the Apocalypse. In 1643, Isaac La Peyrere, a Huguenot Calvinist of Jewish background wrote Du Rappel des juifs – about a Jewish return to Palestine and facilitating the Second Coming. 

In 1649, Johanna and Ebenezer Cartwright petitioned the Thomas Fairfax Council of War for Jewish re-entry to England (as a path for return to Palestine). “this Nation of England, with the Inhabitants of the Nerther-lands, shall…transport Izraells Sons & Daughters in their Ships to the Land promised to their fore-Fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for an everlasting Inheritance.”

Anglo-American Zionism continued with Joseph Priestly (1733-1804) attempting to convince British rabbi David Levi (1740-1799) to “organize a transfer of Jews to Palestine”. Levi, however, “rejected the idea of reinstating the Jews in the Holy Land by material means and affirmed that the Jews must accomplish their mission in their countries of residence.” 

Anglican preacher John Nelson Darby (1801-1882) formulated the “premillennial dispensationalist” doctrine. His sect was the Plymouth Brethren, and he founded a sub-group of bible students called the Exclusive Brethren. Darby read the bible and believed the Rapture was coming. For those who don’t know, the Rapture is when all the dead Christians will be resurrected, all the living Christians will join them, and they all ascend to heaven together. Before this, there will be violent years of tribulation for Christians on earth who live through the end times, with the rise of the Antichrist, the restoration of the Jewish Temple in Israel and the sacrifice of a perfect red heifer there. This view of the bible, reading it as a codebook for future events (also called futurism) is novel – Catholics, for example, don’t learn it. But it is mainstream in American evangelical Christianity and has been popularized by the mega-bestselling Left Behind series of books (80 million copies), video games, and movies.

Unfortunately for the Americans of a century ago, the Left Behind multimedia experience was unavailable. The Left Behind of 1909 was the Scofield Bible – in fact, the Scofield Bible is the 19th century Left Behind and the Christian version of Theodore Herzl’s 1896 book The Jewish State. It’s an important book.

Cyrus Scofield in 1920. His Bible notes haunt the Middle East to this day

Civil War Confederate veteran Cyrus Scofield was a Missouri lawyer after the war, then an elected Congressman in the Kansas House of Representatives, a corrupt US District Attorney for Kansas – forced to resign for stealing political contributions, forging signatures, and taking bribes, and a family man who abandoned his first wife and children. After his checkered career in public service, Scofield found religion and became a minister. In 1909 Oxford University Press published his Scofield Reference Bible with his own annotations, which explained the biblical passages in terms of Darby’s premillennial dispensationalist visions. The Scofield Bible sold millions of copies

The previous generation had their own Left Behind series – another mega-bestseller (28 million copies) futurist geopolitical fiction mapping Darby’s doctrines on to the 1970s it was called The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay. Lindsay’s genius was to update versions of the book as America’s enemies changed. In 1970, the threat to Israel came from Russia; by the 1990s, it was a joint Russia-Muslim operation; by 1999, China was in there too. “It is amazing, is it not”, wrote Lutheran critic of Christian Zionism Joseph Neuberger in his Master’s thesis, “that the great enemies of God’s people just happen to coincide with the national enemies of America at any given moment?” In the Christian Zionist reading of the bible, unlike non-Zionist Christian readings, “Israel” means the state of Israel – this is to be read literally. But Israel’s enemies in the bible are tribes (Canaanites, etc.) that don’t exist any more – these enemies have to be read figuratively and flexibly, which the Lindsay and the Left Behind authors do.

Befitting a story about Christian Zionism specifically, there’s a trinity of key Christian Zionists: Scofield, Darby, and William Blackstone, who believed that America had the special role of fulfilling the Zionist dream. Blackstone’s mega-bestseller was a pamphlet published in 1898 and called, simply, Jesus is Coming.

William Blackstone, whose Zionist work, according to Brandeis, antedated Herzl.

He was described by Justice Brandeis in 1916 as “the Father of Zionism, as your work antedates Herzl.” Addressing the Provisional Committee in 1916, Justice Brandeis called Blackstone “the “most important ally which Zionism has in America outside the Jewish rank”, reminding the audience that Blackstone had sent a petition 25 years before to the US president asking him to “use his influence to consider Jewish problems with a view to the giving of Palestine to the Jews.” Blackstone was honored again in 1918: deep in the post-Reconstruction nadir of the Jim Crow US, when lynchings and race riots occurred in impunity, a Zionist meeting in Los Angeles honored Blackstone, who explained his theological view to the assembled Zionists (quoted in Merkley, The Politics of Christian Zionism 1891-1948, pg. 62) :

“[There are] only three courses open to every Jew … The first is to become a true Christian, accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior, which brings not only forgiveness and regeneration, but ensures escape from the unequaled time of tribulation which is coming upon all the earth … Second – become a true Zionist and thus hold fast to the ancient hopes of the fathers, and the assured deliverance of Israel, through the coming of their Messiah, and complete national restoration and permanent settlement in the land which God has given them. It is true that this leads through unequaled sorrows, as prophesied notably by Jeremiah … [Third – there is the way of] the assimilants. They are the Jews who will not be either Christians or Zionists. They wish to remain in the various nations enjoying their social, political, and commercial advantages … Oh, my Jewish friends, which of these paths shall be yours? … God says that you are dear unto Him … He has put an overwhelming love in my heart for you all, and therefore I have spoken thus plainly. Study this wonderful Word of God … and see how plainly God Himself has revealed Israel’s pathway unto the perfect day.”

Hal Lindsay was also a televangelist, and the super-popular Christian Zionist televangelists Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and of course John Hagee also keep the spirit of Christian Zionism alive through daily sermons. Hagee — who said Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment on Americans for supporting Israel’s 2005 abandonment of the Gaza settlements — uses his pulpit to preach to Americans not to allow any Israel to make any negotiations or compromises (quoted in Neuberger): “God says when you divide up my land, or cause it to be divided up, I will bring you into judgment. And right now the peace process that we call the Road Map to Peace is forcing Israel to divide up the land that God has given to the Jewish people. And God’s response is ‘I am going to bring judgment on the nation that does this.’ I am going to say this without blinking. If America continues to force Israel to give up land to the enemies of Israel, the judgment of God will come to America in unprecedented portions.”

Pastor Hagee says Israel making peace could bring the judgment of God.

Hagee’s declarations are not unique for Christian Zionism. Theology professor Brad Harper in a 2011 article “Apocalypse Soon? Premillenarianism and Popular Responses to Zionism: A Brief History” quotes the final declaration of an Israel-sponsored Christian Zionist conference in Switzerland 1996.

“According to God’s distribution of nations, the Land of Israel has been given to the Jewish People by God as an everlasting possession by an eternal covenant. The Jewish People have the absolute right to possess and dwell in the Land, including Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan.

“Because of the sovereign purposes of God for the city, Jerusalem must remain undivided, under Israeli sovereignty, open to all peoples, the capital of Israel only and all nations should so concur and place their embassies there.

It would be an error for the nations to recognize a Palestinian state in any part of Eretz Israel.”

It is apparent that God’s will coincides perfectly with joint US/Israel geopolitical ambitions.

Brad Harper’s article, “Apocalypse Soon?” concludes by noting some passages of the bible that the Christian Zionists don’t seem to cling to as closely: “The same passages that speak of God’s future blessings to Israel also speak of his blessings upon Egypt and Assyria… in the biblical story of creation, we are told that all people are valuable because they were created in the image of God— and, in the New Testament story of salvation, we are told that God sent Jesus Christ into the world not just for Israel, but for the whole world.”

So, while Christian Zionists believe that America has a divine mandate to protect the State of Israel, their end goal is the end of the world and the mass conversion or death of all Jews. Israel’s cynical statesmen play along because to them the bible and the fools who believe in it are mere tools. The Christian Zionists, meanwhile, understand Israel to be their tool – in bringing about the Apocalypse.

Christian Zionism is the original type of Zionism and is an anti-Jewish doctrine. 

Submiited by Syed Ehtisham Abbreviated by Editors