JCC 15 years ago, at Columbine...

I don't know.... I like me some three stooges, from time to time.

 

Speaking of the Stooges, that new film from a couple of years ago... holy hell that was terrible. The only film I've ever walked out on.

 

Thanks for your valuable contribution to the topic harps.

Wocky why don't you go back and read the thread and be less obtuse. I know this is all a tall order, but it'll help you long term. Let's go back to Moviefan's post:

Like most modern Christians, Moviefan is attempting to distort history to suggest Hitler was hostile to Christianity; in this case, because of his views on the Jews, the suggestion is that Hitler couldn't have been Christian because it was Jewish in origin. Hence the comments about leaving the Catholic Church.

In actuality, HItler was pretty clear on separating the two and it's only from highly debatable sources (WWII diaries, for example, that have been cited as mistranslated) that you see a sudden and inexplicable shift to Hitler suddenly articulating anti-Christian statements.

Let's just ponder this shall we?

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice. And as a man I have the duty to see to it that human society does not suffer the same catastrophic collapse as did the civilization of the ancient world some two thousand years ago—a civilization which was driven to its ruin through this same Jewish people.

Moviefan is not, I believe, making his outlandish implications based on a robust knowledge of Nazism, anti-Semitism or anything of the like. He's parroting a standard view put forward since WWII ended, in an attempt to sanitise the truth for the world at large. Hell, cleaning Hitler up to be some form of opponent of Christianity and its implicit morality is but one step in a wider program to turn the inaction of the world towards Jewish suffering in the war into a message of human hope. Look! Hitler wasn't a Christian and isn't the diary of Anne Frank uplifting! Let's never speak of how we knew of the concentration camps for years and lifted not one finger. Let's instead pretend Hitler wasn't a Christian; that we as a world didn't all hate Jews, and that centuries of aggressive anti-Semitism from the leading power in the West, the Catholic Church, never happened.

(This is what I mean, Guy. Since 400 or so, the Vatican's efforts to scapegoat the Jews and subjugate them have been epic in scope and culminated in a climate that let the Holocaust happen.)

Since we've established all this, we can safely say that the Klebold/Harris shooting was about persecuting Christians and was done to celebrate the love of the homosexual couple, Satan and Adolf Hitler. Don't post a Satan/Saddam South Park picture here, anyone.

 

Yeah.... I have no desire to see it. That's like trying to remake I Love Lucy... should not be attempted.

 

Good. Very good.

 

The picture of Patrick Ireland dangling out of the library window still gives me cold chills.

And I feel sorry for Mark Taylor.

 

All I got from this thread is that Ender is an asshat.

 

Ender, who are you arguing against?

I certainly haven't denied Christian contributions to anti-semitism, nor have I dismissed Hitler's Christian affiliations. Likewise Even, Vivec and DarthWilliams. Moviefan himself opened his post by noting such ties. The difference is that we all proceeded to have a more nuanced discussion of anti-semitism in general and Hitler's motivations in particular. The greater part of the content in each of our posts has usually been about this topic, and often only addresses you in opening and closing, if at all.

You, on the other hand, have spent a great deal of time complaining about other posters, and have dedicated several posts to this topic alone. Even now, you continue to base your entire reaction on what you perceive other people's motivations to be. If you want to discuss the topic, why not actually discuss the topic? Yes, Mein Kampf is one part of that discussion. But it's only that: one part. There are a lot of other elements to be considered, which any number of us have raised (eg from Even non-Christian anti-semitism, from DarthWilliams his post-Mein Kampf religious and intellectual evolution, from Vivec his eclectic rather than doctrinaire approach to religion in general, and from Moviefan, his reservations about the religion's relationship to Judaism).

There was no reason for you to call people "liars" for trying to engage in this discussion. Nor is there any reason, now, for you to remain so fixated on your need to blame Christianity for European anti-semitism, supposedly formed in response to a desire to shirk responsibility that no one in this thread has actually expressed. I imagine you might have something interesting to add if you actually joined in. But that would require doing something other than making hyperbolic posts where you cling desperately to a single piece of evidence, imagining yourself the sole crusader against a giant conspiracy that has for some reason sprung up on the boards to whitewash a religion that half the discussion's participants aren't even a member of and don't particularly like.

 

Chain of events:

Moviefan: "Harris & Klebold deliberately shot Columbine up on Hitler's birthday because they admired him. At least one student (reports conflict on who it was) was asked directly if she believed in God, only to be shot after saying "yes".

Random poster: "Hitler was a Christian tho wasn't he?"

Moviefan: "He was raised Catholic as a kid, but left the church before adulthood. He never formally withdrew from Catholicism, but he openly disdained Christianity because of its Jewish origins."

Ender: "[paraphrase] Hitler was a Christian you *****, *******,*******,********head".

In a nutshell, I think Ender is simply suggesting that Hitler was not in fact hostile to Christianity but in fact embraced that aspect of Christianity which vilified the Jews because the Jews killed Jesus. In fact, Hitler saw himself as a vessel of God to fight the Jews as Jesus fought the Jews. So Hitler was in fact comparable to Jesus. Doesn't get much more Christian than that.

 

HALLELUJAH

 

I will sacrifice a goat in honor of this glorious night!

 

Correct, LOH. Hitler was in fact a model Christian - a blood thirsty conquering bigot.

 

Might be useful to distinguish the difference between what you WANT a model Christian to be and what a model Christian ACTUALLY is.

The model Christian, of course, is Christ Himself, because no human will ever get it all right. Says Paul on the matter, "But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin." From Romans 7:23-25.

 

You're wasting your breath. Ender is an atheist.

 

No doubt; Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.

But you judge it by the actions of Christians... Klebold and Harris look mild by comparison.

 

I don't deny that, there are terrible works performed "in the name of Christ" all throughout history, from the Crusades to Westboro Baptist Church to the Joel's Army crowd. Just don't judge the orchard by the tree with the bad apples.

 

Christianity destroyed entire cultures at swordpoint, ASR. It was literally, "If you don't abandon your Odinist/Pagan ways, you'll die". The light shining out of Jesus' bottom was not so divine that it compelled people to love him; it was the threat of death that scored the most converts. That compliance with the regime had an un-quantifiable carrot in the form of eternal wonderfulness was an ancillary benefit.

 

I believe I already covered the Crusades. That was Catholicism anyway, and we KNOW they go about the faith in the wrong way by making the Pope infallible and calling the general public too stupid to really understand the Bible.

 

Not the Crusades, I'm talking about Pagan Europe. People who worshipped Odin/Wotan. Who worshipped nature. Europeans with their own traditions, tradition butchered by Christianity.

 

Way to outsource, ASR.

 

Four generations back I'm a Cherokee Indian, and my ancestors were forced down the Trail of Tears. I know how it is on that side, and I can also tell you that I do not follow that form of "Christianity." There's a difference, and THAT'S the point I've been trying to make here.

 

You've made a lot of points, none of which have been your intention to make, I suspect.

 

As I've said to some of your literalist and less punctuation-using friends in other threads, it's not "Catholicism" that conducted the Crusades, it was the Christian Church -- period. Unless you'd like to find a historical document indicating that either the Albigensians or the Cathars objected to the idea of a crusade against Muslims. There was no distinction between any arm of the Western Christian Church as to the subject. (And before you start talking about the Eastern Orthodox Church, you might do well to recall that it was based on Byzantium's Empire, and that Alexius I asked for help from Rome against the Muslims who were tearing up his borders, thus resulting in the First Crusade of 1098. Don't think you'll find much help on that subject there.) Not until Martin Luther came along four hundred years down the line, in 1517, did any notable group suggest that a crusade was wrong, which was kinda convenient since the Crusades into Palestine if not generally were pretty much over and done by then. So cut that horse**** right now.

Papal infallibility is always a touchy subject for literalists, but I suspect like most half-assed readers of religions you haven't investigated the precise conditions under which Catholicism says it applies. As for calling the general public too stupid to really understand the Bible: would you like to submit a quotation from other than presumably a long-dead Pope or two as to where the Catholic Church says this or teaches it to its people?