Invisible Children, Kony 2012, and criticisms

[essius.livejournal.com]

The other day I noticed the Kony 2012 video by Invisible Children that has been receiving a great deal of attention on the Internet as of late (it’s received over 56 million views on YouTube). I watched the video and was immediately curious. Evidently, the video has received multiple lines of serious criticism. No one denies, of course, that Joseph Kony must be brought to justice. But Invisible Children’s methods (and in some respects even intent) are highly questionable. I’ll mention just a few of the criticisms brought against the film and the movement.

Chris Blattman, a Poly Sci & Econ Assistant Professor at Yale, argues not only against the style of the film (“the hipster tie and cowboy hat” and the “macho bravado” tend to detract from the message) but also against the notion of rescuing or saving African children: “It hints uncomfortably of the White Man’s Burden. Worse, sometimes it does more than hint. The savior attitude is pervasive in advocacy, and it inevitably shapes programming.” One result, says Blattman, “is a lot of dangerously ill-prepared young people embarking on missions to save the children of this or that war zone. At best it’s hubris and egocentric. More often, though, it leads to bad programs, misallocated resources, or ill-conceived military adventures.” Finally, Blattman is also troubled by the film showing the faces of child soldiers, as well as implying (erroneously and incredibly) that the US and Invisible Children “were instrumental in getting the peace talks to happen.”

Grant Oyston, Sociology and Poly Sci student at Acadia University, has made several criticisms—such as the fact that “[m]ilitary intervention may or may not be the right idea, but people supporting KONY 2012 probably don’t realize they’re supporting the Ugandan military who are themselves raping and looting away” (q.v.)—and also provided links to many others as well. Among the latter, perhaps the most important are lawyers Kate Cronin-Furman and Amanda Taub’s article, “Solving War Crimes With Wristbands: The Arrogance of ‘Kony 2012’,” which raises methodological criticisms, and writer Joshua Keating’s post “Joseph Kony is not in Uganda (and other complicated things),” whose chief argument is that IC “has made virtually no effort to inform” concerning important details (such as where Kony is located, where the LRA’s members are currently distributed, and how many “mindless child soldiers” the LRA presently has).

Author Michael Deibert helpfully lays out some of the important historical details and concludes with another heavy charge against IC: “By blindly supporting Uganda’s current government and its military adventures beyond its borders, as Invisible Children suggests that people do, Invisible Children is in fact guaranteeing that there will be more violence, not less, in Central Africa.”

My father, a retired juvenile hall peace officer, was also pretty critical of the video and, in addition to some of the familiar criticisms, he said it “seemed to violate some pretty serious child rearing tenets, i.e., ‘tis not good to expose a child to an adult’s world as it robs them of their childhood, etc.; and, beyond that it seemed to prepare the film maker’s kid to early indoctrination (and believe me, he’ll get that soon enough as kindergarten is just around the corner for that boy)…”

Meanwhile, IC has responded to some of the above criticisms, and the group certainly has its defenders (e.g.), but it would seem IC has yet to address one of the main claims many are raising: that it is working with groups that are guilty of the same atrocities as the LRA.

Here is another recent source attempting to make sense of the issue.

I’m still wading through some of the various criticisms and IC’s response, but I tend to think IC’s basic motives are pure, but their methods and strategic intent are questionable and in various ways even dangerous. What do you think?

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Imagine of the Lord's Resistance Army were Islamist instead of Christianist. The GOP would probably be making a big race-loaded stink about how Obama doesn't care about his fellow blacks. Instead when it's Christians being the murdering scum their reaction is a measured silence or in the case of Rush Limbaugh praising this nasty little toad.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

It is driving me FUCKING BONKERS that no one is saying "Christian Fundamentalist Joseph Kony" or "Christian Terrorist Joseph Kony".

[essius.livejournal.com]

To be fair, it is unclear to what extent their belief system more than nominally incorporates Christianity. Yes, they identify as Christian and use terms like "Holy Spirit," but so did many early sects of Christianity that would not have been regarded by the original disciples as orthodox. So it's not merely fundamentalist, which is bad enough, but it's heterodox as well. It's also a syncretism of nominally Christian doctrine with African and Jewish traditions. The Ugandan Catholic Church has apparently disavowed the LRA, and it's more than a little difficult to see how the LRA can claim to be truly Christian. "Christian militia" seems almost like a contradiction in terms. There's no basis in the New Testament or the hermeneutics of the historic Christian church for the moral permissibility of murder, sexual enslavement, rape, child abduction, or coercion of children to participate in warfare. On the contrary, everything in orthodox Christianity (a far cry from American fundamentalism, to be sure) demands the loudest and most relentless opposition to such atrocities. Kony's reported use of the Pentateuch to justify murder and mutilation is about as far from historic biblical Christianity as you can get.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Blah Blah Blah. All of this equally applies to Islamists but anyone that points this out is accused of sympathizing with it. And frankly Henry Duke of Guise and a number of other heroes of the Faith would disagree that murder in the name of God is perfectly justifiable. Wasn't it a Christian tradition at one point to burn the local Jews whenever the harvest was bad? They, after all, commited the crime of Deicide......

But I expect that the only True Scotsmen are Glaswegians.

[essius.livejournal.com]

Whether the Islamists are, as they claim, orthodox Muslims or detractors from Muslim orthodoxy is a matter for those better educated in Islam to decide. But I don't see a parallel here, because it is very clear that Kony and the LRA are a corruption of New Testament Christianity. That other "heroes of the Faith" may have wrongly believed in some kind of religiously justified killing is different from the kind of indiscriminate murder of the LRA, to say nothing of the repeated acts of rape, sexual enslavement, and coercion of children to participate in warfare. That is not to excuse the behavior of the former (for the Christianity of the New Testament would strongly condemn it), but rather to distinguish it from the atrocities of the latter.

As a rule orthodox Catholics, Protestants, Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox, Messianic Jews, etc. are all against indiscriminate murder (and anti-semitism), and would strongly reprimand those who think such actions are consistent with Christ's ethics of loving our neighbors. If Christ is our teacher and our example, then we should love our neighbor unto death—our own death, not our neighbors'. Moreover, Ephesians 1:14-16 makes clear the intention of Christianity vis-à-vis the Jews: "[Christ] himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility." (Incidentally, this isn't the kind of passage you're likely to find Kony using to support his bizarre syncretism of Christianity with ideologies that are diametrically opposed to Christ's life and teachings.)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yadda yadda yadda.

All this is an excuse to avoid facing up to the reality that these guys are Christians. Orthodox Catholics do that *now*, what with the Nazis having killed off most of Western Judaism. If you want to erase the medieval history and modern history of Christian anti-Semitism and complicity in wholesale atrocities, so be it. It just confirms you as a moral coward and hypocrite afraid to admit that Tomas de Torquemada, Henry, Duke of Guise, founder of the Catholic League, the architects of the great Pogroms from the 11th-20th Centuries, and the like who were indeed pious Christians were in fact Christians.

But I don't think this is an argument in good faith anyhow.

[essius.livejournal.com]

The "reality that these guys are Christians" is apparently in your head, unless—contrary to the claims of Christ himself*—a person becomes a Christian simply by saying so (in which case religion in general becomes completely divorced from the psychology of real human beings, and the thought of Freud, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche et al. goes by the wayside). If, say, I declare that the Holy Spirit is speaking through me, ignore the hermeneutic of Christian Scripture, and claim that Jesus told me to commit mass genocide, am I really still in communion with the Body of Christ?

The truth is, neither the written rule of orthodoxy (Scripture) nor the living pattern of orthopraxy (Christ) have ever changed, regardless of the cognitive dissonance of many throughout the history of so-called Christendom. Now, if there were actual evidence that the LRA had some kind of robust ecclesiology and Christological hermeneutic, that would be another thing entirely, but I really doubt you're willing to engage the question on that level (because it actually involves asking the essential question: what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for being incorporated into the Body of Christ, on the accounting of Christ and his disciples?—as well as an empirical question concerning the doctrinal history of the LRA vis-à-vis the answer to the first question).

Incidentally, I wonder if your apparent view of "being a member of a certain religion" applies to political ideologies, too. Guess what? I'm a Republican, a Democrat, a Libertarian, and an Anarcho-Primitivist! And now I'm not! Wait, now I am again. This sure is fun.

*"Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'" (Mt. 7:22-24).

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

So I suppose God allowed false agents of Satan to occupy the See of Rome during the Medieval ages, did He? God's not a very effective policeman of His Church, then.

See these quotes by Popes and two of the Gospels:

"And most falsely do these Christians claim that the Jews have secretly and furtively carried away these children and killed them, and that the Jews offer sacrifice from the heart and blood of these children, since their law in this matter precisely and expressly forbids Jews to sacrifice, eat, or drink the blood, or to eat the flesh of animals having claws. This has been demonstrated many times at our court by Jews converted to the Christian faith: nevertheless very many Jews are often seized and detained unjustly because of this. We decree, therefore, that Christians need not be obeyed against Jews in a case or situation of this type, and we order that Jews seized under such a silly pretext be freed from imprisonment, and that they shall not be arrested henceforth on such a miserable pretext, unless-which we do not believe-they be caught in the commission of the crime. We decree that no Christian shall stir up anything new against them, but that they should be maintained in that status and position in which they were in the time of our predecessors, from antiquity till now.

^Blood Libel

I know that you are descendants of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me, because my word finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father. They answered him, "Abraham is our father." Jesus said to them, "If you were Abraham's children, you would do what Abraham did. ... You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But, because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. Which of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? He who is of God hears the words of God; the reason why you do not hear them is you are not of God.

^John, showing Jesus's love for the Jews.

And Matthew:

"His blood be on us and our children", the rationale for many a pious Christian to butcher innoncent women and children for Jesus.

And last but not least, there's the brutal Jew-hatred at the root of Protestantism, and the strand of pious Christian rulers who invariably expelled Jews from Western Europe, the last two of which were the very same Los Reyes Catolicos who began Generalplan West and the extermination of Native Americans, also done for Christian purposes to civilize the heathen savages. As though endiing human sacrifice to replace it with arbeit macht frei is some moral improvement.

[essius.livejournal.com]

First, you are ignoring my general point, which applies to all religions and political ideologies. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for being identified as holding to a given system of belief? If you maintain that it is simply and solely by saying that you believe according to that system, then it's easy to see why you ignored my satirical remarks above—you have no response, and tacitly recognize that your position commits you to absurd consequences. You prefer to define religion in terms of professed belief, rather than lived belief. If this is wrong, and your criteria consist in something else, let's hear it. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for being identified as holding to a given belief system?

Second, you are ignoring my specific point concerning the words of Christ himself—viz., in Mt. 7:22-24. Does the founder of a religion have any say as to who does and does not count as a true follower of that religion, or not?

Third, I have a hard time knowing what was going through the heads of professing Christians throughout history who have commit atrocious acts against the Jews, or why they adopted the hermeneutics of Scripture (on which I'll respond below) that they did. I don't know enough about the social context of medieval anti-semitism to make a judgment. If, in the end, Christ decides that these were true Christians who were simply acting, in this serious way, diametrically contrary to Christ's gospel, that is his call. If he decides that they were only professing Christians, that is his call. All I can say is that they were not acting in accord with the commandments to love the neighbor in the way Christ showed us by means of his holy life and self-sacrificial death—and that needs explanation. As I said above, if Christ is our teacher and our example, then we should love our neighbor unto death—our own death, not our neighbors'.

Fourth, in the passage from John 8, Jesus is referring to specific Jews—Jews who accused him of being demon-possessed and later tried to stone him. Jesus could have said these very same things, without the Abraham rhetoric that his interlocutors introduced, to any Jew or non-Jew. So to anti-semitism into this passage is pretty disingenuous. Ironically, in this very passage Jesus makes the point I've been making all along: "To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, 'If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples'" (Jn 8:31).

Fifth, how could an anti-semitic hermeneutic ever make logical, coherent sense of the Ephesians passage I cited earlier, let alone Paul's statement that God has called "both Jews and Greeks" (1 Cor 1:24) and admonishes the church, "Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God" (1 Cor 10:32)? Consider Paul's remarks in Romans 3:1-2: "What advantage, then, is there in being a Jew, or what value is there in circumcision? Much in every way! First of all, they have been entrusted with the very words of God." Consider, especially, the whole of Romans 11, and in particular v. 18: "do not boast over those branches [i.e., the Jews]. If you do, consider this: You do not support the root, but the root supports you"; and further: "I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved" (vv. 25-26a). All these passages would have to be ignored or wildly distorted. But in actual fact, the Christian gospel holds that no one is righteous—neither Jew nor Gentile (Rom 3), and in both Romans and Colossians, Paul refers to all non-Christians as enemies of God. There is no discrimination.

(continued below)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I have a response, I'm just engaging in a conversation with someone that doesn't admit the response is there. Which describes 99% of my interactions with a certain stripe of ideologue.

1) No, I define religion in terms of lived belief over professed belief. The spirit of Christianity is that of the destructive, annihilating vacuum that consumes all, giving little. The Church has burned books, buried scholars, and exterminated entire peoples. The Church created the largest religious war in human history. Only because it's Christianity this is all neglected and given various excuses under the No True Scotsmen fallacy.

2) No. The Founder of the religion does not, especially since His Followers only needed a generation to start whining about the Jews as Christ-Killers and to butcher them with impunity whenever opportunity presented itself. For the Jew, the Christian is the menace. The Muslims are capable of being friendly in sincerity, good faith between the Church and the Synagogue didn't exist until post-1945.

3) No True Scotsmen and moral cowardice, evading a point so you don't have to answer it. Answer the question, friend. This is called evading the question, using the No True Scotsman fallacy to do it. You're just too much of a coward to admit that when these men sincerely thought they were avenging deicide they were perfectly pious in it. This is how the Church that introduced disputations, Blood-Purity Laws, the Ghettoes, the vicious savage Pogrom, and the expulsion of Jews time after time against the express wishes of the state lies merrily about what it really is. The Church to the Jews is Torquemada, not St. Francis.

4) Again, this is an excuse and an evasion. I provide you with Jesus's words and you immediately leap to deny them the universality in the statement.

5) Don't ask me that, I'm not the one trivializing and minimizing 2,000 years of massacre, hatred, and oppression.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

You seem to be setting a very poor tone in this thread. Wouldn't you rather simply walk away and take a deep breath? That sounds nice, doesn't it?

[essius.livejournal.com]

1) If you define religion in terms of lived belief over professed belief, then why do you focus only on the dark parts of Christianity and ignore its positive contributions? Christianity has also produced, for example, innumerable world-historically influential artists, scientists, philosophers, scholars and saints, and provided the original setting of the liberal arts curriculum and the university system and contributed to human liberty, healthcare, and much else besides. Additionally, why do you ignore what Christ himself declared to be the crux of the religion, and instead define the spirit of Christianity solely in terms of the parts that can, even by Christianity's most ardent defenders, be rightly acknowledged as a "destructive, annihilating vacuum that consumes all, giving little"? I agree that "[t]he Church has burned books, buried scholars, and exterminated entire peoples," but it has also produced profound literature and scholars and from the very beginning has spoken a gospel that is diametrically opposed to violence against any people. Historically, the evil perpetrated by Christians is more ghastly than most people realize, but the good done by Christians is also more profound than most people realize. Your analysis of Christianity, if attempting to accurately represent its "spirit" historically, psychologically, sociologically, and so on, is going to have to be more nuanced than it seems to be. As for "the largest religious war in human history," to what extent, on your view, did Christianity "create" this war? How simplistic is your understanding? It sounds like you're regurgitating the usual anti-Christian rhetoric. I can at least admit both sides of the story. For you, it seems very black and white. Or, to be more accurate, it seems monochrome. It's also disingenuous to represent my view as committing the True Scotsmen fallacy. I acknowledge that true Christians can act atrociously and must be held accountable. The Church does apologize for such events as you mention, but it doesn't do so nearly enough. I regretfully admit this. But I also acknowledge that self-deception about one's beliefs is possible. You, on the other hand, seem to either rule out the latter on a priori grounds or minimize its frequency or significance.

2) What if the founder is in fact God? What if the founder truly is the ultimate judge of the human heart? Unless you divorce the theological question from the psychological and sociological questions, you can't ignore this possibility. If Christ says that some set of attitudes, actions, etc. are an essential part of what it means to be a Christian, and a person doesn't follow that, then eschatologically speaking, the entire world can consider a person a Christian and be wrong. It seems you fail to acknowledge this possibility of error. Am I misrepresenting you? Also, is it not possible for the followers of a religion to engage in heteropraxy? Do you honestly think Christ or Paul would be pleased with the slaughter of innocent Jews, given their stress on love, grace, gentleness, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness?

[essius.livejournal.com]

3) What question? Is admission of ignorance a dishonest answer? I'm sorry I haven't read the details of the history that you have, but I refuse to take a stance prior to having done so. I don't like to simplify complex religious, political, and historical phenomenon the way you seem to, and it's not cowardice to refuse to answer a question prior to sorting through the details required to make even close to an accurate judgment. And I certainly never said that these men didn't think they were pious. I've mentioned the phenomenon of self-deception several times now; the thing about self-deception is that the person guilty of it isn't exactly aware of it. All that said, I'd appreciate you stepping back from name-calling and assuming you can judge my motives and intent. I am more than willing to admit to the wrongs of Christians. That doesn't entail, as you seem to think it does, that every person who claims to be Christian actually is by mere fiat. You have yet to provide, for example, a single shred of evidence that the LRA deserves the label Christian independent of their mere profession of some elements of Christian belief. The Christian church tends to be ecumenical enough for Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox to admit, on some level, that they are all part of the same Body (though unfortunately some think certain denominations are less central to that body than others are). But isn't it telling that all of these churches would deny that, say, Westboro Baptist Church is truly part of the universal church? Most Christians would also deny that Jehovah's Witnesses and the LDS are part of the church, despite the obvious centrality of the Christian tradition to the development of those traditions. So why should anyone, Christian or non-Christian alike, think the LRA is Christian? What links them, doctrinally, to the historic church? Do they accept the Nicene creed? Do they accept the Trinity? Do they accept the Divinity of Christ or what Christ declared to be the two greatest commandments of the Torah? From what I have read, Kony has not publicly mentioned Christ, and focuses not on the commandments of the New Testament but instead on the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament (though I truly wonder at his interpretation of "Thou shalt not kill").

4) If say that a passage says something, and the context of that passage demonstrates otherwise, then yes, I'm going to deny your claim. Jesus clearly isn't referring to all Jews, because he never says, "If you are a Jew and hold to my teaching, then you really are disciples and are no longer Jews anymore." Rather, he simply says that Jews can be his disciples. And if you still want to universalize the passage to all Jews and not those he is speaking with, you'll have to provide reason for it and not just assume the truth of your reading. After all, Jesus doesn't say this to just any group of Jews. In most occasions in the New Testament, he does not take this kind of polemic toward the Jews. There are many Jews who don't accept his teaching who he never goes off on in this manner. How do you account for that?

5) I didn't trivialize or minimize anything. You're the one who brought up these atrocities, and I wholeheartedly admit the existence and horror of these events. Again, I see both the good and the evil within Christianity, and I admit ignorance as to how to interpret (some of) the evil. (I'm no more a telepath than you are.) But you, on the other hand, are painting a very monochrome picture of Christianity, and if anyone is guilty of evasion here, it is you. See, I have asked you how an anti-semitic Christian could ever make logical, coherent sense of various biblical passages, and you ignore the question (and those passages). You may disagree with my interpretation of certain passages of Scripture that you have presented, but at least I give you my interpretation. You, on the other hand, offer no response whatsoever to how a Christian could consistently interpret Paul's remarks in Romans 3 and 11, 1 Cor. 1 and 10, and in Ephesians and Colossians. So it seems like you're the only one who gets to argue on the basis of Scripture and history? Your textual and historical evidence counts, and mine doesn't? That's fair.

[essius.livejournal.com]

Sixth, how can "His blood be on us and our children" be taken as a rationale to murder anyone, given the words of Jesus himself on the cross? If I'm not mistaken, Jesus said to "Forgive them, for they know not what they do," and expressed what it means to love one's enemies—i.e., not kill them, but die for them.

Seventh, I know a little more concerning Protestant anti-semitism, though I find it equally inexplicable when the gospel is taken holistically and verses are not wrenched out of context to support and justify pre-existing enmity toward the Jews—an enmity that Paul speaks out very loudly against. I don't know whether these were true, believing Christians who had a very distorted hermeneutic, or whether they were merely professing, perhaps self-deceived into thinking themselves Christians (you're aware that one can think one is something one is not, no?), or whether there is some other explanation. But aside from all the above points (which, this time, I hope you will not ignore, as I've tried, charitably, to respond to each of yours), there is the one most relevant to the topic at hand:

The last point I'll underscore is another I raised before. What is the actual evidence that the LRA had a robust ecclesiology and Christological hermeneutic? In what way do they follow the essential teachings of Christ? In what way do they express a belief that Christ is who he claimed to be? Empirically, what aside from mere self-identification indicates any genuine belief in Christ?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

6) As I'm not the one claiming that 2,000 years of genocidal thuggery and horrors done to the Jews by the pious Christians and Defenders of the Faith are not really important, I don't know. I'm not the one, after all, claiming genocide doesn't matter.

7) None of the examples I've raised are Protestant. And this is excluding the Russian Orthodox Church.......

[essius.livejournal.com]

6) I never claimed they aren't important, I said I don't know how to interpret each individual case. But whereas these individuals had a connection to the actual orthodox church, the LRA do not.

7) You said, "last but not least, there's the brutal Jew-hatred at the root of Protestantism."

8) You didn't respond to this one, which is the primary thing at issue: What is the actual evidence that the LRA have a robust ecclesiology and Christological hermeneutic? In what way do they follow the essential teachings of Christ? In what way do they express a belief that Christ is who he claimed to be? Empirically, what aside from mere self-identification indicates a genuine belief in Christ? Even independent of Christian practice, there's still the doctrinal question. If I take a verse or two from the Bible and build my hermeneutic on those couple verses, but ignore (and often act diametrically opposed to) all the rest, am I still thereby a Christian?

[essius.livejournal.com]

"If you want to erase the medieval history and modern history of Christian anti-Semitism and complicity in wholesale atrocities, so be it. It just confirms you as a moral coward and hypocrite afraid to admit that Tomas de Torquemada, Henry, Duke of Guise, founder of the Catholic League, the architects of the great Pogroms from the 11th-20th Centuries, and the like who were indeed pious Christians were in fact Christians."

I can't judge the hearts of these individuals, but if when speaking about Christianity we take the words of Christ seriously, what are we to make of his saying, "By their fruits you shall recognize them?" Or John's saying that true Christians shall be known by their love? Are not Christ and his disciples capable of determining the marks of true Christians? Or do later believers get to ignore the actual teachings of Christ when claiming to follow him? If someone has claimed to be a Christian and generally exhibits true Christianity, but there are serious exceptions and they at times act atrociously, I suppose the right thing to do is emphasize the Scriptures that castigate such those serious exceptions and apologize on behalf of the church for those actions. But if someone exhibits no serious interest in true Christianity at all, and vicious behavior is not the exception but the rule in their lives, there seems to be no reason to take seriously their self-identification as Christians. On Christ's own accounting. And as a Christian, I tend to think Christ's accounting is a little more important than the backwards voluntarism of underlankers.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The same Disciples who said the Jews claimed his blood was on them and their children, claimed Jews' fathers were the Devils, and portray Jews as unthinking and unreasoning brutes opposed to Jesus in the Gospels? But all this obscures that there's not a scrap of argument here, just emotional knee-jerking against calling Africa's Charlemagne and Hong Xiuquan a Christian. There's much sound and fury, signifying nothing.

[essius.livejournal.com]

This isn't purely emotional, this is an interest in being clear on the categories by which Christianity identifies its own. The argument is that it's either true or it's not that I can justifiably judge the hearts of these individuals prior to having a lot more information about each of them individually. And it's either true or it's not that when speaking about Christianity we should take the words of Christ seriously, viz., "By their fruits you shall recognize them?" These things make a practical difference as to who we will finally say counts as Christian, and who we will not. You can say I'm not speaking anything of content, but it seems a very simple question: Are not Christ and his disciples capable of determining the marks of true Christians? Or do later believers get to ignore the actual teachings of Christ when claiming to follow him? You haven't answered these questions because, I am guessing, you have not actually thought through them. That they have content is clear from the fact that it makes an important conceptual and practical difference. Either I can claim to be a Christian when killing Jews, or I cannot. Either anti-semitism is consistent with Christianity properly interpreted, or all such interpretations are exegetically flawed. I'm aware the use Luther and others have made of certain passages, but it's far from clear that they did so with textual warrant. When interpreting a text, you take the whole context into consideration. The New Testament writers weren't formalists, and neither should we be.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Christ said the Jews' father was the Devil and the Gospels state that Christ's blood will be on them and their children. Christian Anti-Semitism wasn't considered an aberration until Hitler went "Just kill them all" and then they decided maybe it was time to rein the "perfidious Deiciders" rhetoric.

Anti-Semitism is perfectly consistent with Christianity, as I keep illustrating. But those who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel aren't interested in the fruits of the Christian spirit, which weren't in this regard limited to Jews.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

I could write this whole paragraph replacing "Christianity" with "Islam" and make this about the War on Terror...

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

He's not Muslim, after all.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The only real religious extremists are Muslims. At least that's the impression one gains from the whole approach to movements like this.

[mikeyxw.livejournal.com]

Naw, I think the cannibalism, the dozens of wives, the child soldiers, and the sex slaves are enough that the GOP will not be cutting them breaks because they ID as Christian. The measured silence has a lot more to do with the victims being black people living in hard to reach places in Africa than with the religion of the perps. We're fine with terrorists who blow up folks in India after all, even though many are muslims.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Similarly we hear very little about what goes on in Chechnya