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As Christianity wanes, the Führer retains his starring role in contemporary demonology. Credit: Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
There is nothing either good or bad, the Nazis liked to insist, but thinking makes it so. Eichmann, interviewed in Argentina shortly before his abduction by Mossad agents, scorned the notion that there was anything evil about his role in the Holocaust. Far from repenting the deaths of six million Jews, he expressed regret that so many had survived the genocide. Just as it was the responsibility of a doctor to combat viruses, or a pest-control agent to eliminate vermin, so was it the responsibility of a good Nazi to defend the fellow members of his race from its most noxious and pestilential foes. To steel oneself for one’s duty, to suppress enfeebling notions of humanity, to keep always before one’s mind loyalty to blood: this, quite simply, was the right thing to do. What, then, was there for Eichmann to repent? “I cannot pretend,” he declared, “that a Saul has become a Paul.”
And even if Eichmann had pretended, what then? It would have made no difference. Once a Jew, always a Jew. Saul, by becoming Paul, had merely transmuted all that was most baneful about the Jewish conspiracy against the Nordic race into a more infectious, and therefore more lethal, form. Hitler, who traced the glories of ancient Greece and Rome to Völkerwanderung from the northern reaches of Europe, also attributed the downfall of classic civilisation to the virus introduced by Paul into the bloodstream of the Roman Empire. Its devastating effects had been evident ever since. Lethal variants had evolved. In January 1942, even as war was raging in the snows of Russia, Hitler placed Operation Barbarossa in the context of 2,000 years of history:
“The Jew who fraudulently introduced Christianity into the ancient world — in order to ruin it — re-opened the same breach in modern times, this time taking as his pretext the social question. It’s the same sleight-of-hand as before. Just as Saul was changed into St. Paul, Mardochai became Karl Marx.”
Two particularly toxic evils, both of them derived from Christian teachings, threatened the Nordic race with ruin. First, there was the insistence that the weak, the sick, the persecuted merited compassion. So infuriating did Hitler find the objections of church leaders to the Reich’s on-going sterilisation of mental and physical defectives that already, by 1937, he had begun to envisage the elimination of Christianity once and for all. Clearly, there was no prospect of the Germans fulfilling their racial destiny while they were cancerous still with compassion. Hitler’s own preference — one that he was quick to put into practice the moment Germany went to war — was for a mass programme of euthanasia. This, a policy that was sanctioned both by ancient example and by the most cutting-edge scientific thinking, could never satisfactorily be carried out by a people who persisted in seeing it as evil.
Yet it was their own folly, their own blindness, that constituted the authentic evil. The Christian morality they clung to had resulted in any number of grotesque excrescences: alcoholics breeding promiscuously while upstanding national comrades struggled to put food on the table for their families; mentally ill patients enjoying clean sheets while healthy children were obliged to sleep three or four to a bed; cripples having money and attention lavished on them that should properly be devoted to the fit. Idiocies such as these were precisely what National Socialism existed to terminate. For the Germans to continue in their opposition to policies so transparently vital for their own racial health was insanity. The churches had had their day. “Harping on and on that God died on the cross out of pity for the weak, the sick, and the sinners, they then demand that the genetically diseased be kept alive in the name of a doctrine of pity that goes against nature, and of a misconceived notion of humanity.” The strong — as science had conclusively demonstrated — had both a duty and an obligation to eliminate the weak.
They also had a duty to trample down the second doctrine with which Christianity had poisoned the world. In 1942, an SS pamphlet quoted a line from Paul’s letter to the Galatians to illustrate just what it was that they had been summoned to fight against. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Here, the pamphlet warned, was a universalism that had dimmed the claims of blood, that had privileged the inferior races over the superior, and that over the course of the centuries had served to geld the Nordic race. A doctrine as pernicious in its effects as this could only have come from one source.
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SubscribeNational Socialist Germany was not an atheist state in the sense that Communist Russia was atheist. Certainly National Socialist Germany was an explicitly anti-Christian state, and it was actively trying to recast Christianity into a National Socialist form much as liberals are doing to Christianity today. The SS was drenched in paganism, and that is what Germany was evolving towards. If Germany had won the war, that is what would eventually have emerged. Paganism is the future we escaped. (For a while at least).
Are you serious? Liberals (social rather than economic, presumably) are trying to recast Christianity today into a Nazj or Pagan form? What does that even mean?
Perhaps you have some examples that might illustrate what you are on about?
I think he meant that Christianity is being recast as a kind of Socialism with Jesus as a ‘Progressive’ hippy type.
He is probably referring to liberal Christianity rather than evangelical Christianity.
It is not Christianity (which they seek to destroy), but religion and the nations that are being swallowed in paganism. For instance, the famous pagan dancing at the opening of the tunnel is Switzerland – utterly unrelated to successfully tunnelling, and yet thought to be a worthy way to celebrate it. Watched by the massed gathering of EU and European political dignitaries.
Paganism is just a generic term for different religions to your own, generally, but not exclusively predating Christianity. Generally they are polytheist rather than monotheist, though some poorly educated Christians would have called Muslims and Jews pagans or heathens – both terms have their linguistic roots in being unsophisticated country folk and not really anything to do with beliefs. However both are used as insults by those who feel they are superior, which is characteristically how someone who felt enlightened by virtue of their religion would view someone who did not share those beliefs. Paganism had its own rituals and celebrations, mostly tied to nature in some way that were generally a lot more fun (hedonistic in the eyes of those who saw themselves as superior) than the equivalents the Christian church sought to replace them with – Christmas Vs Yule and Sol Invictus.
The form of paganism we know best it that practised by the Anglo Saxons before conversion to Christianity, which had many similar beliefs to that practised by the Nordic peoples (Woden Vs Odin) who invaded many times until Alfred the Great and his descendants finally secured what became known as England and completed the conversion to Christianity, noting by then Scotland as it became, Wales as it became and Ireland as it became were already predominantly Christian. May I commend the Alfred the Great series by Bernard Cornwell to you, if you like a good historical yarn.
I see no return to paganism happening at all; just a rise in atheism, agnosticism (mostly through apathy rather than uncertainty) but above all consumerism is the new religion affecting the planet – maybe this is where you draw the parallel to paganism.
So, Adrian, if you see no return to paganism, you don’t see a bright future for the new TV series, Loki, I take it?
When it came to mass murder Staling and Mao made Hitler look like an amateur yet the media always put him front and centre don’t they?
He had star quality I suppose.
My aunt found a large portrait group of my grandfather ( who fought in WW1) with family-probaby taken in 1914 , and while my grandmother was elegantly draped in a chair surrounded by doting children-my grandfather was in ( British ) uniform looking exactly like our chap. Hitler modelled his look on this older generation-he liked to present himself as a ‘kind uncle’ figure. Chaplin took him’off’-but his own look was Edwardian. He was to some extent a created figure Brecht even did a play called Arturo Ui about it.
Also those who control the narrative are more likely to have relatives who suffered under the latter. The strange dichotomy is that the strongest cheer leaders for the former two ‘gents’ often belong to the group most victimized by the latter regime.
The fundamental mechanism at play here is where the source of human flaw resides.
Biblical teaching is clear on who has sinned and fallen short (all have), and that Satan does not corrupt until you give into your flesh and allow him to.
In short, overcoming inherent sinful nature is a self-reflective exercise.
When you replace “the devil” with a Hitler, you invert this.
So sinful nature is no longer reflective; it’s deflective. The world’s ills are not ‘cus of me, but thee.
Thus, people aren’t inherently sinful, saved by grace. We are inherently pure, corrupted by an external societal force (fascism obviously), of which the only redemptive force must be centralized control by the elite, ruling intelligentsia technocrat signalers of virtue, who possess the education and expertise to purify us via wealth redistribution, pharmaceuticals, and perfectly formulated economic calculations.
Or—and bear with me—we could all just clean our rooms.
Terrence Malik’s film “A Hidden Life” illuminates the terrible choice true followers of Christ faced as the Nazis marched across Europe. Pray that we would all have the courage of a Jagerstatter. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s worth 3 hours of your time.
Thank you. This had escaped my attention. I’ll follow it up, because I greatly admire some (though not all) of Terrence Malik’s films that I have seen. (The main exception is the essentially amoral Badlands.)
Where do the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot fit into this discussion.
A good starting point for thinking about and discussing the subject of evil is, I think, Susan Neiman’s “Evil in Modern Thought.” Her discussion of the Holocaust and its architects and how to think about them in the light of the work of Kant, Sade, Hume, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Sartre, Leibniz, Voltaire. Her work is to come to terms with why, given all the great natural and man made tragedies and catastrophes in history, the Holocaust seems to be in a special category of evil.
“ Communist dictators may have been no less murderous than fascist ones; but they — because communism was the expression of a concern for the oppressed masses — rarely seem as diabolical.”
I wonder if that is how communist leaders themselves saw it. Certainly the likes of Lenin could not abide the unwashed masses up close; and why waste concern on a group whose triumph is inevitable? Substitute “class” for “race” and I think the Naz!s and communists saw their respective projects in a very similar way: rising above sentimental notions of right and wrong, they had seen the scientifically revealed class/racial struggle, whose inevitable outcome they were simply hastening. The essential similarity lies in the obliteration of the “is/ought” distinction.
“but they — because communism was the expression of a concern for the oppressed masses — rarely seem as diabolical. “
Seems the opposite was true to me. Stalin’s murderousness was entirely arbitrary whereas if you were on Hitler’s good side you were pretty much in the clear.
The same Satan who ruled all the above rulers now rules the Silicon Valley bosses. A kinder, gentler Satan it would appear, thus far, but really the same one. Just wait till AI comes.
Satanic is not really about cruelty, it is destroying the soul, and today’s Entertainments, gaming, secular Humanism, destruction of family and community and nation, are out to do exactly that. To make people into mere soul less animals seeking avoidance of boredom as the highest goal, a sterile and solitary existence with artificial companions and community.
Brave New World, 1984, same difference really. Hitler and XI seeked 1984, Silicone Valley seek Brave New World, same Satan drives both.
Note though that it was the churches who managed to force a temporary halt to the first murderous euthanasia campaign .
I am a fan of Tom’s writing in general, but I’m afraid this is pretty weak stuff.
Hitler replaced the Devil because he was, unfortunately for millions, a real human being who committed real world atrocities. It’s really that simple.
We can debate the nuances here, that perhaps Hitler wasn’t even the most evil leader of all time or who killed the most, but his and the Nazi’s example is one of history’s most simple clear cut good vs evil stories.
This also:
Or it really just is. Church attendance has also decreased in line with widespread aviation. Perhaps we no longer require edifices to god now we are closer to him… Perhaps not, but it’s just as weak an argument. There are lots of thing in play here.
Indeed a classic relatively weak correlation proposed as a cause and effect weakens an otherwise useful article. I do think that as we struggle with new evils and tyrannies inside and outside our borders, it helps to be reminded of what pure evil (which I define as having a total disregard for the value of other human beings, as opposed to doing something you know to be wrong but justifying it as being for some greater good – the principal form of evil perpetrated by religions) looks like and the sort of arguments it uses to justify itself and coerce others into perpetrating it, especially as there are so few remaining who fought that particular evil. HRH DofE (Phil the Greek) was 18 in 1939. There have been other purely evil people, possibly even more evil than the Austrian Corporal, but we don’t have the same connection to them.
“Awaiting for approval” – can’t we at least have a grammatical warning that the overenthusiastic mod software has bitten again? Particularly since we’re complaining about Hull Uni’s drop in standards (UnHerd, passim).
My post below is awaiting for approval, which usually means it is just vented into the ether.
I had said Sa* an was not about cruelty, but destroying the soul, although the above used cruelty in their methods. ‘Brave New World’, ‘1984’, same difference really. Now days the Silicone Valley bosses are also servants of Sa* an, but seemingly a kinder and gentler one. Wile the above tyrants were trying to create 1984, Silicone Valley seek Brave New World.
The modern Secular Humanist world is about destruction of family, faith, community, nobility, nation, marriage, morality, and humanity its self, and is doing it with the MSM, entertainments, schools, internet and phones, where avoidance of boredom is the greatest goal. Just endless focus on banality, seeking hollow pleasures, and degenerate diversions. When AI arrives Brave New World will too, but one incorporating 1984, and the destruction of the soul will be close.
This is what happens when professional cancel culture takes hold of an ideology. Censoring of opinions, turns to censuring of opponents, turns to ‘cleansing’ of out-groups. It repeats. And repeats. And repeats in human history.
The administrative state becomes a terrible machine when it wants to disappear people to ‘purify a truth’ and zealots take control. Fortunately, the greatest strength of English Law is the concept of ‘reasonableness,’ accumulated through case law, that recognises that the letter of the law can be abused and that justice, not legality, should be paramount. It doesn’t always work, but other countries don’t always have this safeguard.
In the same way doctors sign up to the principle of ‘Do no harm’, our administrators and lawyers should sign up to a principle that rules and the law should never be used to create injustice.
Besides the fact that Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-Dong outdid Hitler for murder and genocide, as many other have commented, it is perhaps wishful thinking that Hitler as Satan-substitute has something to do with declining church attendance. Decline in comparison to which era? There have been plentiful examples of poor church attendance in the past, well before Hitler, of course.
I think Hitler and Nazism was an effect of many things more than the cause, and maybe the hold of religion on the modern imagination, and the concept of a real Hell, Satan, or whatever working in the world but also present in the intermingled after life had weakened, and Nazisim , or Facism just replaced it as the benchmark of evil, but entirely located in this, mainly Western post-enlightment, largely secular post-religious societies- but without that other worldly, after life dimension.
Many (most) people don’t see the world as a kind of arena in which Good and Evil are battling through and in people with rewards or punishments to come in the after life (a system that basically tries to create an orderly society for orderly lives in this life), they see it as entirely located here and so *Facism* becomes a matter of mutable choice.in a system of rewards and punishments entirely located in this world…
“……only Hitler aimed to eradicate, not just the institutional forms of the religion, but the doctrines of charity for the weak and sick, and the universalism, that lay at the heart of its traditional teachings. This is why, 80 years on from the Second World War, the Führer retains his starring role in contemporary demonology. ” He shouldn’t though; Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky should be up there with him (not to mention Mao, Kim and Pol Pot but of curse they don’t come from the Western tradition)
I think that there are no objectively right and good behaviours and that there are no absolute rights or wrongs. Right or wrong is a judgement that we make according to our circumstances and our cultural conditioning.
I am a child of my culture and my time (as are all of us) so of course I have views of the world built into me by that background and it is difficult to try to stand outside of this and to see that someone else might have a different set of morals, someone who truly believes that what they are doing is right and correct in every sense even though we might feel complete abhorrence.
Could you imagine being an Inca parent of a child judged propitious that has to be necessarily sacrificed to the Gods? You may very well be pleased and proud and more than willing for your child to be drugged and killed. Indeed, there are numerous references to willing child sacrificial practices in the Old Testament and clearly this was a part of expected practices given the Abraham/Isaac story although there was an escape at the end in that particular fable.
I do not believe in absolute morality or absolute justice and I do believe that our senses of what is right and wrong are instilled in us by our environment. No outside judgemental being, nothing in the universe that cares. Nowhere to look for guidance except for what we come up with – thankfully we have stopped sacrificing children to appease misunderstood forces.
We see this belief in some type of absolute morality being applied in a judgemental form to historical figures when there are claims that some person, previously regarded as worthy, was a horrible racist and thus a statue should be taken down or a building renamed. Quite ridiculous in my opinion – a mistake to think that what someone felt a couple of centuries ago was not a product of their society but was a personal failing to be condemned and that they are thus a terrible example to people today or that we approve of racism.
I guess morality evolves as well as adapts.
For a non-subscriber to any faith or ideology, your assessment is quite correct. The problem though, if you decide that it is supposed to be a puddle, and you are supposed to stay in the puddle, you may not even try to find a solid ground, let alone find it. Our search for certainty is natural, existential, and at the core of life’s struggle.
During the cold war (I can’t comment on today’s curriculum), most students were not taught about either communist or nazj genocides (or for that matter Turkish/Armenian genocides, slavery, or colonial era abuses). You learned about the Romans, early English history, and (depending on where in the UK, and on the flavour of your school) some local (Irish, or possibly Scottish) history.
But almost everyone still knew that both Hitler and Stalin had killed huge numbers. There was a distant awareness that slavery had been abolished. And little or no awareness of other genocides, or of colonial conflicts.
Hitler and the Holocaust are still well covered in popular media – possibly due to our obsession with “the war”. Communism seems consigned to the dustbin of history (and is thus largely ignored) – it’s even the case that many or most Eastern European ex-pats in the UK no longer personally remember it.
I’m not sure we need to look for an ideological conspiracy for this disparity. Mostly it’s entertainment industry market forces at work (though arguably nationalist sentiment may be part of the enduring fascination with WW2 that drives current awareness of Hitler’s evil, as compared to Lenin’s or Stalin’s).
“I’m not sure we need to look for an ideological conspiracy for this disparity.” – perhaps not but perhaps it’s not coincidence that the media and academia is dominted by the left.
The villains in Ian Fleming;s Bond thrillers were almost always working for the Russians until he invented Spectre for his last books in the 1960s. The filmmakers preferred to whitewash the Russians and took pains to pit Bond against Spectre rather than Smersh in the film version of From Russia, with Love.
I’m not so sure he is wrong – I think people do see them differently, it’s not just about exposure.
People, rightly or wrongly, generally see Stalin as having no real commitment to the ideals of communism, but rather as largely indifferent to ideology for its own sake and as being a man who cared about his own authority and was also insane. So yet another example of an egomaniac authoritarian, not really different than any other except in scale.
Mao is more complicated perhaps but even there, I would say the dominant public sense is of someone who believed in a vision of good which had some merit, but also believed in an extreme form of the ends justifying the means. I would say that’s simplistic, but it’s not how they think about what motivated Hitler.
With Hitler, people’s sense is that precisely what he believed was good was in fact in a very specific way actually evil. So a mirror image – so a plausible substitute for the Devil in the secular imagination.
In my view the difficulty with this is that it suggests he was quite other than us in his thinking, when actually many of his ideas slip into modern secular thought without people realising it.
The difference being the Commie had “good intentions”, like today’s Socialists do. The road to hell and all that, you know the thing.
The difference being the Commie had “good intentions”, like today’s Socialists do. The road to hell and all that, you know the thing.
What the heck happened to the comments on this article, they’ve been decimated. Worse than that, more than half are gone!
It’s annoying is’nt it ? Perhaps there’s a rogue moderator or something.
What is weird is that it’s difficult to see why most might have been considered problematic. I imagine a few might have merited deletion, but most were pretty standard discussions of the article.
“Communist dictators may have been no less murderous than fascist ones; but they — because communism was the expression of a concern for the oppressed masses — rarely seem as diabolical.”
Communist regimes were actually more murderous by a considerable margin.
They further acted on the secular articulation of the exact Christian virtues specified 1) service to the downtrodden and 2) universalism.
As the liberal democratic expression of those values has come to be held as an unassailable good in Western Europe, indigenous Europeans now face the prospect of being demographically displaced in their homelands by peoples from Africa and Asia.
I can’t help but conclude there was profound truth in the view that Christianity is a destructive force aimed at the heart of European peoples, even as I unequivocally reject the Nazis approach to addressing that problem.
Really not sure what the point of this well put together piece is. Is this just a description of the state of play or a criticism? As Holland’s book makes clear, modern progressivism, that endless Unherd articles seek to attack, is simply a modern version of Paul’s universalism. It is obvious why Hitler rather than Stalin is the big baddy of the modern world. Stalin was simply a paranoid psychopathic bully. Hitler was the same but with an ideology that explicitly contradicted the Christian universalism of progressivism.
Can Nazism be seen as a Darwinian “Protestantism,” a form of the belief in a predestined elect? Instead of individualist salvation as in Calvinism, Hitler (following contemporary science) applied the “chosen” status to race, which was a concept unknown in Calvin’s time. (As was the survival of the fittest.)
Did some background reading into Gods of Death and arrived at this within the Art > Literature section. It seems Satan was somewhat revered at the time as a kind of rebel who was a force for good in the world and a symbol for the struggle against tyranny, injustice, and oppression. Certainly an apt cultural context to pose as redeemer and protector of a pure race.
…..
Radical left-wing political ideas had been spread by the American Revolution of 1765–83 and the French Revolution of 1789–99, and the figure of Satan, who was interpreted as having rebelled against the tyranny imposed by God, was an appealing one for many of the radical leftists of the period.[97] For them, Satan was “a symbol for the struggle against tyranny, injustice, and oppression… a mythical figure of rebellion for an age of revolutions, a larger-than-life individual for an age of individualism, a free thinker in an age struggling for free thought”.[92] The French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who was a staunch critic of Christianity, embraced Satan as a symbol of liberty in several of his writings.[98] Another prominent 19th century anarchist, the Russian Mikhail Bakunin, similarly described the figure of Satan as “the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds” in his book God and the State.[99] These ideas likely inspired the American feminist activist Moses Harman to name his anarchist periodical Lucifer the Lightbearer.[100] The idea of this “Leftist Satan” declined during the twentieth century,[100] although it was used on occasion by authorities within the Soviet Union, who portrayed Satan as a symbol of freedom and equality.[101]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanism
Odd that George Lloyd, a drug addicted sociopath who thought nothing of mugging pregnant women has become a symbol of freedom and equality!!!
Bottom line: Jesus is the only person in human history to survive death itself. Claims of all other pretenders are superfluous. No man, woman nor child who has ever lived can surpass or outdo his claim to survive death itself.
You either believe it or you don’t. Believe Jesus in his claim of surviving death itself, and you go with him into eternal life. Believe any other bullying pretender and your destiny may be to clean toilets at an Auschwitz-like venue beneath a sign that reads “hell.”
Morality exists outside of the church, politics and religion. As an innate part of humanity. We all feel sadness at human suffering, of children going hungry. The elderly weeping and alone. Regardless of religion or political affiliation!
A world with god and a world without god looks remarkably alike! Both are sad, filled with loss, corruption, violent and at times bloodthirsty depending on leadership and ideology,
Authentic evil has been found on both sides of belief No society was a ever a utopia. Just as the bible too with its human sacrifice, burnt offerings, stoning…as recipes for a just and compassionate society — would never have been successful…It took the compassionate from many beliefs to fashion the rights and morals we have today. Human awareness, the feelings of others regardless of sex, religion, race…
Religion has never made a peaceful, tolerant and fair society for all its members, and often scripture is the cause! It is largely that failure that made people question god, religion and the church! And rightly so! Religion has had its chance. Its many variations and gods have failed… not once did it succeed.
Religions and politics twist the innate goodness of people and weaponise it (regardless of their place of birth and religion) to their own ends. It’s only humans that kill over ideology. I hope humans rise out of both of those systems to be independent compassionate humans without the need of corruptible leadership Authentic evil has been produced by both. – Challenged by the rare people that spoke out against cruel leadership in whatever form it takes is also not only the domain of the religious or non religious. I would say it is the product of a human. (A very rare gem too)
We are just as far away from utopia as ever we were… Religion or politics will not be the tool that makes it all better.
Leadership and ideology keep holding us back as society. Or at least the comfort to follow unquestionably…it is why history repeats.
You are so right that a world with or without religion is not peaceful, tolerant or fair. I don’t know about other faiths but Judaism and Christianity account for this by teaching that we live in a broken world through man’s rebellion. I used to think that this could simply be fixed by a change in behaviour but I realised I couldn’t sustain the sort of behaviour I wanted to express!
Perhaps we are too ambitious with our utopian visions, maybe if each individual concentrated on their own shortcomings more and stopped trying to change the world there might be a better chance of some peace.
Perhaps seeing our own personal journey through life as the only ‘progress’ we are ever likely to make would help. I don’t know.
I don’t think humans have “innate goodness” sadly. Children need to be trained and civilised into useful adulthood. No matter what you do some humans end up with a strong moral compass and others not so much.
It is human greed, self aggrandisement and the lust for power that corrupts, not religion.
Jews seem to have been persecuted throughout history. The Romans didn’t imposed their gods on others because they recognised the same pagan gods even though the names were different. So even then the Jews were seen as different and unwilling to change. It got worse when Christianity imposed its views on pagan religions and then the Jews were persecuted by the Eastern Roman Emperors and it has continued elsewhere since.
I think one reason is that Jews are known to have, on average, a higher IQ and throughout history they have been successful wherever they have moved. Success, especially when it is immigrants who are seen to be different, is often not liked. Judaism is not a proselytising religion and this also marks them out as different. We have witnessed the Church of England and the Catholics giving up their long held beliefs and adopting modern ideas, but the Jews will not do this. They show that they are not willing to be controlled by politicians and trendy ideas.
I’m a lifelong atheist so might have got this wrong, but if I was forced to adopt a religion it would be Judaism and that is because of Lord Sacks, a man of great wisdom, something that cannot be said of any Christian (and Muslim) leaders.
This is ahistorical rubbish.
If you think so, then put forward your case?
Correct, however the Jews have paid a terrible price for such obstinacy, particularly at the hands of the otherwise wonderfully tolerant Romans.
In about 132AD/885AUC, the Romans not only flattened Jerusalem, but totally destroyed the Temple for the final time, and renamed the City after the Emperor Hadrian, one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest Roman Emperor.
From then on, without any real homeland they were condemned to the life of the “wandering Jew” which finished at Auschwitz..
Was it worth it?
and whereas so many others, witness the migration queue from muslim countries, leave , the Jews actually went back and re created Israel.. How many Israeli, Jewish or Indian Hindus are there coming ashore on the Kent coast? … None… I wonder why?
Jewish peoples have shown themselves, and still do, as superior in everything that they turn their minds and hands to, a phenomena now being mirrored by Indian Hindus… as an Irish Italian Roman Catholic I respect and celebrate this with admiration.