Cline has basically adopted the ADL's disingenuous argument that it's "deception" to assert that accepting Jesus as the Messiah is compatible with Jewish theology. But how does Cline know what the "real" Judaism is? Did God tell him? If so, did God also say which of the varied beliefs of the Reform, Conservative or Orthodox Jews are compatible with Jewish theology? They can't all be right about God's law.posted by dgaicun at 9:14 PM on April 23, 2006
There's no inherent logical conflict in a Jew accepting Christ as Messiah, and certainly no contradiction nearly as serious as those involved the concept of God generally. Jesus was a Jew, and presumably the ultimate Jew for Himself.
There is hardly an aspect of contemporary history more irritating and mystifying than the fact that of all the great unsolved political questions of our century, it should have been this seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honor of setting the whole infernal machine [the Nazi movement and World War II] in motion. Such discrepancies between cause and effect outrage our common sense....posted by russilwvong at 10:16 PM on April 23, 2006
... According to Tocqueville, the French people hated aristocrats about to lose their power more than it had ever hated them before, precisely because their rapid loss of real power was not accompanied by any considerable decline in their fortunes. As long as the aristocracy held vast powers of jurisdiction, they were not only tolerated but respected. When noblemen lost their privileges, among others the privilege to exploit and oppress, the people felt them to be parasites, without any real function in the rule of the country. In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.
Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence, and were left with nothing but their wealth. When Hitler came to power, the German banks were already almost judenrein (and it was here that Jews had held key positions for more than a hundred years) and German Jewry as a whole, after a long steady growth in social status and numbers, was declining so rapidly that statisticians predicted its disappearance in a few decades. ... to a statistician Nazi persecution and extermination could look like a senseless acceleration of a process which would probably have come about in any case.
The same holds true for nearly all Western European countries. The Dreyfus Affair exploded not under the Second Empire, when French Jewry was at the height of its prosperity and influence, but under the Third Republic when Jews had all but vanished from important positions....
Kristol has acknowledged his intellectual debt to Strauss in a recent autobiographical essay. "What made him so controversial within the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment dogma that `the truth will make men free.'" Kristol adds that "Strauss was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some [emphasis Kristol's] minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and political order, and that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion with utterly unpredictable, but mostly negative, consequences."Doesn't get more straightforward than that. "Most people are too stupid for the truth, and we have to keep them in line."
Kristol agrees with this view. "There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people," he says in an interview. "There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."
posted by srboisvert at 5:18 AM on April 23, 2006