168
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
168 points (100.0% liked)
Palestine
339 readers
92 users here now
Posts and comments can be in English and العربية
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
"Thou shall not kill." Did he fucking stutter?
You are not familiar with Judaism. They aren't allowed to kill Jews. That's what the commandment means to them and has always meant to them. The second of the ten commandments is about loving your neighbor and to Jews that historically means other Jews and therefore the other commandments following it also only apply to other Jews.
But to be fair, Islam has the same issue of discriminating against unbelievers. At the time of Muhammad, only Jews, Christians and Sabians were tolerated. Others had to convert or be killed.
And to be even more fair, there are orthodox branches of Judaism that are pacifist and therefore definitely don't go out to kill. I really admire Yaakov Shapiro, who is fiercely anti-Zionist and pacifist.
Of the three Abrahamic religions, Christianity is the only one that doesn't allow killing of any humans.
Jesus specifically took the commandments and gave the parable of the Good Samaritan. Samaritans were the Palestinians of his time, descendents of non-exiled Israelites and Judeans. The Jews who came back from Babylon didn't recognize them as Jews and discriminated and oppressed them.
So Jesus gave that parable to make it clear that even Samaritans were neighbours, not just Jews.
Of course, later Christianity became the Roman religion and evolved to become the most violent of the three Abrahamic religions, but Christians have always needed to justify their wars as "just wars" in "self-defense" or "to protect the innocent" and Christian leaders are masters in lying and deceit. Even in modern times, Bush needed to lie about WMD to get support for the Iraq war.
So I don't want to say Christians are less violent - history shows the opposite. Only that Christianity is pacifist in its original form.
Nice blood libel you got there.
I'm a Jewish person and I don't see blood libel in this. They provided some interesting points and while I don't fully agree they aren't painting Jews as evil or others as good, just trying to reconcile our beliefs with these recent atrocities.
Truth is an absolute defense for libel accusations. So what about the comment was untrue? Or do you think including the phrase "blood libel" is sufficient to form a though-terminating cliche?
Anyway, looking at it from an anthropological perspective, many societies have regarded themselves as human while characterizing all outsiders as non-human. I wouldn't expect the ancient Jews to differ from anyone else in the region at the time when it comes to this.
Subhuman spotted
Deuteronomy 17:12
2 Chronicles 15:12-13
Deuteronomy 13:13-19
There are more examples. I love hypocrisy dunking, but the hypocrisy is unfortunately baked into the theology.
More examples on the "opposite side":
Deuteronomy 10:19
Psalm 82:2-4
Isaiah 1:17
Overall, though, I would interpret Abrahamic religions as hostile to outsiders, non-believers, and other religions.
The Abrahamic religions are and have always been internally incoherent. I didn't come here to argue that the Court got their own doctrine wrong, just to provide a citation to their foundational doctrine that illustrates the incoherence. I don't care what their invisible space monkey tells them, but if they want to kill others, they shouldn't be surprised when the others fight back. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
There is a reason the Talmud is basically a collection of massive extensive debates. Our religion isn't necessarily coherent or consistent and it takes a very long time to become a Rabbi for a reason.