Yeah, I’m not sure, either. Dated a Mormon chick. She was pretty freaky in the sack. That’s about what I know.
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Nope, I’m just saying that if you go far enough into history, you’ll find not so dissimilar behavior - sometimes you have to go back centuries, sometimes a millennium or more.
The problem is that ISIS and Salafis in general are literally reading from a 7th century how-to book.
When was the last time any of you checked the Bible to find out how to treat captured slaves?
Deuteronomy 20:14
But the women and the little ones, the livestock, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as plunder for yourselves. And you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you.
“When you go out to war against your enemies, and the Lord your God gives them into your hand and you take them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pare her nails. And she shall take off the clothes in which she was captured and shall remain in your house and lament her father and her mother a full month. After that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. But if you no longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she wants. But you shall not sell her for money, nor shall you treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her.
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OK, so the Mormon thing was a bad example. I agree.
But to the larger point: why would you go back millennium on a group that really came into existence no more than 200 or so years ago? The Christian Zionists pretty much started with the Puritans and Quakers in the USA/England.
And I am not expert (since my study of Protestantism was in Catechism class in a Catholic Church), but the whole Christian Zionist movement started with Protestants who were very firm abolitionists and, in fact, were pretty much the folks who started the ball rolling in ending first the slave trade and then slavery in the USA. That seems 100% contrary to the reading of the Bible you have.
I’m thinking maybe I’ll defer to their reading of their book to them, as they don’t seem to be coming up with the same conclusions as you. Maybe you’re taking something out of context.
Not all fundamentalists are crazy, and some are more into their religious doctrines than others. And not all evangelicals are pro-Israel either.
But to give you an example of the lunacy some of these people are into, see this:
“There is a case of one group called the Millerites. These people felt they knew the exact night that the rapture would occur. So they climbed into trees and waited expectantly so they could be the first people to meet Jesus as he returned. But they were wrong. Some clever person sneaked out with a trumpet and gave it a blast. Some of the Millerites thought it was the trumpet announcing the secret return of Jesus and the rapture of believers. So they jumped out of the trees where they were perched, expecting to fly up in the air to meet Jesus as he came down from heaven. They were sadly mistaken, and came crashing down to the earth. Some of them broke arms and legs.”
Now, the whole concept of “rapture” is based on some loose interpretations of certain sections of the Bible. Every once in a while someone sets a date, last time about 10 years ago it was in the news that some preacher was saying the world was going to end tomorrow. But for people who are so into every word of the Bible, such behaviour seems extremely foolish when you consider the following:
Deuteronomy 18:20-22
But a prophet who presumes to speak in my name anything I have not commanded, or a prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, is to be put to death.”
You may say to yourselves, “How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the Lord?” If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed.
And, so, because there are some obscure crazy Protestants “Evangelical Zionist Christians seem to me like the equivalent of ISIS”?
Broad brush you have going there.
The rules in the Bible for slavery would have resulted in much less harsh conditions than what was done to Black people in the Americas. Not saying it’s good, but compare these two:
This guy kept a detailed diary
Apparently Muslims used to castrate male slaves most of the time. A Muslim guy told me that.
Yeah, the US secretary of state is an obscure nobody.
Pompeo’s words:
" “We will continue to fight these battles,” the then congressman said at the Summit church in Wichita. “It is a never-ending struggle … until the rapture. Be part of it. Be in the fight.”"
" Christian Zionism has become the “majority theology” among white US Evangelicals, who represent about a quarter of the adult population. In a 2015 poll, 73% of evangelical Christians said events in Israel are prophesied in the Book of Revelation."
I just coincidentally came across this, see what modern Catholics are into:
How are you getting that Christian Zionism is "Evangelical Zionist Christians seem to me like the equivalent of ISIS”?
So far, the evidence you have of Christian Zionism being like ISIS is: (1) some Christian group jumped out of trees and (2) nothing.
OK, what does that have to do with "Evangelical Zionist Christians seem to me like the equivalent of ISIS”?
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Both believe that current events are a holy war, and are eager for the apocalypse.
Nothing, but it’s another example of insane politics led by religion.
I think I am correct in memory that leading up to the date change to year 2000, a number of literalist Christians from somewhere around Utah in the USA tried to smuggle guns into Israel with themselves. The idea was to go to someplace like Jerusalem, start shooting, and in the hopes of the confusion causing the Israelis and Palestinians to start a hot, full war. Eventually the Biblically predicted Holocaust would play out, and all that goes with it.
I once asked a Christian on another webboard a few years later if he had any memory of it, and he drew a blank.
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The problem with these “literalists” is that they only read one part and think they know the whole story.
Amos 5:18-20
18 Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light.
19 As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him.
20 Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?
It’s not a reading, it’s a quote. Despite lofty proclamations of equality between the master and the slave, early Christians had to be disposed favorably towards slavery, otherwise it wouldn’t have spread throughout the Roman Empire. The Roman elites liked the message this strange new observance preached to the slaves - “shut the fuck up and wait for your reward in Heaven”
Now that’s the crucial difference where two major religions diverge - imagine living in a country where between 50 and 80 percent of the population are literalists and passages from the Bible were used in common law courts - for example, having to bring a ram before dawn for sleeping with someone’s slave.
I just watched Pompeo’s speech at the “Summit Church God and Country Rally”. (It’s on Youtube.)
Where are you getting that Pompeo thinks the “current events are a holy war, and [he is] eager for the apocalypse”?
A much fairer summary would be “all good people are in a fight against evil, and it will be so until the end of the world. So fight the good fight!”
I heard Obama make effectively the same speech, to a different audience.
I candidly agree with that assessment of the human condition.
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Yeah, again not a scholar of modern Protestantism.
But, going by their actual behavior, they seem to disagree with how you are interpreting the Bible. I’m 100% sure the Quakers were both fundies and anti-slavery.
Maybe you should go convince them they are reading the Bible wrong and bring back slavery.
Yes they were, but they were a fairly recent phenomenon in terms of Christian history. And during antebellum religious debate about slavery where Bible quotations were thrown around by both sides they were in a vocal minority.
Evangelicals have a history of racism and being proslavery.
While countless Union soldiers and northern civilians depended on theological narratives to sustain them, a providential view of history particularly influenced how Southerners reacted to and interpreted the events of the war. After all, the preamble to the Confederate constitution, unlike the federal one it replaced, explicitly invoked “the favor and guidance of Almighty God.” They were, Southerners believed, a people chosen by God to manifest His will on earth. “We are working out a great thought of God,” declared the South Carolina Episcopal theologian James Warley Miles, “namely the higher development of Humanity in its capacity for Constitutional Liberty.”
Miles held, though, that divine mandate extended beyond simply the Confederate interpretation of states’ rights, and that Southerners were bound by the Bible to seek more than merely “a selfish independence.” The Confederacy must “exhibit to the world that supremest effort of humanity” in creating and defending a society built upon obedience to biblical prescriptions regarding slavery, a society “sanctified by the divine spirit of Christianity.” In short, as the Episcopal Church in Virginia stated soon after the war began, Southerners were fighting “a Revolution, ecclesiastical as well as civil.” This would be a revolution that aimed to establish nothing less than, in the words of one Georgia woman, “the final and universal spread of Gospel civilization.”
This “Gospel civilization,” many believed, didn’t just permit slavery — it required it. Christians across the Confederacy were convinced that they were called not only to perpetuate slavery but also to “perfect” it. And they understood the Bible to provide clear moral guidelines on how to properly practice it. The Old Testament patriarchs owned slaves, Jewish law clearly assumed its permissibility and the Apostle Paul’s New Testament letters repeatedly compelled slaves to be obedient and loyal to their masters. Above all, as Southerners never tired of pointing out to their abolitionist foes, the Gospels fail to record any condemnation of the practice by Jesus Christ.