When I posted my latest blog, A Final Word, yesterday I had not realized the significance of its title. Alas, soon after it posted yesterday a flurry of new Featured Bloggers appeared and it vanished from the JPost portal. And so I post it as a new and final, for the time being, blog with the present Intro:
As a psychotherapist I long concluded that "addiction" is really just "addict behavior," a choice to engage in self-destructive behavior. And for me this involves hours each day reading responses to my writings and feeling compelled to "teach," to explain what I mean, and why I consider it important to an understanding of the next and final Final Solution to the millennial pathological assault on "the Jews" most recently expressed in the Holocaust. I feel compelled; in a way this has become my purpose in life: to warn of the impending and final assault on the Jews.
Always dissatisfied by my revisions I determined earlier this year to make this rewrite my last. I would integrate the advice of several historians and conform my "style" of composition to their suggestions. Stylistically my manuscript is far more readable (I only began the "revision" following the present section on Christianity so the change is not evident on-line) and I feel close to a "final" copy, perhaps two months away. To cross the "finish line" will demand discipline and consistent focus. And this will require I minimize distractions.
Writing for and managing the blog is my principal distraction. So, at least for the next few months, I will take a break. At least from "editing" the book on-line. So if you want to read the end project you may have to buy it!
Since long before I began my once-again renamed (that too I struggle with) "The Jewish Problem and its Final Solution" I had been blogging on more topical Israel-Zionism issues. This began with President Bush stupidly invading
And so, while I am closing down my "book blog" I will continue to blog, if far less consistently, on issues topical to Zionism and
For my readers, and particularly those who have assisted me as I struggled with describing the Jewish Problem, you have been far more helpful than you realize in the development of my thinking! I am deeply in your debt. Thank you for your comments, criticisms and, over the years, support.
I will continue to read and respond as in the past to comments on the (no longer) present "blog", A Final Word.
David
Christian Insecurity: A Final Word
In closing this chapter on Christian Insecurity I remind that I take no position regarding the subject of the Search, the existence or not of a first century person described in the gospels as Jesus Christ. I do stand by my criticisms of the methods employed by most “scholars” over the past two centuries seeking to prove Jesus historicity. Christianity is a belief system shared by several billion adherents throughout the west and around the world. And while I do not criticize or judge that belief system I do seek an explanation for a singular fact of history representing Christendom’s attitude towards Jews, itself an outgrowth of that belief system. Christendom’s Jewish Problem is a continuing threat to the remnant of a far more numerous people at the time Christianity emerged from Judaism. If I raise issues of internal and usually “sub-conscious” contradiction and uncertainty in Christian text and practice my purpose is only to identify the sources of those unconscious anxieties more ably described by Nicholls, Ruether, Carroll, Fredriksen and many other theologians across the Christian belief spectrum.
My own input is to point at issues introduced in scripture, picked up and developed by early theologians and affirmed and reaffirmed by later generations of theologians from the first to twenty-first century. From Irenaeus to Augustine to Luther to the concluding statement from the 2010 Vatican Conclave on the Middle East Judaism is represented as “replaced” by Christianity. And if, as understood by many Christianities today, God did transfer His covenant to the “New Israel,” why is there still an “Old Israel”? And while Jews and their neighbors have had their differences for centuries long before the appearance of Christianity, these were mostly of a national origin, competition, intolerance, etc., between peoples within a particular historical context. Christianity’s Jewish Problem is religious and so eternal.
Assimilation, the “solution” represented by Augustine’s Witness Doctrine and adopted by the Church of his time failed both as voluntary and coerced solution to that Jewish Problem. In a world no longer governed by religious authority “conversion” is irrelevant, provides no protection from discrimination and persecution. It is a discussion for future chapters. The project of providing a “solution” to the Jewish Problem has dogged Christianity since its inception. In its secular guise “solution” has taken on an even more ominous form. The Holocaust established a modern secularist approach to the Problem, a bureaucratic, technological and thoroughly “modern” approach. Secularism’s adaptation of the original Jewish Problem emerged in the twentieth century as the West’s Final Solution.