#they tended to stick with each other and marry other jews

[deadtower]

so my ancestrydna results came in today and i am bona fide eastern european jewish

this is like a big thing for me bc i was rly terrified my mom might have been lying about it to seem “interesting” but my mommom also told us we were jewish and i know she wouldn’t lie to me so it was just a case of the test

i feel ... so much better now hbgrbgh

[pamphletstoinspire]

Understanding The Bible - A Practical Guide To Each Book In The Bible - Part 33

Written by: PETER KREEFT

TEN

________

How a Christian Is Different: First Corinthians

Today, especially in America, Catholics, like everyone else (except Orthodox Jews and Fundamentalists), want to be “accepted”. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians is especially relevant to such people. Though it talks about dozens of separate issues, the most unifying theme is that Christians must be different.

Corinth was the largest, most cosmopolitan, and most decadent city in Greece. Two-thirds of its seven hundred thousand citizens were slaves. It was a major port and hub of commerce. Much of the commerce was in human flesh. “To act like a Corinthian” was an ancient saying meaning debauchery, especially prostitution. Men went to Corinth to take a moral holiday.

The city was also full of idolatry, which centered around Aphrodite, the goddess of sex. Her temple, atop an eighteen-hundred-foot promontory, had a thousand temple prostitutes. Paul had come here in the years A.D. 51 and 52 to evangelize. Now four or five years later, he writes this letter to address some of the problems of this new, struggling Church surrounded by an “advanced” world just like ours: a world in “advanced” stages of decay.

His main point is that Christians are called out of paganism to a radically distinctive lifestyle. For Christ is the Lord of every aspect of life. Paul is utterly Christocentric; in 1 Corinthians 1:30 he identifies four great abstract ideals (wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption) with Christ Himself. In 1 Corinthians 2:2 he says that he “decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ”. Any addition to Him would be a subtraction.

America is strikingly similar to Corinth. According to polls, most Catholics consider themselves “Americans who happen to be Catholics”, rather than “Catholics who happen to be Americans”. Two of the words they dislike the most are “authority” (or “lordship”) and “obedience”. Yet these are precisely what Paul calls for.

Christ always sought out the most needy, and His Church has always followed His lead. Christianity naturally flows to the lowest places, like water. Corinth was the world’s lowest place, the spiritual gutter. Yet the Corinthians thought of themselves as high, not low—like the high and airy temple of Aphrodite. For one thing, they were rich due to trade and prostitution. For another, they were well educated. Though they did not produce any philosophers, many philosophers from Athens taught there. The most prominent philosophical school at the time was probably Scepticism. The last thing any of them would believe was a man rising from the dead.

Into this atmosphere heavy with lust, greed, and pride, Paul had introduced the clear light of Jesus when he first visited (2:1-5). And he now continues the same strategy: not compromising, not pandering, not patronizing, but calling for the hard way, the distinctive way of living the life of Christ in a Christless world.

This is not a systematically ordered letter, like Romans. It moves from topic to topic. There are many minor topics, but the four major ones are (1) sectarianism, (2) faith and reason—Christianity and philosophy, (3) sex and love, and (4) the resurrection from the dead—both Christ’s and ours. Other topics include incest, pagan lawyers, eating food offered to idols, prostitution, virginity, marriage, divorce, the Eucharist, order in worship, speaking in tongues, and other spiritual gifts.

The first two of these major points are treated together since simple faith unites while pride in reason divides. Paul is utterly scandalized at the growing factionalism in the Corinthian church (1:10-13). Can anyone seriously wonder which of the many “denominations” he would approve today?

Paul sees the source of division as the proud claim to possess superior “wisdom” and not submitting to Christ as God’s Wisdom. The wonderful irony and paradox of God’s folly being wiser than human wisdom (1:18-3:23) is the definitive passage for philosophers or theologians with “original” minds who tend to resist Christocentrism and want to “advance” in different and schismatic directions.

If all Christians had kept this passage uppermost in their minds for the last two thousand years, I believe that the tragedies of 1054 and 1517 and the hundreds of tears in the seamless garment of the Church since then could never have happened. If the Church ever becomes visibly one again, this passage will be the foundation for unity. Yet she always remains substantially and invisibly one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic.

On the number one topic in modern morality, sex and love, Paul does three things. First, he condemns sexual immorality in chapters 5 and 6, as well as the Corinthians’ lax attitudes that accepted it. Instead of justifying incest, they should excommunicate the offender. Instead of justifying prostitution by the slogan “all things are lawful” (6:12), they should realize that in doing so a Christian, as a member of Christ’s Body, makes Christ fornicate with a prostitute (6:15)!

Second, Paul gives a positive alternative picture of Christian marriage in chapter 7. Here he clearly distinguishes God’s commands from his own opinion, which is to stay single. I think there is a wonderful divine humor in God revealing some deep and perennial principles of marriage through a celibate who confesses that he personally does not recommend it! I also see a wry divine humor in including in Scripture (7:6-12) a clear distinction between what is divine revelation and what is not. The distinction between divine revelation and human opinion is a matter of divine revelation, not human opinion!

Third, Paul writes the most famous passage about love ever written, chapter 13. This is the essential alternative to pagan lust for both married and unmarried. It is also a call to a clear and distinctive lifestyle and Christian witness. After all, Christ had prophesied that the world would be able to distinguish Christians from others by the special kind of love they had (Jn 13:35), not by having the same kind of love as the world had.

First Corinthians 13 is often read at weddings because it is the best definition of love ever written. This love (agape) is not a feeling or desire (eros) but a life; it is as Dostoyevsky put it, “love in action” rather than “love in dreams.”

The first paragraph (13:1-3) shows the infinite value of love by contrasting it with other things of great value: speaking in tongues, prophecy, knowledge, faith, and even the works of love without the soul of love.

The second paragraph distinguishes this love from all others by describing it in fifteen characteristics (vv. 4-7). Love is the skeleton key that unlocks all these doors. For instance, it is impossible to be patient with difficult people without love, but love brings patience with it.

Finally, the last paragraph shows the eternal destiny of love. Everything else, including all the things the Corinthians set their hearts and lives on, is doomed to die. Even faith and hope and earthly wisdom are not needed after death. But love is. When we love now, we plant seeds for eternity.

Chapter 13 is sandwiched between two chapters on spiritual gifts, especially the gift of tongues, and their use in worship. Paul shows moderation and wisdom in avoiding both the extremes of naive enthusiasm and suspicion, and in subordinating everything, even supernatural gifts, to love. He himself speaks in tongues and wants everyone to (14:5, 18), but the issue is much less important for Paul than most charismatics and their critics think.

Next to chapter 13, chapter 15 is the most famous and most important. It is the primary text in Scripture on the resurrection of the body. None of the Greek philosophers in Corinth believed in bodily resurrection, not because they did not believe in miracles, but because they did not believe the body was good and created by God. Their sexual materialism and their philosophical spiritualism went hand in hand. Paul revealed instead that the body is more real and good and important than they thought. It is a holy thing, the Spirit’s temple now (6:19) and the seed of something destined to live with God eternally, not a mere animal organism seeking sexual pleasure as its greatest good.

Plato had called the body “the soul’s tomb”. Paul tells the Corinthians, who were probably influenced by this philosophy, that to deny or ignore Christ’s bodily Resurrection is to abandon the whole faith. Without the Resurrection, “our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain” (15:14), “you are still in your sins” (15:17), and “if for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied” (15:19).

And this Resurrection is no mere symbol, no merely subjective and spiritual “resurrection of Easter faith”, or some such silly subterfuge. The Greek words for “the resurrection of the body” are anastasis nekron, which means “the sitting-up of the corpse”! Denial of the literal Resurrection, according to the Word of God, is denial of Christ, denial of the faith.

After demonstrating its existence (15:12-34), Paul gives some hints about its nature (15:35-58) through natural analogies. This body is the seed of another one. This body is as different from the resurrection body as a planet differs from a star. Paul’s contrast between a “physical body” and a “spiritual body” does not mean that the post-resurrection body will not be tangible. Christ’s was and is. It means that the source of this physical body is physis, nature, the dust we return to, while the source of our resurrection body is the Spirit of God, who will raise us as He raised Christ.

Paul concludes the great chapter with words that sound like trumpets (indeed, that is why Handel accompanied them with a trumpet in his “Messiah”). He concludes by sticking his tongue out at death, taunting it: “O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?” Death is now a stingless bee for us because its stinger is in the body of Christ crucified. He took the stinger of Hell out of the bee of death for us.

The central theme in each of the specific topics Paul deals with (probably from questions in a letter the Corinthians had written to him) is the theme of Christian distinctiveness. This is seen most strikingly in chapter 6, where Paul is scandalized that Christians sue other Christians before pagan lawyers and judges. No one today even blinks at that practice, for we have so radically lost that sense of distinctiveness.

But why would a cat go before a dog to adjudicate a dispute with another cat? The difference between a Christian and a non-Christian is like the difference between a cat and a dog. It is not, for Paul, merely a difference between two beliefs, but a difference between two beings, two species.

I continually ask my theology and philosophy classes the simple question, “According to the New Testament, what is a Christian?” They always answer it not according to the New Testament but according to something else. For they always say what a Christian thinks, or believes, or feels, or does, or likes, or desires, but not what a Christian is. Paul knew what a Christian is: a Christian is a little Christ, a member of Christ, a cell in Christ’s body.

Because of this radical transformation of our very “I”, everything in our lives is transformed. As he was to put it in his second letter to these Corinthians (5:17), “If any one is in Christ, he is a new creation.” In our desperate, bored search for novelties and “new theologies”, we can never be more radically new than to simply rest on “the Church’s one foundation — Jesus Christ her Lord”.

[ishuhbrerrah]

Personal Narrative

My name is Lale Sokolov. The historical fiction novel by Heather Morris called The Tattooist of Auschwitz is about my experience as being my concentration camp’s tattooist during The Holocaust from the years 1942-1945 and about how I met and reunited with the love of my life, Gita Furman. 

When I was 26 years old, I was transported by force to a concentration camp in Auschwitz - Birkenau in 1942, all because I was a Slovakian Jew. When I arrived at the camp, I was noticed by the SS officers for speaking numerous languages but didn’t think much of it until I was appointed to be the next tattooist of my camp (or Tätowierer, as the Germans called it) by the tattooist at that time, Pepan.

At first, the idea of stabbing people with a sharp needle with ink to create a serial number on their arm was horrific, but Pepan quickly told that if I wanted to live, I was to obey the orders the officers gave me, or else they wouldn’t hesitate to put a bullet through my brain. I decided to shut up and listen but always observe, in order to see the light of tomorrow.

Months after, Pepan was taken away and because he hadn’t given an exact reason why he was leaving, I assumed he’d been dragged off to his execution. The officers assigned me an assistant, Leon, who I told him the exact words Pepan had told me: if he wanted to survive, he’d have to obey the orders given to him. Leon was a timid inmate, who was too shy to even look me in the eyes at first, but he instantly warmed up to me when I gave him extra food I was given for being the tattooist of my camp.

The privileges that came with the job were beneficial as I decided to give the extra food portions to those who needed them more than I did, just so they could have enough food in their stomachs to see the light of the next day. It felt amazing to help out the less fortunate in the camp, but at the same time, I was risking not only my position but also my job, by sneaking them extra food as I had no idea what the consequences were in store for me if I got caught.

One day, I met a girl who caught my attention as I was tattooing a serial number on her arm. At very first sight, all I could do was admire her beauty, even to the point when the slight smile she gave me after I finished her tattoo made my knees feel like jelly. 

Shortly after, I bribed my guard, Baretski, with jewels to send her a handwritten note, asking for her name, as I desperately needed to know who she was. I, later on, I found out that her name was Gita, as one of her friends told me when I ran into her in person. Even the name gave me butterflies.

We began to spend time with one another and as the days passed by, I realized that I was falling in love with this girl. Unfortunately, our time together was limited as I had to tend to my own duties and she had to stick with her own role in our camp, but that didn’t prevent us from sneaking off occasionally and spending some alone time. The more time I spent with her, the more determined I became about leaving this hell-hole and taking her with me to a place where we were free to do whatever we want, whenever we want.

It was obvious that she was the one for me, and I thanked my mama for telling me that I would know who would be the right one for me when the time came. Gita was the one I wanted to spend my life and future with, she was the love of my life, and I made a promise that the two of us would escape and find freedom together someday.

A year or so passed by and everything was fine until rumors began to spread around that the Russians were to arrive at our camp, and I dismissed the news but began to worry when I heard the Germans ordered us to abandon our camp and to march by foot to the Polish towns of Gliwice or Wodzislaw, which were about 35 miles away. 

At this time, my beloved Gita and I were forced apart as she was taken away to some other place I had no idea of, but I realized that if I wanted to find her again, I’d have to escape from the death marches as I knew that those who participated in them were bound to be mistreated by the guards, or die.

One the way to one of the towns to attend another labor camp, I found the opportunity to run away from the march I was participating in as the guards were too busy chit-chatting with one another. After running away from them through a forest and a freezing river, I ended up getting captured by Russian soldiers and being forced to work for them as their pimp.

Fortunately, after several weeks I was able to gain their trust and used it as an opportunity to escape, deciding to catch a train to Slovakia, my hometown, where I end up reuniting with Goldie, my sister, and the only family member of mine who survived.

After catching up with her, I told her about Gita and she told me to not come back without Gita beside me. Determined to find my lover, I head to Bratislava, the capital of my country, in hopes of finding her. 

When I arrive there, I ask the locals about her and ask if they’ve seen anyone that matched her physical description, but received no good news. As I was about to go home, I made out a figure in the distance and when they came close enough for me to get a good look at them, my heart stops and time stands still as Gita and I cross paths on the street and recognize each other.

It turns out that Gita was marched out of the gates with thousands of other female prisoners, and then escaped from the guards, found refuge in a nearby village, and eventually made her way to Bratislava, where she joins other camp survivors.

After finding safety, she began her journey to find me, just like how I set off to search for her.

The story ends as I ask Gita to marry me and she says ‘yes’. We were one young couple, among a few, who managed to find happiness, peace, and love within each other in a war-ravaged city.

[elliswaldon4587-blog]

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[cabiba]

For as long as I can remember, I’ve puzzled about why people become communists. I have no doubt about why someone would stop being one. After all, we have a century of evidence of the murder, famine, and general destruction caused by the idea. Ignoring all this takes a special kind of willful blindness to reality.

Slogans and dreams are hardly a suitable substitute for a workable program.

Even the theory of communism itself is a complete mess. There is really no such thing as common ownership of goods that are obviously scarce in the real world. There must be some solution to the problem of scarcity beyond just wishing reality away. Perhaps ownership and trade? Slogans and dreams are hardly a suitable substitute for a workable program.

But how communism would work in practice is not something they want to talk about. They just imagined that some magical Hegelian shift would take place in the course of history that would work it all out.

So if there is no rational case for communism as such, why do people go for this stuff?

The Red Century

The New York Times has been exploring that issue in a series of remarkable reflections that they have labelled Red Century. I can’t get enough, even the ones that are written by people who are—how shall I say?—suspiciously sympathetic to communism as a cause.

The most recent installment is written by Vivian Gornick. She reflects on how her childhood world was dominated by communists.

“The sociology of the progressive world was complex. At its center were full-time organizers for the Communist Party, at the periphery left-wing sympathizers, and at various points in between everything from rank-and-file party card holders to respected fellow travelers….

When these people sat down to talk, Politics sat down with them, Ideas sat down with them; above all, History sat down with them. They spoke and thought within a context that lifted them out of the nameless, faceless obscurity into which they had been born, and gave them the conviction that they had rights as well as obligations. They were not simply the disinherited of the earth, they were proletarians with a founding myth of their own (the Russian Revolution) and a civilizing worldview (Marxism).

While it is true that thousands of people joined the Communist Party in those years because they were members of the hardscrabble working class (garment district Jews, West Virginia miners, California fruit pickers), it was even truer that many more thousands in the educated middle class (teachers, scientists, writers) joined because for them, too, the party was possessed of a moral authority that lent shape and substance, through its passion for structure and the eloquence of its rhetoric, to an urgent sense of social injustice….

The Marxist vision of world solidarity as translated by the Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of one’s own humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified. It was to this clarity of inner being that so many became not only attached, but addicted. No reward of life, no love nor fame nor wealth, could compete with the experience. It was this all-in-allness of world and self that, all too often, made of the Communists true believers who could not face up to the police state corruption at the heart of their faith.”

Sounds fascinating, if bonkers (Marxism is hardly a “civilizing worldview”). It sounds less like an intellectual salon of ideas and more like a religious delusion. Those too can be well intentioned. The key here is a dogmatic ideology, which serves as a kind of substitute for religion. It has a vision of hell (workers and peasants exploited by private-capital wielding capitalist elite), a vision of heaven (a world of universal and equal prosperity and peace), and a means of getting from one to the other (revolution from below, as led by the vanguard of the proletariat).

Once you accept such an ideology, anything intellectual becomes possible. Nothing can shake you from it. Okay, that’s not entirely true. One thing can shake you of it: when the leader of the cult repudiates the thing you believe in most strongly.

Khrushchev’s Heresy

She was 20 years old in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev spoke to the Soviet Communist Party about the crimes of Stalin. Apparently the unrelenting reports of famine, persecution, and mass death, from the early years of Bolshevik rule – and even the revelation of the Hitler-Stalin pact – would have demoralized them earlier. But no:

“The 20th Congress report brought with it political devastation for the organized left around the world. Within weeks of its publication, 30,000 people in this country quit the party, and within the year it was as it had been in its 1919 beginnings: a small sect on the American political map.”

Amazing.

The Early Reds

And speaking of this small 1919 sect, I’m reminded of one of my favorite movies: Reds (1981). I could watch it another 20 times. It explores the lives of the American communists of the turn of the 20th century, their loves, longings, and aspirations. The focus is on fiery but deluded Jack Reed, but it includes portraits of a passionate Louise Bryant, the gentile Max Eastman, an edgy Eugene O’Neill, and the ever inspiring Emma Goldman.

These people weren’t the Progressives of the mainstream that history credits with having so much influence over policy in those days. These were the real deal: the Communists that were the source of national frenzy during the Red Scare of the 1920s.

The movie portrays them not as monsters but idealists. They were all very talented, artistic, mostly privileged in upbringing, and what drew them to communism was not bloodlust for genocide but some very high ideals.

They felt a passion for justice. They wanted to end war. They opposed exploitation. They longed for universal freedom and maximum civil liberty. They despised the entrenched hierarchies of the old order and hoped for a new society in which everyone had an equal chance.

Watching their one-by-one demoralization is painful.

All of that sounds reasonable until you get to the details. The communists had a curious understanding of each of these concepts. Freedom meant freedom from material want. Justice meant a planned distribution of goods. The end of war meant a new form of war against the capitalists who they believed created war. The hierarchies they wanted to be abolished were not just state-privileged nobles but also the meritocratic elites of industrial capitalism, and even small land owners, no matter how small the plot.

Why be a communist rather than just a solid liberal of the old school? In the way the movie portrays it, the problem was not so much in their goals but in their mistaken means. They hated the state as it existed but imagined that a new “dictatorship of the proletariat” could become a transition mechanism to usher in their classless society. That led them to cheer on the Bolshevik Revolution in its early stages, and work for the same thing to happen in the United States.

The Dream Dies

Watching their one-by-one demoralization is painful. Goldman sees the betrayal immediately. Reed becomes an apologist for genocide. Bryant forgets pretending to be political and believing in free love, marries Reed, and tends to his medical needs before his death. O’Neill just becomes a full-time cynic (and drunk). It took Max Eastman longer to lose the faith but he eventually became an anti-socialist and wrote for FEE.

The initial demoralization of the early American communists came in the 1920s. They came to realize that all the warning against this wicked ideology – having been written about for many centuries prior, even back to the ancient world – were true.

Eastman, for example, realized that he was seeking to liberate people by taking from them the three things people love most in life: their families, their religion, and their property. Instead of creating a new heaven on earth, they had become apologists for a killing machine.

Stunned and embarrassed, they moved on with life.

But the history didn’t end there. There were still more recruits being added to the ranks, generations of them. The same thing happened after 1989. Some people lost the faith, others decided that socialism needs yet another chance to strut its stuff.

It’s still going on today.

As for the Communist Party in America, most left-Progressives of the Antifa school regard the Party as an embarrassing sellout, wholly owned by the capitalist elite. And when we see their spokesmen appear on television every four years, they sound not unlike pundits we see on TV every night.

It would be nice if any article written about communism were purely retrospective. That, sadly, is not the case. There seem to be new brands of Marxian thought codified every few years, and still more versions of its Hegelian roots that take on ever more complex ideological iterations (the alt-right is an example).

Why do people become communists? Because human beings are capable of believing in all sorts of illusions, and we are capable of working long and hard to turn them into nightmares. Once we’ve invested the time and energy into something, however destructive, it can take a very long time to wake us up. It’s hard to think of a grander example of the sunk-cost fallacy.

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education. He is also Chief Liberty Officer and founder of Liberty.me, Distinguished Honorary Member of Mises Brazil, research fellow at the Acton Institute, policy adviser of the Heartland Institute, founder of the CryptoCurrency Conference, member of the editorial board of the Molinari Review, an advisor to the blockchain application builder Factom, and author of five books. He has written 150 introductions to books and many thousands of articles appearing in the scholarly and popular press.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.