Amerika

Maybe those crazy guys blaming The Jews™ for everything have a point, if they look at the Bible as the downfall of the West, given how much liberalism it preaches:

⁹ And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest.

¹⁰ And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and stranger: I am the Lord your God.

¹⁴ Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumblingblock before the blind, but shalt fear thy God: I am the Lord.

¹⁵ Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour.

¹⁶ Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people: neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy neighbour; I am the Lord.

¹⁷ Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him.

¹⁸ Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord.

³³ And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him.

³⁴ But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

Charity, care for the handicapped, and tolerance of foreigners seem like good things, but there is a difference between doing so voluntarily and making them into rules and regulations.

The idea of fixing social problems by having the productive subsidize them seems to have a root in the culture of the half-Arab population of Jews, passed on through Christianity.

My guess is that these were idealistic and well-meaning attempts to address suffering, instead of accepting it like the Buddhists, pagans, and Hindus do. The common ground is not Judaism but humanistic idealism.

In symbolic religions such as Christianity, “purity” of thought is needed in order to keep the categories behind the symbols intact, and this leads to unrealistic ideas such as the above.

If you feed the poor, they will hang around, and soon you will have more; if you tolerate the foreigner, more will come.

Not bullying the handicapped seems like a good idea, but as we have seen in the West, soon it becomes a proxy for “good” itself and therefore, is both manipulative and reaches destructive levels of obsession.

Perhaps the problem is simply symbolism itself.

Tags: christianity, humanism, idealism, liberalism