Friday 5 September 2014

Farage's Fallacy On Fox

There is no such thing as “Judaeo-Christian”. The use of that term bespeaks a failure to take either Judaism or Christianity seriously in its own terms.

Most practically, perhaps, Judaism gives priority to justice over mercy, whereas Christianity gives priority to mercy over justice. A politician who wishes to draw on either or both needs to be aware of, and sensitive to, that profound difference.

Far from being the mother-religion that it is often assumed to be, a very great deal of Judaism is actually a reaction against Christianity, although this is by no means the entirety of the relationship, with key aspects of kabbalah deriving from Christianity, with numerous other examples set out in Rabbi Michael Hilton’s The Christian Effect on Jewish Life (London: SCM Press, 1994), and so on.

Judaism is an organising principle for all sorts of people discontented for whatever reason by the rise of Christianity in general and the Christianisation of the Roman Empire in particular, including all the historical consequences of that up to the present day, without any realistic suggestion of a common ethnic background.

Above all, Judaism’s unrealised Messianic hope and expectation has issued in all sorts of earthly utopianisms: Freudian, Marxist (and then Trotskyist, and then Shachtmanite), monetarist, Zionist, Straussian, neoconservative by reference to all of these, and so forth.

They are all expressions of Judaism’s repudiation of Original Sin, Christianity’s great bulwark against the rationally and empirically falsifiable notions of inevitable historical progress and of the perfectibility of human nature in this life alone and by human efforts alone.

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