The three Abrahamic monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam where conceived in strife, incubated with fire, and born in battle. Ancient Judaism was conceived when Moshe (Moses), a prince of Egypt born of Israelite parents, killed an Egyptian overseer for mistreating the Israelites whom he was supervising. This set in motion the violent story of the Exodus with its ten plagues including the slaughter, by an angel of the Lord, of all Egyptian firstborn, human and beast.
Our religion was then carried to term through the forty-year sojourn in the desert during which we had to defeat and annihilate the hostile tribe of Amalek, down to the last calf, lamb, and kid. It was finally born into the world in battle, when the walls of Jericho fell and so did the walls of other Canaanite city states and we finally had our Promised Land.
Modern Rabbinical Judaism and its non-identical twin Christianity were conceived in the bloody rebellions of the Jews against the Romans in 70 and 120 AD and incubated in the brutal decades of Roman occupation of Judea and in the persecution of Christians that followed. Christianity was born as a world religion in a bloody battle on the Ponte Milvio near Rome on October 28, 312 AD, when the emperor Constantine the Great committed to converting the Roman empire to Christ, should He grant him victory over his rival emperor Maxentius. Constantine won and kept his word.
Islam was conceived in a civil war on the Arabian Peninsula, incubated in countless battles when the semi-nomadic Arabic tribes carried it across the Middle East from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east and born in 680 AD in the Battle of Karbala (today’s Iraq) when the Sunni-Shia split we hear of so much today came about.
Alone in its peer group, Judaism demanded not only exclusivity of dogma, i.e. insisted that it and only it had the key to salvation of the soul and life eternal, but also the exclusivity of ethnic origin. This doomed the Jews to be few in number and as they left their homeland after centuries of devastating Roman occupation and two bloody revolts, they were in no position to wield the sword until quite recently.
Christianity and Islam spread around the globe with the cross and the Koran in one hand and the sword in the other or as the original French language Quebecois version of the Canadian national anthem puts it: “Car ton bras sait porter l’épée, Il sait porter la croix !” (because your arm knows how to bear the sword, it knows how to bear the cross!).
Even when Christian missionaries came before rather than after the Christian armies, the promise of life eternal through Christ would likely not have been enough to seal the deal with pagan warlords like the Russian Prince Vladimir, had he not been well aware of the effective use to which Christianity had been put in organizing great military empires such as Byzantium.
Today, the symbols of the three Abrahamic religions, the Star of David, the Cross, and the Crescent appear on military insignia and on actual weapons of war such as tanks and fighter jets of many countries.
Throughout the last millennium and more, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam distinguished themselves from all other world religions by providing not only spiritual guidance and the path to individual salvation, but also the practical structures for the organization of societies from families to states and in some cases empires. The idea that a society can exist and prosper without organized religion would have been preposterous to people as diverse as Maimonides, Suleiman the Great, or George Washington.
While the American Founding Fathers forbade the establishment of a state religion or an official religion in their new country, it was only because they were well aware of the slaughter that the various Christian denominations had perpetrated against each other in Europe. Christianity was so totally immersive for them and all Americans of their generation that it had never occurred to them that America could ever be anything but a Christian country, in other words a country organized around Christian principles and in which Christianity took the leading role in education, common welfare, charity, medicine, and the like.
There can be no doubt whatsoever that had it been proposed to the American Founding Fathers that two and a half centuries after they had embarked on their adventure most of America’s residents would be ignorant of the Bible and that it would not be taught in most schools, they would have been appalled and mortified.
The three religions that are the subjects of this article started their lives with swords in their hands and came to the world from a place of stern masculinity. Their organizing principles of justice, charity, morality, community, and military prowess when and if possible, made them successful in preserving their followers and in the case of Christianity and Islam growing their numbers by orders of magnitude. Together, they made the world a better place, no matter how far they have at times strayed from their true paths. They vanquished human sacrifice and soul-crushing pagan beliefs like voodoo and shamanism. They made multitudes fear the just judgment of a just God and thus lead more moral lives. They protected the weak, most notably women and children from wanton violence. They took care of the orphans and the widows.
Today in the West, Christianity and Judaism have abandoned their responsibilities and substantially pimped themselves out to the lowest bidder. They stopped telling their congregants the truth and began telling them blatant lies just so they could be more popular. Since nobody wants to waste time listening to lies, synagogues and churches emptied out as a result. In America specifically, the only thing that is still holy to pastors, priests, and rabbis is their income tax exemption. For that, they will tear every page out of the Old and the New Testaments alike. They will ordain women, perform interfaith and gay marriages, and preach every possible abomination from the pulpit.
In the East, the Greek Orthodox Church in Russia is rebuilding itself after the communist years and it is providing the one place where the Christian truth still lives. Judaism, in returning to its crucible in the Holy Land, has found its long-lost mojo as the religion of robust self defense and military might, the religion of warriors and of valor. Islam is struggling to adapt to modernity and overcome its radical tendencies, but it is, at the very least, still true to its ways of old.
Human beings need purpose that transcends their short lives, their fleeting desires, their lust for money, power, and sex. Without it, their lives curdle up and sour like spoiled milk and they die bitter, horrible, unredeemed deaths. That purpose cannot be found in the soft murmurs about “equality” and “diversity” one hears today in America’s churches and synagogues. It can only be found back at the source, back where it all started, back in the realm of bearded stern-faced old men, men who were wise enough to know that caring is truth and truth is caring.
The liberal secular progressive movement in the West has done such a thorough job of destroying its Christian foundations that it is all but impossible to see now how they can be rebuilt. We certainly do not hear of any priests or rabbis willing to preach the truth outside of Hassidic or possibly Amish communities. Their spiritual predecessors were burned by the Inquisition and thrown to the lions. Today, they are afraid to lose their tax exempt status or be heckled by Antifa. We live in a time of diminishment in America.
Well, my friends, we had better wake up. The progressive dystopia we are now inhabiting is not the final destination. The final destination will be much much worse. So close your ears and your eyes to lies and open the Bible. Read it. Act in accordance with it. If enough of us do that, we may yet turn the tide of time and rediscover the promised land right here at home. After all, we Jews did it, so why can’t the Christians?
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5 comments
Eh.
It’s not often I find cause to disagree with Baruch, but here I do. Christianity was not born of the sword. Constantine did not invent Christianity, nor does he define it. Christianity was born before it became the official religion of Rome and its centralizing principle, or tenet is suppose to be love, forgiveness and redemption. In that, I suppose its many sects originally though of themselves as a reform movement sprung from, or of Judaism, perhaps even a more enlightened and true Judaism. In that, it’s origins at least it is different from both the Jewish faith and that of Islam.
As for Judaism, while genocide for homeland was undoubtedly intrinsic to the founding construct of Babylon, out of Egypt and historical fact, I would have to characterize the essence of wht it means to be Jewish, both historically and contemporary with the word law rather than militancy.
Furthermore, a belief in exclusivity isn’t specific to the Jewish faith. Both the Catholicism of my youth taught that only the one true church, one true religion could lead to salvation. It was a mortal sin no less to give suggestion otherwise. It was referred to as the sin of scandal, to give scandal. I believe Islam still punishes conversion by death, or allows for such according to the Koran.
And while I believe Baruch is quite right about the insipid nature of contemporary changes to at least two of these three religions, not being at all sure the same is true of Islam as well the reasons for the changes, which he all too conveniently seems to ignore. Reality check: no one, or very few are buying the “Stern faced” versions anymore. Science has vanquished superstition, which isn’t at all the same thing as negating the continued, human needs religion once filled. I wished I could still believe in Santa Claus, but I can’t. Even physicists don’t know what to believe anymore torn by such quasi understandings as quantum entanglement. Alas, the existential quandary of the human condition. The last and latest word being there simply isn’t any certainty anymore, only probabilities in search of an algorithm and the very act of observing, one might say I suppose even asking, changes the outcome.
Islam is not a abrahamitic religion.
YES, Islam IS an abrahamic religion. Mohammed and his followers were descendants of Abraham through the lineage of Ishmael, the child that Abraham fathered with his wife’s handmaiden (at his wife’s insistence, due to her barren condition at the time), in order that Abraham might be able to have posterity (later, of course, he was finally able to have a son through his own wife, due to a blessing from God). The handmaiden and her son were subsequently banished by Abraham after his wife complained of the disrespect the woman showed toward her. Muslims believe in the same God as Jews and Christians (the God of Abraham), though their beliefs regarding him are not identical, and they accept and believe in additional scriptures given through their own prophet (Mohammed), in addition accepting the bible in some degree. The thought may bother you, but yes, they are definitely an abrahamic religion.
Judaism? Eternal life? I don’t think so, pal. You’re a little mixed-up. Jewish scholars are still debating as to whether there is a heaven or an afterlife.