Category Archives: Religion

UPDATE II (6/15/023): The Curse of Ham: Pious Political Correctness Perverts The Hebrew Testament

Ancient History, Argument, Christianity, English, Hebrew Testament, Religion

If you are reading translations of the Tanach (acronym in Hebrew for all books of the Hebrew Bible: Pentateuch or Torah, Prophets and Writings)—you’re likely reading a lot of porcelainized nonsense

Funny thing how Christian commentary “changes” what my Hebrew Bible says, plain and simple. (I am sure politically correct, Americanized rabbis will join in this textual finessing.)

See, not only can I read Biblical Hebrew perfectly well—I’m looking at the tract now—but my Israeli teachers decades ago confirmed the commentary that claims Ham and descendants were cursed.

Ham did something unspeakable to his father, Noah. Noah, cursed him and descendants.

And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.

19 These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.

20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.

23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.

24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.

25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

26 And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.”
Genesis Chapter 9

But not according to King James commentary, which is still better than most. Accordingly, the biblical author didn’t know what he was saying. Ham’s descendants were never cursed in the Hebrew Bible.

Yeah they were. It says so in Genesis 9:24.

That’s why I say: If you are reading translations of the Tanach (acronym in Hebrew for all books of the Hebrew Bible: Pentateuch or Torah, Prophets and Writings)—you’re likely reading a lot of porcelainized nonsense.

UPDATED (11/28/022): Interesting thread on LinkedIn.

ME: The biblical tract doesn’t say today’s blacks originated in Ham. And I, of course, claimed nothing of the sort. I said quite clearly that Ham and descendants were cursed in the Hebrew Bible, and pious scripture should not develop creative ways of pretending they were not.
I don’t know who Ham begot. I do know that his excuse-making defenders say he begot the greatest civilization ever. ? Why, of course. Next they’ll claim ancient Egyptians were really Africans. Wait a sec, they have already.
Ask Mary Lefkowitz, Greek classicist, author of “Not Out Of Africa: How “Afrocentrism” Became An Excuse To Teach Myth As History.”

 AND:

Yes, let us demonize non-aggressor Noah for objecting to his abuse. I have not disputed your point. I only questioned the hubbub of white-noise commentary around what seems to be straightforward biblical text.

UPDATED: Masses Crave An Opiate: From COVID Compliance To Religion On Ukraine

COVID-19, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Music, Propaganda, Religion, Russia, War

Note how Covid conformity had been replaced with the requirement that we all find religion on Ukraine.

Duly, one of the world’s greatest conductors, Russian Valery Gergiev, was fired from his position as head of the Munich Philharmonic because he wouldn’t denounce Putin. The Free World in action!

Will they bring in the Rack? Unnecessary. Banishment from polite company and professional cancellation by right-thinking people is worse than the pain of torture on the Rack.

The masses crave an opiate. Leaders know how to exploit this quest for group-think. As soon as the usefulness of one faith (Covid) expires; another takes its place (Ukraine) courtesy of the ruling elites, and with the willing complicity of the crowds. Those who do not think in lockstep—why, they need to be banished, punished.

Illness and war involve matters of life and death. The heightened emotions surrounding matters of life and death ensures a state of constant emotional arousal, in which reason recedes.

UPDATE: His columns got Boyd Cathey a threatening phone-call. Dr. Cathey asks:

It got me to thinking about questions I ask anyone who approaches me about my stance on what is going on in Ukraine: Why the over-the-top passion on this topic? Why Ukraine? Why such an hysterical response when Ukraine and its position in Europe and in the world are not strategically important to us? After all, the United States has been on the invading-end of conflicts for decades…Bosnia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and so on. Yet, somehow our foreign ventures are always virtuous and noble? And what kind of outrage did we express for those hundreds of thousands of Tutsis killed in Uganda or the thousands of Kurdish inhabitants eliminated by our ally Turkey?

READ Dr. Cathey’s column. Column archive is here.

* Image via Wokeipedia

UPDATED: It’s All So Emotional: The Origins Of Our Degenerate, Therapeutic Culture

Christianity, Culture, Pop-Culture, Pseudo-intellectualism, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Religion

The media scrum had framed the Trump impeachment circus round II as an “emotional” affair.

Over and over again did the word “emotion” inform reporting, appear on the lips of legislators,  and culminate in an “emotional” catharsis in the Chamber, where the “affected” representatives told a captured audience how they suffered.

Where did this sick therapeutic culture originate? Where else but in America.

I recalled reviewing a book, in 2005, when London’s Jewish Chronicle was a serious magazine. What a relief it was, then, to learn that Jewish thinkers didn’t herald the therapeutic age, a fact that emerges from Andrew Heinze’s outstanding Jews and the American Soul.

In his examination of “why [between 1890 and 1945] psychology became a booming cultural industry, outstripping theology and philosophy as a guide for a literate mass audience seeking advice on how to live”, Andrew Heinze, a scholar, established that “America’s Protestant heritage yielded a powerful American interest in personal development and a massive audience for popular psychology”.

The rationality of the Enlightenment had come under fire from movements espousing mysticism, romanticism, and the occult. The ascendancy of “the psychological interpretive mode” between the 1880s and the 1920s was compatible with Christianity.

The new psychotherapies “had the drama of faith-healing”; the new psychotherapists, true to their Protestant heritage, spread the faith with evangelical zeal.

What do you know? In searching for an image to accompany this blog post, I came across what looks like a work of scholarship that affirms the Anglo-American origins of these leanings as well as the coercive, manipulative nature of the “therapeutic imperative”:

Therapy Culture explores the powerful influence of therapeutic imperative in Anglo-American societies. In recent decades virtually every sphere of life has become subject to a new emotional culture. Professor Furedi suggests that the recent cultural turn toward the realm of the emotions coincides with a radical redefinition of personhood. Increasingly vulnerability is presented as the defining feature of people’s psychology. Terms like people ‘at risk’, ‘scarred for life’ or ’emotional damage’ evoke a unique sense of powerlessness. Furedi questions the widely accepted thesis that the therapeutic turn represents an enlightened shift towards emotions. He claims that therapeutic culture is primarily about imposing a new conformity through the management of people’s emotions. Through framing the problem of everyday life through the prism of emotions, therapeutic culture incites people to feel powerless and ill. Drawing on developments in popular culture, political and social life, Furedi provides a path-breaking analysis of the therapeutic turn.

UPDATED: A fair point is made by our reader in the Comments Section. I am, however, making a philosophical, or theological, point about Judaism as opposed Christianity. Judaism is more legalistic. The supernatural, mysticism, romanticism, and the occult are more compatible with Christianity than with the rationalist morality of Judaism.

 

Christianity And White Guilt

Christianity, English, History, Race, Religion, The West

White guilt is a Christian affliction. Not for nothing did Edward Gibbon saddle Christianity with the downfall of the Roman Empire.

Gibbon is the genius who wrote the 12 volumes that make up “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” [1776].  ( I read the 1943 version, which was “condensed for modern reading.”)

Gibbon brought upon himself the wrath of “bishops, deans and dons”—not to mention that of Dr. Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell. Boswell called Gibbon an “infidel wasp” for “the chapter in which he showed that the fall of Rome was hastened by the rise of Christianity.”

And indeed, Gibbon seems to point toward Christianity’s self-immolating, progressive nature, remarking on the courting by early Christians of criminals and women.

Willson Whitman—he wrote the 1943 Foreword to the abridged version—remarks on how “Gibbon outraged the Christians of his era by suggesting the ‘human’ reasons for the success of Christianity … Among these reason [Gibbon] noted that Christianity … attracted to its ‘common tables’ slaves, women, reformed criminals, and other persons of small importance [his words]—in short that Christianity was a ‘people’s movement of low social origin, rising as the people rose.”

I wonder: If to go by Gibbon, can Christianity be called the Social Justice movement of its day? Gibbon seemed to suggest so.