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The Land of Israel has changed hands many times over the centuries. But it has always been the homeland of one particular people. Noa Tishby, author of ‘Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth’, explains. Don’t miss it!
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I don’t support indigenous people’s rights. I don’t support tribal rights. Tribal rights are a contradiction of rights.
In reality only INDIVIDUALS exist and the only real rights that exist are individual rights which can only be implemented by individual private property rights.
Most Jews today, like most Christians today, are Hellenized Jews and Christians. But not all of them, you still have some seriously tribal-theocratic Jews just like there are some seriously intolerant Christians. Islam has never been Hellenized and that’s the dangerous difference between Islam and Judaism and Christianity.
The truth is, Ms. Noa Tishby, the theocratic, tribal Maccabees would have slaughtered or exiled a modern, Hellenized, secularized Jew like you. You would not recognize the Maccabees as your tribe at all. You would literally view them as crazy, violent, primitives. Like the Taliban still are today.
“Writes [Paul] Johnson: “Many of the better-educated Jews found Greek culture profoundly attractive. [Some were] torn between new foreign ideas and . . . inherited piety, between the critical spirit and conservatism.” Predictably, orthodox Jews railed against apostasy, against educated Jews adopting a rationally critical method and rejecting faith-based beliefs. The pious regarded the Greek philosophers “with more alarm” than they did the Greek’s liberal sexuality. States Jewish historian Max Dimont: “The latter could corrupt only the body, while the former corrupted the mind.” Aristotle, the orthodox Jews understood, was vastly more dangerous to religion than was promiscuity….
In the years 166–164 BC, the Maccabees drove the Greeks from the area around Jerusalem and, in time, from Judea. The pro-Greek Jews were slaughtered or exiled….
To understand this complex conflict, bear in mind that the king, Antiochus Epiphanes, although undoubtedly a tyrant, was significantly less tyrannical than were his zealous foes. One is reminded of the 20th-century struggle between the Shah of Iran—a foreign-backed brutal secular dictator—and the indigenous, fanatical supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini, a dictator vastly more brutal and totalitarian. Perhaps more to the point, the Maccabees were the Taliban of their day—slaughtering their more secular coreligionists as apostates and tolerating nothing but a strict adherence to fundamentalist religion.” – Andrew Bernstein
THX: “In reality only INDIVIDUALS exist and the only real rights that exist are individual rights which can only be implemented by individual private property rights.”
In reality, individuals exist as products of their ancestors. Further, civilization requires individuals living together with common language, purpose, culture, history, etc. This happens in families and tribes / clans and the larger communities these create together. Your presuppositions ignore this and become silly in extrapolation.
Civilization need not vitiate private property or individual rights, but rights must be protected via laws and / or customs (community agreement).
I have boiled down your other primary presuppositions for which you refuse to give either reason or evidence:
1. Reason is man’s mind.
2. Reason produces Truth, disqualifying Truth from the list of Transcendentals which are without antecedent.
3. Existence precedes consciousness. But isn’t reason a “conscious process”? Oops! Reason is not transcendental!
4. Matter and energy are eternal. Therefore matter and energy created everything, including consciousness. Oops! Matter and Energy are ….transcendental? There goes Truth, Beauty and Goodness are de-throned as Transcendentals.
And so I repeat. Your religion requires unreason, faith without evidence or reason, and is totally lacking in truth, beauty, goodness and unity.
Go ahead. Reason from your presuppositions. Use your own words and your own brain to show everyone how reasonable and right you are.
By the way, you misquoted me in Ms. Goska’s last article entitled “Why I use the phrase ‘Judeo-Christian.’ ”
When I did that to you, I apologized and corrected myself. For the record, I recognize that existence is being and must, logically, precede all else.
It also is the Name of God given to Moses thousands of years ago: I AM. It is what you might describe as “Super Existence.”
I have sufficiently explained the philosophical axioms of existence and consciousness on which reason depend to you Kynarion. But you are welcome to persist in your magical thinking.
“How does one answer an opponent who says: “You’ve demonstrated that I must accept your axioms if I am to be consistent. But that demonstration rests on your axioms, which I don’t choose to accept. Tell me why I should. Why can’t I contradict myself?”
There is only one answer to this: stop the discussion. Axioms are self-evident; no argument can coerce a person who chooses to evade them. You can show a man that identity is inescapable, but only by first accepting the fact that A is A. You can show that existence is inescapable, but only by accepting and referring to existence. You can show that consciousness is inescapable, but only by accepting and using your consciousness. Relying on these three axioms you can establish their position as the foundation of all knowledge. But you cannot convince another person of this or anything until he accepts the axioms himself, on the basis of his own perception of reality. If he denies them, it is a mistake to argue about or even discuss the issue with him.
No one can think or perceive for another man. If reality, without your help, does not convince a person of the self-evident, he has abdicated reason and cannot be dealt with any further.” – Leonard Peikoff
“Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.” ― Ayn Rand
I might stop when you stop mischaracterizing Christianity. I will feel free to chip away at your flimsy foundations when my eye happens to fall upon one of your glaring evidentiary or logical errors.
I have correctly and succinctly identified your “axioms” and you do not deny it. If these are “self-evident” then why do they contradict one another?
1. Reason is man’s mind. This is by no means axiomatic or “self-evident.”
2. Reason produces Truth (as opposed to describing / discovering it) and therefore Truth is not transcendent. Reason might be a transcendental, but see #3 below:
3. Existence precedes consciousness. (Logical and agreed). If Reason is a conscious process, but it produces Truth, then neither Reason nor Truth are transcendental.
4. Matter and energy are eternal. This is entirely a faith claim, without evidence. Further, it makes necessary the infinite regress – something you admit is illogical.
These are your tenets. How can they be “axiomatic” much less self-evident or based upon reason and evidence?
Maccabees may have been hardliners in certain ways, but is it really fair to equate Hellenization with tolerance and civility?
“In the meantime, the people of Damascus, when they were informed of the destruction of the Romans, set about the slaughter of the Jews that were among them… which they had done on the suspicion they had of them”.
I mean, you would think the Jews of Damascus at the time of that incident would be considered by their Greco-Syrian neighbors sufficiently hellenized so as to not to arouse that kind of ugly primitivism.
In the mid-twentieth century (CE) most of the Jews of Germany were more than “sufficiently Hellenized”. Yet the spawn of Amalek murdered them with great delight anyway, because, well, because they were Jewish.
Excuse me? Hardly. The Jews are ONLY where they are because the U.S. put them there after WWII. That’s it. God threw them out of the holy land, Never to return but the U.S. decided they knew better. Many wanted them in Grand Island NY, but they settled for Orchard Park instead.
As are just about all PragerU videos, this video is excellent. While not wishing to nit pick, Noa Tishby stated that after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in 70CE they renamed the land Palestina. That is historically inaccurate. The Romans renamed the land Palestina in 135CE after the second Jewish revolt of Bar Kochba where the Romans were very bloodied by the Jews and the emperor Hadrian wanted to insure that there will be no more revolts. It is he who emptied Judea of most of its Jews and that’s really when the Jewish exile began. Otherwise, keep telling the truth!
Jerusalem is the City of God, City of David, Zion, the City of the Great King, Ariel, Lion of God. The name Jerusalem has resonated down through the centuries…David’s Capital. A world map drawn in 1581 has Jerusalem at its center with what were then-known continents of the world surrounding it. As the navel is set in the centre of the human body, so is the land of Israel the navel of the world, and Jerusalem is the centre of the land of Israel, and the Holy Place in the centre of the sanctuary, the ark in the centre of the holy, and the foundation stone before the holy place, because from it the world was founded. The Land of Canaan was given to the Jewish people as part of the Abrahamic Covenant. For the Jewish people whose cry for centuries has been “Next year Jerusalem,” it is more than a spot on the map; it is not just a tourist Mecca where one can visit various holy sites; Jerusalem is the Holy City. It is the essence of all for which the Jews hoped and prayed and cried and died for. It is their God-given Land.
Thousands of years ago God made a covenant and committment with Abraham, that he would give. him a land and a great host of descendants. “I will bless them that bless thee and curse them that curse thee. Genesis 12:3.