A Scot Is Born A Scot A Christian Decides To Be One There Are Untrue Christians

In this post on the On Being blog, Yolanda Pierce noted, quite effectively, that a large majority of those who call themselves "Evangelical Christians" voted for a man who embodies just about everything other than a sincere follower of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  It is something which Christians in the United States have to face, that a large number of those who proclaim their fidelity to the Gospel have committed an enormous sin in voting for Donald Trump and his regime which he is already filling with billionaire and multi-millionaire criminals, oligarchs, degenerates, insane xenophobes, racists and violent paranoiacs who will crush the least among us, reduce many to the same level of destitution and the close to it state of desperation.   That whirlwind that I talked about being sown yesterday, a lot of those seeds were planted by those who proclaim themselves to be Christians.  Just as democracy in the United States is lying sick and injured on the side of the road with no Samaritan in sight, the least among us is too.  The priests and pharisees are passing on the other side of the road, getting ahead.   There isn't any use in pretending that isn't the case anymore than it was to pretend about that in Germany in the early 1930s as the Nazis were both exploiting the symbolism and language that Christians were used to and preparing to destroy Christianity along with its developing list of those it intended to murder.  I wouldn't at all be surprised if the likes of Michael Flynn and those working with the Trump regime on the outside didn't have the beginnings of such lists in mind if not on paper.  

Here's a reminder from last year of the real nature of the Nazi regime, something so frequently lied about online these days. 

The other day, when I pointed out that the brutality of Christian medieval Europe lacked at least one feature that made the brutal pagan European cultures worse, human sacrifice, I got someone's pinafore in a twist.  I pointed out that any brutality done by those nominal Christians would have been in contradiction to the very teachings of the man they revered as divine, no less a figure than the only Son of God.  That isn't something you can say about the brutality of paganism, warfare and brutality, human sacrifice were part of pagan religion, just those things which made it so popular with some of the most brutal of the Nazis, Himmler, for example.   For those who go all romantic about the Yule, the SS under Himmler were real big on celebrating the "Jule"  there was a special ceramic, the Julleuchter, candle holders created as an award for members of the SS who participated in Nazi celebrations of the Yule, the candle symbolic of the "undying sun" which was apparently, to be associated with Nazism as well as the little yellow star we enjoy.

I have seen identical "Yule lights" sold as neo-pagan holiday items and as decorations on pagan websites, some of them also, neo-Nazi webites ("Heathern English" is one, though I will not post a url for a neo-Nazi website.) There is even an apparent pagan revisionist who  includes a cross and a star of David along with the SS lightning bolts and other Nazi symbols.  I'm not sure of his motives but I doubt they're honest.

It was all part of the promotion of paganism which the Nazi hierarchy were pushing to be an eventual replacement for Christianity, as was, in fact, the pseudo-Christian, "Postitive Christianity" in which everything would be redefined because the original contained such anti-Nazi facts that the man who was held to be the second person in the Godhead was a Jew, all of his earliest named followers were Jews, the morality taught by Jesus was the direct and absolute opposite of what was taught by Nazism, etc.   That a number of those pushing paganism were atheists, such as Alfred Rosenberg, who saw it as something the simple people needed as they were turned into atheists and Nazis rather demonstrates my point.

The Nazi substitute for Christianity, "Positive Christianity" is also useful to refute the line used in the hate mail this post is inspired by,  "No true Scotsman".   There is a problem when applying that pat phrase to what I said in that you can be a true Scotsman by simply being born a Scot, you can be a perfectly good Scot by that simple fact no matter what course of conduct you take.   It's a matter of biological heritage.  You can't say the same thing about Christianity, which is not biological but is based at its rock bottom foundation on belief in the teachings of Jesus. The extent to which you follow those is the extent to which you are being good at practicing Christianity, of "being a true Christian" if you will.  The extent to which you violate and contradict those teachings is the extent to which you are being an untrue Christian.   Someone who followed the Nazis' "Positive Christianity" was in no way a true Christian.

That many such have pretended to be successful at being Christians is something which is, as well, a part of the Gospel of Jesus.  Over and over again he noted there were and would be people who professed their belief in his teachings only to prove by their actions that they don't.  He said there would be false prophets who led people astray.   The Gospels show that Jesus wasn't under any illusions as to that, it would also be false to his teachings for anyone professing Christianity to not admit to it and to question, critically those who profess their Christianity especially when their actions are radically in opposition to the moral teachings that define Christianity.

You would never say that someone who insisted on doing their arithmetic wrong was a "true mathematician" you wouldn't say that someone who, despite their having a doctorate in Biology, denied the reality of evolution or the scientific method was being a "true scientist".   Like science, Christianity is something that you adopt as a conscious choice, it's not something you're born to.  You can't say that even a Scot who betrays Scotland isn't a true Scotsman, their parents determined that at conception.  You can easily say someone isn't being a true scientist or Christian because those choices are entirely in their own hands.  That phrase in that context should be put away because it is especially ill considered.  That it seems to have been the biology teacher, P.Z. Myers who has popularized it among atheists is especially revealing of his lapse in analytical rigor, he's had a number of those.