Competing For God

A COMMENTATOR, commenting on the Pittsburgh tragedy, remarked that anti-Semitism is the oldest form of hatred in the world. This supposition is highly dubious; one can easily imagine various sects within early Hinduism contending for supremacy in ancient India, long before the advent of western civilization or the emergence of any of the Abrahamic religions, or even easier one can imagine neanderthals and Cro-Magnon primates, filled with tribal hatred, fighting it out in the primordial forests of Europe forty thousand years ago. Nonetheless, her point is well taken; anti-Semitism goes back a long way, long enough, and pervasively enough to rank, regrettably, as a core value of western civilization. Anti-Semitism originated within the Jewish faith itself; among the various tribes which existed before most of them vanished into the mists, so to speak, of history. religious hatred is a religious matter. The early Christians, who began as a splinter groups of former Jews, aroused the ire of mainstream Judaism in the first century after Christ, and very rapidly, as the new religion spread spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean Christendom fragmented into numerous small groups, each claiming to be the true messengers of Christ. religious disputation and conflict arrives early and often; wherever you find religion, you find internal conflict, as well as conflict between religions. Anti-Semitism has swept across Europe on a regular basis throughout the centuries, as the christian faith become dominant throughout Europe, spreading across the continent with the expediency of the communications channels of the Roman Empire. the common denominator in hatred of jew is; Christians. Christians rejoice in their salvation through the blood of Christ's sacrifice on the cross, and yet, many of them blame the sacrifice on the Jews as if it were avoidable, and as if the Romans had nothing to do with it. To blame it on the Jews can be seen as a way of giving them credit for facilitating the very act which made the Christian faith possible. I have never known an atheist who harbors any particular animosity towards Jews, or any other form of religious worship, but merely refrained from believing in God, believing instead that belief in God is a superstition, a primordial response to the difficulties of life, a fantasy. people who are not religious tend not to disparage any particular religious tradition or even religion itself; they merely see religion as a primitive form of human culture which will eventually wither away as human kind advances to a more enlightened state of being. On behalf of atheism, if everyone were an atheism, anti-Semitism would never have existed in the first place.