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A review by tittypete
Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews--A History by James Carroll
3.0
This is a really long examination of the catholic church’s complicity in anti-semitism. There’s a lot of it. From its beginnings when it was just another Jewish sect, they had to paint the guys who didn’t jive with Jesus as his murderers and deniers of god or whatever. The romans are playing these two groups against each other and stirring up animosity. Then Constantine has a vision of the cross and gets the idea to use it to conquer shit. This is kinda when Christianity becomes more about the death of christ rather than the guys life. So the “you killed our guy” and “you reject our story” vibe permeates and christians take it out on the jews time after time. There are some ok times (the convivencia in spain was an interesting time) and some ok popes but for the most part the jews were the scapegoat for everything from the plague to both corrupt capitalism AND communism. Meanwhile they keep truckin, scattered about and talkin’ torah.
The author is a weird guy. He’s super catholic and inserts his own anecdotes about having the hots for the virgin mary and also his mom. His musings about the big cross the Polacks put up at Auschwitz is what kicks off the book. Then at the end he has some ideas of how to fix the church. The key takeaway is to admit that the church’s doctrine is flawed because it was written by dudes from back in the day with their own agendas.
My final reaction is that all deity-based worship/revelation religions are poisonous bullshit and retard humanity. There might have been some fine ideas put forth by people way back in old timey times but once you bring the magic man in the clouds into it shit gets perverted and we start killing eachother over fairytales. So fucking stupid.
The author is a weird guy. He’s super catholic and inserts his own anecdotes about having the hots for the virgin mary and also his mom. His musings about the big cross the Polacks put up at Auschwitz is what kicks off the book. Then at the end he has some ideas of how to fix the church. The key takeaway is to admit that the church’s doctrine is flawed because it was written by dudes from back in the day with their own agendas.
My final reaction is that all deity-based worship/revelation religions are poisonous bullshit and retard humanity. There might have been some fine ideas put forth by people way back in old timey times but once you bring the magic man in the clouds into it shit gets perverted and we start killing eachother over fairytales. So fucking stupid.