SELF-HATE? WELL, DUHH! | 2008-06-22
Secular historians agree what the greatest American theologian was Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century.
Here's a sample of Edwards' Puritan Wisdom:
The Eternity of Hell Torments
by Jonathan Edwards
Fourth, the sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever. It will not only make them more sensible of the greatness and freeness of the grace of God in their happiness, but it will really make their happiness the greater, as it will make them more sensible of their own happiness. It will give them a more lively relish of it: it will make them prize it more. When they see others, who were of the same nature and born under the same circumstances, plunged in such misery, and they so distinguished, O it will make them sensible how happy they are. A SENSE OF THE OPPOSITE MISERY, IN ALL CASES, GREATLY INCREASES THE RELISH OF ANY JOY OR PLEASURE.
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Edwards represented the Calvinist reaction to Catholicism.
The Medieval Church, by which I mean the Wordist institution that grew up using the name of Christ, had an interesting version of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." They insisted that what a truly Holy Man would do to himself was to starve, go without sleep, wear hair shirts, and effectively castrate himself.
I said EFFECTIVELY because they condemned Origen when he PHYSICALLY castrated himself to remove temptation. Such a cheap out as not allowed. You had to SUFFER the lack of sex your whole life, or God didn't get any fun out of it.
Protestants never disagreed with this. They felt this suffering was too undemocratic.
In fact, the only outrages Protestants talked about with monks was when monks DID have sex and fun.
Puritans insisted that EVERYONE should get in on the suffering.
How could a people with good, healthy Traditional values like that have ended up declaring that the highest morality consists of destroying their own race?
It had to be the Jews that did it.